Two MDesS students are using the GSD as a laboratory to show how Gund’s outdoor spaces can be more inviting and social while also working to improve water quality. Ecaterina Dobrescu and Rebecca Bartlett created “Stormwater Modules,” with help from an Office for Sustainability grant, to transform a concrete patio through a modular system of vegetation and planters that will absorb and purify stormwater. The project includes a test site to evaluate the quantity and quality of the water collected and released by the planters.
Dobrescu and Bartlett worked collaboratively with the GSD Green Team, Harvard’s Environmental Health and Services team, and GSD facilities manager Kevin Cahill to arrive at a practical and replicable solution to the environmental challenge of contaminated storm runoff. Dobrescu says, “We hope that students and other green teams will take this modular system further, bringing it to other campus spaces with similar conditions. The system is designed to be moved, changed, and adapted.”
Read more in “A Patio Space Transformed” in the Harvard Gazette.
Photo by Kate Hammer