Evds2702marks’s Weblog

This week’s lecture on urban roof design proved to be very useful for the upcoming Ecology and Design project where our proposed building was to have a greenroof.

Green roofs started as ancient hanging gardens and Scandinavian turf roofs, supplying vegetation and insulation. Today there are used for much the same purpose, but today, they are also used as a public space.

There are three types of green roofs. The basic green roof is inaccessible, low cost, low weight, and low maintenance, where dry meadow grasses and mosses are used. The green roof hybrid requires simple intensive roof-greening, it is accesible, requires little watering, and perennials, grasses, shrubs are used for vegetation. A roof garden is also accessible, however it requires intensive roof greening, is quite heavy and expensive, but there is an extensive range of vegetation that can be used from lawn, to perennials, and even trees.

The benefits of a green roof prove to be an excellent reason for implementation:

• Amenity and Aesthetic: recreational space, public and private, high quality in high density
• Environmental: biodiversity and wildlife value, stormater management , air pollution urban heat island effect
• Economic: increased roof life, cooling, insulation and energy efficiency, green building assessment and public relations

At the end of the presentation, it was determined that for our project we would use a basic green roof, as our building proposal would be a reletively inexpensive project, where the added cost of a roof garden, and even the maintenance fees of a green roof hybrid could not be justified.