Green Roofs in a Great Book - Sustainable Environments by Yenna Chan
I picked up another cool book today, Contemporary Design in Detail - Sustainable Environments
Sustainable Environments is absolutely loaded with some of the coolest houses going, many of which I've talked about here in this blog, like: Steven Holl's Little Tesseract House, the ever-exciting C2C Home winner, and Shigeru Ban's Bamboo Furniture House. Other featured works are from noted firms like Arkin-Tilt, Pugh+Scarpa, ZEDFactory, and the good folks at Rural Studio.
One of the neatest things about the book is that roughly half the projects shown in it have green roofs. I love green roofs, I've already decided the home I build someday will have one, and I can't understand why on earth every new home shouldn't have one.
I like the green roof in the book done by Balmori Associates for the Solaire Building, a green residential tower in NYC which was chosen as an AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects. They have great pics of it on their site, as well as a short video that talks about all the benefits of green roofs, like helping to reduce the urban heat island effect, mitigating air pollution, absorbing stormwater and reducing runoff, and providing a green space for residents. There's another great video on the Solaire's green features here.
Green roofs rule! We need a green roof revolution in America!
Sustainable Environments is one boss book. Find it and read it.
Image credit - Rockport Publishers, AIA/COTE Top Ten Green Projects,
2 comment(s):
What about bugs? Wouldn't a house with a green roof be more likely to have bugs? I can't stand the thought of bugs.
I think you'd be shocked how many bugs are living in the walls of a typical stick frame home with a regular roof. They love all those tiny little spaces. With a green roof you'd have no more bugs near your home than your lawn already brings you. Typically there's a nice membrane underneath the roof's plantings, no bugs will get in that way. But let me dig up some links on green roofs tonight and we'll all learn more about it together. Bugs never bother me much, as long as they stay outside!
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