Seattle's Big Green

Portland has financial incentives, FAR bonuses, and saavy public agencies that promote green roofs. Seattle, has the Gates Foundation. Fueled by massive amounts of capital that has done amazing good around the world - and turns this trend towards their home base in the construction of one of Seattle's largest green roofs atop the parking garage of their new structure. Katie Zemtseff, a friend here at L+U and author of the Seattle DJC Green Building Blog, recently posted some pics and words of the project as a follow-up to her previous story about the project.




:: images via DJC Green Building Blog

While the track record of roofs in Seattle has been spotty, this project looks to utilize a vegetated mat system atop 5 inches of growing media. So to say it was 'designed' is a stretch, but perhaps this will eliminate some of the failure issues from previous rooftops, which had a bit of problems getting established. The issues and lack of incentives have made slow going for projects up north, as mentioned in the DJC: "Green roofs have not proliferated in Seattle as they have in Chicago, where there are more than 250, or in Portland, where the city has a green roof grant program. Nichol said some Seattle building owners may have been intimidated by the cost and green roof failures. Often in King County, she said, green roofs fail due to weeds."






:: images via DJC Green Building Blog

To clarify though - green roofs don't fail due to weeds. They fail due to shitty design and bad maintenance. But alas, that's a story for another day - and one that looks to be avoided on this project. While the vegetated mats and 60,000 sf area probably added up to a pretty substantial price-tag - the benefits are still worth it. The project is also unique in being visible from both the ground, as well as the adjacent Space Needle (seen looming in the distance)... so it looks like the view from on ground and high above Seattle is looking a bit more green from there.

Veg.itecture: VIA Flowerbox

Flowerbox is a building in NYC with a vertically stacked set of horizontal planters at the floorplates. Completed in September 2007. The garden consists of over 500 plants and 80 different species. The building is designed by Derek Sanders, with landscape from Mac Carbonell from Verdant Gardens Design.










:: images via Flickr - maccarbonell

Check out more these images from Carbonell's Flickr page.

Veg.itecture: VIA Seeing Greens

More Veg.itecture in Action (VIA) from around the world. For those in NYC looking for the practical, the New York Botanical Garden will be hosting a symposium Creating Green Roofs: The Next Steps on March 6th. More from NYC on a L+U favorite, the High Line - with some choice words about the prosaic and the sublime from Hugh Perlman. A post from outofdoors offers discussion on the habitat potential for green roofs in Southern California. Sky Gardens provides some thoughts on the equitable access to green roofs - in particular a response to the overpriced 'eco-woofs' from Sustainable Pet Design - says why so expensive. I'd add why such awful design?

Some of the dialogue is about the difference in vision from reality (which was mentioned a bit in the post related to BIGs Moutain Dwellings), continued in views of the new visuals of Eden Bio from Eduoard Francois (shown first here in L+U). First, the vision:


:: Visual of Eden Bio - photo from Dezeen

And the reality in a few photos:




:: Eden Bio in action - photos from Dezeen

Part of the issue is time. We need the patience to wait out the inevitable timeline of growth of plants to make their way into the project form. For now the green paint and wooden trellis structures will have to suffice in giving a prelude, and see how it shakes out. On the opposite subject - a range of some designs that made it past drawings, photoshop and construction to retain some semblance of realistic implementation:

SESC School for Secondary Education, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
by Indio da Costa AUDT




:: images via WAN

The Wellness Center, College of New Rochelle, New York
by ikon.5 architects


:: images via WAN

YTL Residence Kuala Lumpur
by Jouin Manku




:: images via SpaceInvading

HouseC Chiba, Japan
by Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP Co., Ltd.






:: images via SpaceInvading

Interior Green Wall
Wait until you see the exterior of this one... coming soon.


:: image via Contemporist

A Trio of Asian Roof Terraces
Via Urban Greenery: “Official in Shanghai’s Luwan District hope to have planted 13,000 square meters of roof garden by the end of this year in an attempt to cool down buildings and save energy.”


:: Shanghai - image via Urban Greenery


:: Singapore - image via Urban Greenery


:: Tokyo - image via Urban Greenery

MFO Park
And you can never show too many pics of the great MFO Park, this time via VULGARE.






:: images via VULGARE

To get into some of the mechanisms at play, outofdoors delves into a couple of different ideas in two separate posts, including clinging vines, climbing vines, and espalier - with some examples that work in a California ecoregion.


:: clinging - creeping fig - image via outofdoors


:: climbing - bougainvillea - image via outofdoors


:: espalier - apple - image via outofdoors

And one of the things I really like to differentiate is the highly designed from the more organic... and there are no shortage of opportunities to see these more 'natural' of sem-designed veg.itectural specimens in action - often the subject of Urban Greenery.


:: Building in Cairo - image via Urban Greenery


:: Abandoned castle in Sorrento - image via Urban Greenery


:: taking root - image via Urban Greenery