Oregon Public Broadcasting

American eyes will look to China later this week, when Beijing’s summer Olympic games open. But engineers and architects in Oregon have been looking to China for another reason.

It's been almost three months since a catastrophic earthquake killed thousands of people in  Sichuan Province.  Now, Oregon experts are helping guide China’s post-earthquake reconstruction.

As Rob Manning reports, the effort is taking a turn toward sustainability.

The idea to connect China and Oregon through sustainable building practices actually goes back years. Periodically, the Portland-based China U.S. Center for Sustainable Development has brought people from China’s Ministry of Construction to talk sustainability.

Center board member Kent Snyder says from Oregon’s side, the concern was air pollution.

Kent Snyder: “I would wring my hands -- what do we do about China? We have these brown clouds, ten percent of our particulate matter in our atmosphere here is coming from China, what can we do?”

Well, last year, Oregon engineers and architects went to China, to meet with officials and come up with a green design for a school building. 

They hoped to start a green building revolution  throughout China. The University of Oregon got involved, along with two Chinese universities. Snyder says they'd even picked a site.

Kent Snyder: “So there was this collaborative process, that had been done – about how to do a sustainable small school in a rural area. And then May 12th happened, and this disaster occurred.”

So the focus switched quickly to building a demonstration school in Sichuan Province, in the central part of the country. And the pace picked up.

Oregon’s team has now just returned, after days of back-to-back meetings with high-level Chinese officials and visits to the earthquake-affected region.

They want to blend Chinese cultural preferences and building methods with core sustainability principles, like those used in some green buildings in Oregon.

Architect Bill Hart says he focused his presentation to Chinese officials on ways to improve efficiency – like with lights, or heating.

Bill Hart: “We looked at the ability of how you would direct those lights, where they would be positioned in the rooms, the reflection of the surfaces. In terms of a heating system, we looked at the idea of using the solariums which are on the side of each of the classrooms, as the ablity to use that as a passive heating system.”

And, as a passive cooling system, Hart advocated building air shafts, to carry cool air during the hotter months.

But beyond the green aspects, the new schools are intended to be safer in an earthquake, and to be Chinese.

That means lots of advice from local officials. It also means making the most of what China does best.

Kent Yu is with Degenkolb Engineering’s Portland office. He says to produce buildings fast – and with the proper oversight to insure seismic safety – the school will be largely pre-fabricated.

Kent Yu: “So by doing the pre-fabrication we can control the quality of construction very well, and to do a minimum of cast-in-place concrete in the field, so we can control the quality – make sure that the most critical part of the earthquake system is done properly."

The Chinese ministry of construction has thousands of damaged schools to re-build in the next three years.

Kent Yu says he’s optimistic that the Chinese government is interested in incorporating some greener practices along the way. And he says if the demo school building gets the funding it needs quickly, it could be replicated in Sichuan, possibly hundreds of times.