Sustainable Architecture

I was talking to one of my UROP advisors a couple of days ago, about how green roofs are more beneficial for the long term because they're really a systems kind of approach to sustainable design. A couple of buildings with green roofs won't really a make difference, but a whole city with green roofs would definitely be cooler, could be a carbon sink, and also keep up a vibrant ecology.

William McDonough is an architect who is really big on sustainable buildings and changing industrial manufacturing processes. One of his most famous designs is the Ford Rouge Dearborn Truck Plant, 10 acres of a green roof that is estimated to absorb 50% of annual rainwall--that's pretty good stormwater management.



And then our very own Kendall Square has a nice green roof garden on top of a parking garage.


From Google Maps, the Kendall green roof looks just like a park.



It's easy to design new buildings to be capable of supporting the weight of green roofs, but retrofitting old buildings for green roofs is nearly impossible because of the lack of structural integrity. We were talking about how cities should been encircled by new buildings with green roofs. Like the Amazon forest canopies, a la human architecture. hahaha

Summer Time

On the top of the Solaire in Battery Park City in New York. (Photo Copyright © birdw0rks/Simon Bird and the Albanese Organization.

This summer I'm working on two projects: surveying people's thermal comfort with LEED coordinator Emma Leonard and designing green roofs with Leon Glicksman from Building Technology (Yang organized the BPP this spring and he was one of the speakers!). I'm excited, I get to put some test beds up on building 1 and tentatively I'll be monitoring things like temperature and moisture differences. I get calculate 2.005 like heat transfer problems since the plants act as insulation. The survey is for the new grad dorm N35 so it can get certified as environmentally sustainable by the US Green Building Council. Leon Glicksman said there were plans in the past to make every new dorm have green roofs, but that plan seems to have fallen through. I get to find out how practical green roofs are and in what situations. Some of the advantages of green roofs are stormwater management and reduction of urban islands and heating loads. hooray!