Unveiled> Bjarke Ingels Designs an Entire City Covered in Green Roofs Near Paris
EuropaCity (Courtesy BIG)
The Bjarke Ingels Group, along with Tess, Transsolar, Base, Transitec, and Michel Forgue, have revealed their winning design for EuropaCity, a 200-acre urban cultural and commercial destination located between Paris and Roissy. Combining the forms of a dense European city with an open landscape, EuropaCity is set to be a retail, cultural, and leisure city of unprecedented scale. Modeled on the European urban experience and equipped with cutting edge green technologies, the development will serve as a retail and cultural hub for the region as well as a laboratory and showcase for sustainable design.
Southern Philadelphia High School Crowdsourcing Philly’s First Rooftop Farm
Southern Philadelphia High School has teamed up with Roofmeadow, a Philly-based green roof design and engineering firm, and the Lower Moyamensing Civic Association to bring the city its first rooftop farm in a new campus-wide plan to take the school from gray to green. The plan includes rain gardens, street trees, vegetable gardens, and a rooftop farm. These elements will be incorporated into a new curriculum for the school’s culinary and science departments, providing students with a chance to escape the classroom and engage in hands-on learning, while nearby residents will gain access to fresh produce and new green space.
“South Philly High is on the cutting edge of sustainability and innovation,” said Kim Massare, President of the Lower Moyamensing Civic Association in a statement to greenroofs.com. “It is changing the way we think about what a school should be and using technology to drive change in a totally new direction.”
The school is working with Roofmeadow and community representatives to develop the master plan, which targets large, underutilized properties on the school’s urban campus. The project will be crowdfunded through Projexity, an online platform that provides the support and framework for bottom-up neighborhood development projects, from creating proposals, to gathering funding, holding design competitions and getting the final approval necessary to move forward. The first of five stages of fundraising begins here on April 9th.
Urban Farming Duo Plants Seeds for Boston’s First Rooftop Farm
(Courtesy Higher Ground Farm)
While rooftop farming has cropped up in a number of cities across the country, it has yet to take root in Boston. But this will soon change when founders Courtney Hennessey and John Stoddard launch operations of their new rooftop farm, aptly called Higher Ground Farm, located atop the Boston Design Center this Spring. According to CoLab Radio at MIT, the duo will start planting on a 40,000-square-feet segment of the expansive 55,000-square-feet roof within the next few months and be ready to sell the fresh produce by summer.
Product> Let It Pour: Eight of the Leading Green Roof & Subsurface Components
Green Roof Blocks by Green Roof Blocks.
Nothing says “sustainable architecture quite like a green roof. AN has rounded up eight of the latest green roof and subsurface components that the pros use to seal out, drain, or retail water, like the Green Roof Blocks system (above) by Green Roof Blocks.
The Green Roof Block system is a completely self-contained module made from high-grade anodized aluminum. It can be pre-planted with a growth medium that the company guarantees will never break down. Built-in drainage and convenient handles make the units easy to install.
A decade of green growth celebrated at CitiesAlive!
(Courtesy LiveRoof)
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since the first green roof gathering in Chicago, when 400 green roof enthusiasts came together from around the world to share their passion and knowledge of green roofs. Since then, we’ve laid some very important foundations for the industry, which enjoyed an amazing 115% growth rate last year.
On October 17-20 at CitiesAlive, we will gather at the Congress Plaza Hotel in Chicago once more, to celebrate all that we have accomplished together, and lay plans for the future growth of this industry. Performance is the unifying theme for programming that features the best and brightest in green roof and wall design, research, policy. ’On the roof with’ conversations feature examples of what green infrastructure is best at – stormwater management, urban agriculture, increasing biodiversity, energy efficiency, job creation and more. Together, we’re building a legacy of outstanding performance!
After roaring into New York last year, BIG is reaping rewards from the American Institute of Architects who bestowed an Honor Award on the firm’s aptly-named “8 House” in Copenhagen (it looks like a figure-8 in plan). The AIA jury lavished praise: “people really ‘live’ in this newly created neighborhood,” which “provides an invigorating sculptural form while creating the ramped ‘pedestrian’ street system.” Ramps around 8 House make it bikable—from the street up to its 10th level penthouses—and two sloping green roofs total over 18,000 SF where the building reaches down to the ground.
Quick Clicks> City Atlas, Boathouse Retouch, Urban After Dark, Seasonal Seoul
City Atlas web site. (Courtesy City Atlas)
The City Atlas. The City Atlas is a new online project that seeks to create a platform to share collective imagination that is grounded on past and current accomplishments yet aimed at the future. Check out their website here.
Don’t Remove, Retouch. This beautifully renovated Norweigian boathouse is still technically un-new. Norwegian architects TYIN tegnestue was committed to reuse as much physical material as possible during the renovation. Images at WorldArchitectureNews.
Urban After Dark. According to Chuck Wolfe at myurbanist, a city’s true success is best measured at night (hence the quote “cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night”).
Seasonal Sedum. Check out these twelve staggered living roofs in Seoul designed by Joel Sanders Architect in cooperation with Haeahn Architecture. The roofs are planted with flowers (sedum) that bloom at different times of the year– resulting in changing, seasonal landscapes. See the images on Inhabitat.
P!LA: SynthE-sizing Dinner
On Saturday, before we headed over to the Standard for my star turn on the media panel, Sam Lubell and I first swung by the Flat, home to celebrated LA restaurant Blue Velvet. We were there for an event hosted by colleague and co-panelist Alyssa Walker, part of her de Lab (design east of LaBrea) series. SCI-arc professor and hunk Alexis Rochas had installed easily the coolest green roof we’ve ever seen on top of the condo, and two dozen or so people had shown up for a tour, followed by a most-interesting lunch. Read More
Who Designed These Buildings?
On Friday, the prolific New York Times metro reporter Jennifer 8. Lee, whose beat seems to include everything from fortune cookies to urban planning, covered a new mixed supportive and moderate-income housing development in Harlem, co-developed by the Fortune Society. Unfortunately for the architects involved, she misattributed the design of the project, and of another recent affordable housing development in Harlem, David and Joyce Dinkins Gardens, to the other co-developer, Jonathan Rose Companies. Read More
Advertise on The Architect's Newspaper.
Archives
Categories
Architecture
Design
East Coast
Midwest
National
Planning
Shft+Alt+Del
Sustainability
Transportation
West Coast
