Green Options

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.

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: