The Highline Heritage Museum building, which is planned to be built at 819 SW 152nd Street in Olde Burien, has been nominated for an AIA “What Makes It Green” award for sustainable design.

According to one of the building’s designers, Tim Rohleder of Rohleder Borges Architecture:

“We have submitted the Highline Heritage Museum project as representative of our efforts in the world of sustainable design. The jury has already selected the “Top Eleven” projects from a pool of entries from all over the region including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, British Columbia, Hawaii, Japan and Guam. The “Top Ten” (or in this case eleven) are supposed to be announced the week of May 5th in coordination with juried interviews at Seattle City Hall.

Per the AIA: “2010 WMIG? program recognizes projects that demonstrate the highest accomplishment in environmentally sustainable architecture, combining inspired design, systems analysis, and performance evaluation.”

Readers can vote on the entries here – so click on over there and vote for your soon-to-be-built, innovative and sustainably-designed new museum!

Here’s more info on the museum from the Highline Historical Society’s website:

The Highline Heritage Museum (HHM) has been designed to represent the Community of Highline, the stories of their past, the legacy of their people and their responsibility to the environment. From the start of the programming process, the Board of Trustees has been engaged and committed to creating a symbol representative of their community. It is a broad stroke representing the people from five different communities. The project is proposed as a redevelopment of an existing decaying building on an urban site in the heart of the City of Burien with a promising future for pedestrian vitality. The property lies along a primary pedestrian path with bus routes as connections to all its major constituents. The site is within a few blocks of the new regional county library and the Burien City Hall. The neighborhood also includes restaurants, retail shops, a post office, a regional transit center and a recently completed multi-family, moderate density residential development. The Board of Trustees warmly embraced the opportunity to create a “green” museum. While LEED was initially not accepted as a reasonable tool to gage the success, it was later recognized as an important element. One of the goals is LEED Silver with design strategies that include multiple mechanical zones utilizing ground source heat pumps, managed day lighting, specialty glazing integrating art and energy performance, a super insulated building envelope, transparency to the neighborhood using full height glazing, articulated building forms, and strategic use of site and roof areas integrating exhibits, landscape and pedestrian gathering areas. While there is much excitement at the uniqueness of the “geothermal” systems and the associated 300 foot deep pits, the design is a total package that investigates green opportunities for a building type where there are currently few recognized built examples.