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A photovoltaic (PV) array consisting of 5,000 panels is the centerpiece of the hybrid landscape.
Solar power as art
Story by Arthur Page
Walter Hood, artist and landscape designer.
Photo by: Reanna Kaopuiki, BFA ’01
COME NEXT SPRING, UB’s North Campus will be the site of the largest solar array installation on a college or university campus in New York State and one of the largest on a college or university campus in the United States.
Located east of Flint Road between Maple Road and Audubon Parkway, it will contain 5,000 photovoltaic panels that will generate solar energy for 735 student apartments and reduce UB’s carbon emissions by more than 500 metric tons per year.
It also will advance a principal goal of the UB 2020 strategic plan: improving the environmental sustainability of the university’s three campuses.
The installation is being built by UB in partnership with the New York Power Authority (NYPA) and funded with up to $7.5 million from the NYPA.
The proposed design is derived from “the strand,” a linear landscape formation and DNA fingerprint. Together, water and light merge, harnessing
nature’s energy from sunlight and hydrological infiltration.
Work on the site will begin this fall.
The university, envisioning the solar array
as a significant land art installation, conducted
an invit–
ational international design
competition to ensure that it would integrate
beauty with engineering innovation
and environmental sustainability.
Artist and landscape architect Walter Hood, winner of the competition, is founding principal of Hood Design of Oakland, Calif., and professor and former chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of California at Berkeley. He calls his winning design “The Solar Strand,” a term that refers both to a linear landscape formation and to the way pairs of molecules entwine to form DNA.
Indeed, Hood’s design physically resembles the linear pattern of a DNA fingerprint, and will incorporate plantings in and among the solar panels to reinforce and merge with the existing creek and campus wood patch ecology. He envisions educational and social uses for the solar panel system, primarily through the development of “social rooms” that would “break through” the array at three locations.
Like a DNA fingerprint, solar
panels are codified, arranged to show how much power is captured or generated and where it is used.
MULTIMEDIA
UB in the News
USA Today interviews UB accounting professor on Eastman Kodak's bankruptcy filing
1/17/2013 An article in USA Today on Eastman Kodak?s bankruptcy filing, which has caused huge cuts to pay, benefits and insurance coverage for retirees and employees, quotes Martha Salzman, assistant professor of accounting and law in the UBSchool of Management.
NPR interviews UB professor on Pres. Obama?s plan to reduce gun violence
1/17/2013 Steven Dubovsky, chair of the Department of Psychiatry in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, was interviewed live on NPR?s ?Here & Now,? which airs on 170 NPR affiliates nationwide, about President Barack Obama?s $500 million plan to reduce gun violence.
Buffalo News front-page story features UB study on use of stem cells in MS
1/15/2013 A front-page story in the Buffalo News reports on a new study soon to be underway at UB and two other upstate medical centers to test a procedure that infuses stem cells into the brains of patients with multiple sclerosis to repair damage to their central nervous systems. The article quotes Bianca Guttman-Weinstock, co-principal investigator on the study. ?Expectations have to be kept under control,? she said. ?You?re not going to implant stem cells in people and suddenly see them running around.?