Green Roof Mashup: Golf Course, Filtration Plant, Park and Prison

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 02.27.09

The Bronx NIMBYs went nuts when it was proposed that a water filtration plant be built in a park. So the architects, Grimshaw, followed what is becoming a common strategy: put a green roof on it and show it from the air. Building? What building?

And in this case, it's BIG, nine acres big, and they are putting in putting.

“The distinction here is it’s not just a green roof, but a performative green roof that needs to provide all these functions,” [Landscape Architect] Smith said in an interview. “I think we’re pushing both the design of the green roof and the design of the golf course in new directions. We’re working to see how far we can push the diversity of the ecology and still adhere to the constraints of the golf course.”

The Architects Newspaper writes:

When this heavily secured compound is completed in 2012, it’s due to be topped by far more than just new turf. Grimshaw and landscape architect Ken Smith have designed one of the largest and most intensive green roofs to date, which is also a fully functioning driving range. And an irrigation system for the golf course. And an integrated security program for the facility below. Think Pebble Beach meets the Biosphere meets Rikers.

The engineering challenges are formidable. At nine acres, the $95 million driving range is the largest contiguous green roof in the country. So when it rains at the range, it pours, which creates a paradoxical hazard for the plant below. “It’s of paramount importance to the City of New York that this building stay dry, despite being full of water,” said David Burke, the project architect at Grimshaw. So to handle the millions of gallons that can accumulate on the green roof during a storm, the design team has devised a natural filtration system to collect, process, and store the runoff

Green Roof : A Tehcnology to save our planet.

A green roof is a roof of a building that is partially or completely covered with vegetation and soil, or a growing medium, planted over a waterproofing membrane. This does not refer to roofs which are merely colored green, as with green roof shingles. It may also include additional layers such as a root barrier and drainage and irrigation systems.

Container gardens on roofs, where plants are maintained in pots, are not generally considered to be true green roofs, although this is an area of debate. Rooftop ponds are another form of green roofs which are used to treat greywater.

Green Roofs : More Green on Your Roof

In most of architecture design, almost buildings are designed to shed rain, and as such are built with hard, impenetrable roofing surfaces.

As a result, rainwater bounces off and collects as runoff, picking up impurities—including infectious bacteria from animal waste as well as harmful pesticides and fertilizers—on the way to municipal storm sewers, which in turn eventually empty into local bodies of water.

But we can make this runoff more effective for our environment.

Minimizing this runoff means that more impurities will remain in local soils where they can be broken down more easily into their constituent elements than if they are concentrated downstream.

To achieve this goal, landscape architects have developed so-called “green roofs,” which use living plant matter and soil on top of a building to absorb, collect and reuse rainwater while preventing runoff. Many buildings employing green roofs are able to find abundant uses for the water they collect, from watering exterior plants at ground level to flushing toilets inside.