Knight's Sustainable Streetscape project featured in ENR Midwest:

Sustainable Streetscape Paved With Green
A gritty Chicago thoroughfare proves that sustainable design need not be pretty in order to be green

By Pamela Dittmer Mckuen, ENR Midwest

The rough-and-tumble backdrop of factories and warehouses is more suggestive of urban grit than LEED Gold, making Chicago’s first sustainable streetscape, a two-mile-plus stretch along Cermak Road and Blue Island Avenue, an unlikely poster child for environmentally minded design.

“It may not seem glamorous, but engineering sustainability into basic elements such as streets and sewers can have a profound impact on our cities,” says Kevin Lentz, president of Chicago-based Knight E/A, the project’s engineer of record and mastermind of Chicago’s Green Alleys program.

Though Cermak-Blue Island doesn’t qualify for LEED certification, a rating system reserved for buildings, its team members, including the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), are pursuing environmentally minded solutions with LEED-like fervor. The project, due for completion later this year, will serve as a template for similar undertakings in an effort to advance Chicago’s standing as one of the nation’s greenest cities.

Click here to view the full article on the ENR Midwest Website