By Lucille Chi •
July 25, 2009
There is a brilliant sustainability series on urban gardening (Alive Structures and roof garden tutorials will be featured) in New York City this summer put on by a non-profit called New York Restoration Project. There will be four talks, every other Thursday from 7 pm to 8 pm, in NYPC’s Toyota Children’s Learning Garden. All of them are open to the public.
Where? Toyota Sustainable Summer Series Toyota Children’s Learning Garden 603 East 11th Street, New York, NY
When? July 30, 2009 from 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
What? Sarah Seigal, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. She will give a short garden tour and speak about the garden design, specifically the shade tolerant planting palette she created for this garden.
What else? Refreshments at the end of each event.
NYRP works exclusively in New York City managing community gardens to help ensure their liveliness in each community. Keep reading for more details on the series in August and beyond…
By Alan Smith •
May 18, 2009
Urban Spaces – once concrete jungles of pollution – are starting to realize the potential for green living, and the race is on for which city can push that envelope the furthest.
By Lucille Chi •
May 3, 2009
Inhabitat shares a great set of stories on Alive Structures: a Brooklyn based green roofing collective. Together, with the most creative native gardeners in the city, Alive Structures will be giving tours of their rooftop gardens at NYC wildflower week. All those in the greater New York area make sure to stop by to explore this exciting dimension of the greening of cities.
City roof gardens create a nice natural habitat for pollinators and migrating species, and additionally “they provide open green spaces for property owners and the public to enjoy.” Green roofs are known to improve air and water quality, lessen storm-water runoff, lower building energy consumption, and reduce urban heat island affect.
Green roofs are constructed as a series of layers including:
- a waterproof membrane
- a root barrier
- drainage mat
- an erosion control fabric
- lightweight engineered soil, and vegetation.
By Lucille Chi •
April 26, 2009
The GreenRoofs.org “Green Roofs for Healthy Cities” Conference is on the horizon in Atlanta this coming June 2009! It is just ideal for:
- those interested in creating Green Roofs.
- studying the future of Vertical Gardens/Green Walls.
- raising awareness for green roofs and living walls (vertical gardens).
- engineers, architects, landscape architects, landscape designers, property managers, developers, roofing contractors, and students.
- anyone interested who wants a 2-day crash course in green roofs and all the beautiful benefits they bring to cities.
- creative city gardeners of all sorts.
“Green roofs are an important component of green infrastructure. They provide valuable public benefits related to stormwater management, reduction of the urban heat island, improvement of air quality (including removal of particulate matter), and general improvement of the quality of life in communities.” ~GreenRoofs.org
By Lucille Chi •
April 21, 2009
A project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics) at Exit Art, “Vertical Gardens is an exhibition of architectural models, renderings, drawings, photographs and ephemera that depict or imagine a vertical farm, urban garden or green roof.” The exhibit features over 20 projects, both imaginary and real, by artists and architects envisioning solutions for building greener urban environments.
Details for the FREE two-day event (featuring eco architects, artists, professors, and poets) at Exit celebrating Earth Day 2009 are as follows:
By Timothy B. Hurst •
April 14, 2009
Though green roofs are reemerging in the most advanced building designs around the world, for centuries, people constructed buildings out of materials immediately available to them in their surrounding environment. It is only a relatively recent luxury, for example, that people have easy access to roofing materials like asphalt shingles made hundreds, perhaps, thousands of miles away.
On the island of Læsø, Denmark there still stand a handful of buildings that are excellent examples of what communities would do with what was immediately available to them — if only they had any of it left.
In the Middle Ages the island of Læsø became famous for its salt industry. Hundreds of salt kilns were built, throughout the island, requiring constant fuel for the important final stage of commercial salt concentration. But on the island of Læsø—a community with a finite availability of natural resources—constantly feeding the hundreds of salt kilns eventually led to the island’s deforestation.
By Amanda Peterka •
October 20, 2008
The proposed 500,000 square feet of green roofs are part of Mayor Marcelo Ebrard’s $5.5 billion Green Plan, which also plans to reduce traffic in the crowded city.
By Jennifer Lance •
July 3, 2008
Austrian art collective Gelitin has created an installation titled “Normally, Proceeding and Unrestricted With Without Title”. You can row around this four feet deep artificial rooftop lake in boats made from from reclaimed timber and junk-store furniture with oars assembled from old chair legs.
Princeton University’s new Sustainability Plan calls for the campus to reduce its carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
Under the plan, all new construction at Princeton will have to use half as much energy as is required under current building codes. The plan also aims to reduce campus car traffic by 10 percent by 2020.
“We feel that we have an obligation as an institution to create an environment where students, faculty and staff can see the institution trying out new technologies … or trying to change behavior,” said Mark Burstein, Princeton’s executive vice president.
By Jason Phillip •
October 15, 2007
If you follow politics in Chicago at all, you’ve probably heard that Mayor Richard M. Daley has been using his lock on political power to try and make the Second City a more sustainable one. Daley established the city’s Department of Environment in 1992, and in the intervening years, has made some big steps toward making the city look greener (by planting thousands of trees in median planters along streets) and build greener
[...]
Vegetated Wall at Quai Branly Museum: Photo Credit: WikipediaGreen roofs are possibly one of the more radical green features being introduced to many people through the green building movement. Although they have been well established in central Europe for decades, it is only relatively recently that the idea of a vegetated roof has been considered in North America.
Contemporary vegetated roofs have little in common with old "earth sheltered" buildings of the
[...]
