K-State students aim to make Greenburg the nation's first green-community
7:55 p.m. Friday, April 18, 2008
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Manhattan — Saws roar and sparks fly as these K-State students help polish Greensburg to becoming the nation's first-ever green community, where they’ll focus on building environmentally friendly homes, offices and facilities as they rebuild.
Architecture student Melody Meek says the effort, known as Project Cubed, will bring pavilion cubes of sustainable living to Greenburg.
Each cube is eco-friendly. One cube recycles rain water. Another provides bins for recycling. Students focused on carefully crafting each cube to be able to withstand another weather crisis.
”It's one way to connect the world of architecture with normal people because they can't. Design can really help improve people's lives,” says K-State architecture student Melody Meek. She helps develop the “Ice Cube” structure that recycles water. “Then when Greensburg happened, maybe this could start to lay the groundwork of how universities can respond to natural disasters such as tornadoes that are right next to us," she said.
There are 14 K-State architecture students who are participating in Go-Green Initiative, where they're going to bring these products down to Greensburg, Kansas at the one-year anniversary of the F5 tornado that devastated them a year ago.
Though the students have spent two weeks building the project, many say the lessons learned from the experience will last a lifetime.
”To find the silver lining, I guess you could say,” says architecture student Aaron Vanderpool, who hands the community relations of the project. “And kind of bring their town into the 21st century and give the high schoolers that are there now and future generations a reason to stick around.”
”Pretty rewarding to know that we actually didn't just draw something up, but we can stand and touch this and imagine the people of Greensburg going in and using it and sitting on our bench, and I'm really excited,” says Jacob Henley, another architecture student assisting with the project. “And I hope that we can go down and see the excitement on their faces, and I think that's something that we'll take with us for the rest of our lives.”
But no matter how excited the community of Greensburg is, these students can't help but paint a happy smile on their own faces.
The students of Project Cubed will deliver the finished product to the community on May 4, the anniversary of the tornado. Students have been planning the overall project for two semesters.
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Apr. 19, 2008 at 6:47 p.m. (Suggest removal)JeanSC (anonymous)
FYI this tornado was an EF5, rather than F5 - the first using the new system.
Responding to this tornado devastation with "green rebuilding" [a good thing by itself in any case] is a non sequitur of the highest order - a textbook case of ignoring the elephant in the room. The logical response, which I've advocated from the start, is to make tornado-resistant construction the top priority.
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