Page 18 - Green Builder Magazine Nov-Dec 2017 Issue

CREDIT: D. JANDY/FLICKR

The right path. Chicago’s City Hall, with its living walls and path-derived gardens, is a prime example of how a green roof can look like
more than just a building with plants on top.
Photo-Synergy

Green roofs are becoming a Viking Age, when such roofs first became popular in Scandinavia.

red-hot way to promote Rewind modern-day Norway to the ninth or 10th century, and you
would find a landscape dotted with sod-roofed homes, now called
torvtak.
sustainable development. Today, the conventional rooftop is a brutal, lifeless terrain, typically
serving a sole purpose: protecting the building and inhabitants
BY PAUL HAWKEN beneath from the elements. In fulfilling that role, roofs take a beating
from sun, wind, rain and snow. They can endure temperatures up to
ROM AN AERIAL VIEW, most cities are a patchwork of 90 degrees higher than the air around them on a hot day, making it
gray, brown and black rooftops. But look down over some harder to cool the floors below and contributing to the urban heat
parts of Stuttgart, Germany, or Linz, Austria, and many island effect. This phenomenon of cities being measurably hotter
rooftops are easily mistaken for small parks or grassy than nearby rural and suburban areas is particularly harmful for
Fsquares. They are affirmation of the modern movement residents who are young, elderly or ill.
for green or “living” roofs, which has taken off in the past 50 years. Green roofs, on the other hand, are veritable ecosystems in the sky,
They also evoke a much longer history, back to the heyday of the designed to harness the moderating forces of natural ecosystems and

16 GREEN BUILDER November/December 2017 www.greenbuildermedia.com

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