We can find green roofs on houses, and also on office building. To have a green roof on building can be interpreted like a philosophy which focuses on increasing the efficiency of resource use energy, water and materials. A green building can be interpreted in many different ways, and one of the common views is that they should be designed and operated to reduce the overall impact of the built environment on human health and the natural environment by efficiently using energy, water, protecting occupant health and improving employee productivity, and reducing waste, pollution and environmental degradation.
One of environmental feature of green buildings is a green roof. Green roof has extensive plantings on a rooftop or terrace, and these are popular with environmentalists because they reduce rainwater runoff.
Some of these buildings that have green roofs are presented in this article.
Waldspirale
The Waldspirale(wooded spiral) is the name of a residential building complex in Darmstadt, Germany, the building was built in the 1990s. The Waldspirale is a green building designed by an Austrian artist, Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
There are other apartment buildings in Darmstadt, but the U-shaped Waldspirale is special. The roof of the altogether 12 floors is covered with grass, shrubs and trees and the facade follows an irregular grid organization. The building contains 105 apartments, a parking garage, a kiosk as well as a café and a bar, the last two being located at the top of the spiral.
The building has more than 1000 windows. Not one of these windows are shaped the same in this “out of line” building, and many have “tree tenants” growing right through them. Some of the apartments are decorated in Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s personal style and exhibit the colorful tiles in the bath and kitchen that are characteristic of his work.
A-cero Wins Research Center for Renewable Energy
The project was born on architectural competition for an academic center that researches renewable energy sources, when Joaquín Torres was the direction of principal.
The building that blends in with the surrounding landscape aims to reach highest goals in sustainable architecture. The international competition was organized by the commission of Education, Formation and Employment of the Murcia region in Spain.
The building has 9,000 square meters constructed, surface that constitute teaching areas, library, audio-visual, auditorium, administrative area, restoration, facilities and services and also parking.
The winning project presented by A-cero, raises the center as a landscape operation blurring the limits between architecture and free space. The horizontal plane of the plot bends producing a new orography marked by fissures that will be the spaces of access to the center and exterior spaces of the teaching areas. The resultant geometry north – south looks for the orientation for the interior program. The surrounding one (walls and covering) triangulated specializes and diversifies adopting different solutions as orientation and conditions of use. The idea is that it is possible to cover the “covering” as a park where there coexist green areas (indigenous vegetation and gardens) with areas destined for solar, photovoltaic panels, and other systems of clean energies and energy saving.
URSSAF offices
URSSAF offices is a project designed by mikou design studio, and the project was born for a competition, competition which has the aim to create a new building for the social security organization.
The building is sculpted by successive withdrawals, emphasizing terraces planted with plants behind horizontal railing strips.
The building has 9,000 square meters constructed, surface that constitute individual offices and open space, meeting rooms, foyer and restaurant for employees, atrium, delivery platform and also parking places.
Green Roof Art School in Singapore
The building is School of Art, Design & Media at Nanyang Technological University campus, Singapore, has 5-storey and is situated in a wooded valley.
The embracing arms of this unique building have a most spectacular verdant turfed roof which blends with ground contour as if emerges from it. It has glass curtain wall and raw concrete minus the painting.
The green roof helps to lower the roof temperature and surrounding areas, and in the same time it works as a functional space, as a scenic outdoor community space via easily accessible sidesteps along the roof edge.
The glass are projected to allows generous doses of daylight into the studios and galleries while cutting off the tropical heat, provide a visual exchange between indoors and out allowing students and teachers to experience the building, and at night, the building glows like a lantern.
The place where the building is situated is a wooded valley which was supposed to be left as a green lung in the master plan of the 200-hectare Nanyang Technological University campus. The designer-planners, however, carved a habitat from the constraints of the valley. And instead of imposing a building onto the landscape, they let the landscape play a critical role in moulding the building. It allows the original greenery of the site to creep and colonise the building.
The building design challenges the traditional linear system of education with a clear teacher-student arrangement. Here, given the sloping nature of the architectural form, many of the teaching spaces come in different shapes and volumes which could be easily adapted to different needs. For example corridors and cozy corners double up as informal exhibition areas. The architectural form beautifully complements and creates an ambiance and environment conducive for exploration and exchange of ideas for the arts and design students.
Green Roof for ZUIDKAS
An ecological sustainable design (ESD) study of over 11,000 m² mixed-used building situated in the Ravel sub-area of the Zuidas in Amsterdam, Netherlands, carried out by Dutch architect Architectenbureau Paul de Ruiter and commissioned by the Government Buildings Agency. It integrates a greenhouse into the roof. And by integrating both office and residential functions into the same building, the greenhouse serves the additional function of being part of a system of air and water purification.
Taking issues like CO2 reduction, energy savings and public health into account, we arrived at a functional mix in the building that is far from ordinary: homes, offices, a school, parking facilities, retail, restaurants, a park and a biogas electrical plant.
All of these functions can be connected by a glass envelope that accommodates a variety of ‘greenhouses’: CO2 greenhouses, hybrid greenhouses, a buffer zone and various atria. The objective was to make an intelligent autarchic building that allows for the exchange of energy and CO2 streams and the conversion of waste streams into heat and energy. As well as minimizing the building’s total emission levels, bringing back the building’s energy requirement to minimum levels, and above all creating an attractive, comfortable and healthy environment for people to live and work in. To develop the building as a miniature city, embedded in the proposed urban structure of the Zuidas.
Green Roof for Rathaus Terraces
Weilburg, a medieval city not too far from Frankfurt, has announced plans to demolish a parking structure on the edge of its dense core and replace it with a mixed-use development with retail, residential and park space. Recently they revealed this beautiful proposal from ACME, which won the all-important public vote and second place from the professional jury. Inspired by the nearby Baroque terraced-landscape design of the Weilburg Castle Gardens, the Rathaus Terraces will feature green roofs, as well as natural ventilation and daylighting.
Rio’s Paineiras Hotel with Green Roof
The building is designed by a Brazil firm from São Paulo, and the architects are Alexandre Hepner, Denis Cossia, João Paulo Payar, Rafael Brych, Ricardo Gonçalves. The idea is to design a complex that allow perfect fruition of the beautiful panoramic view and the close contact with nature. The strategy reflects “the intention of harmonizing the intervention with the existing context, thought without denying the contemporary character of such intervention nor hiding its presence among the surrounding forest and the old hotel building.”
The building is located in Tijuca National Park, and takes into consideration the environmental impacts of the project while providing ample spaces for the estimated number of future tourists due to increase sharply with the World Cup coming to Brazil in 2014 followed by the Olympics in Rio in 2016.
The roof become an extension of the plaza and expands the available spaces for visitor activities which are organized in different volumes. The green roof covers the plaza and protects the pedestrian spaces from the weather, visually restores the forest canopy and reduces the environmental impact that would have been caused by the loss of the site’s permeability.
OMA a Residential Complex with a Green Roof
The building is designed by Ole Scheeren, partner of OMA, and the idea is to design a new residential typology which breaks away from the standard isolated, vertical apartment towers of Singapore.
Thirty-one apartment blocks, each standing at six-storeys tall and identical in length, are stacked in a hexagonal arrangement to form eight large open and permeable courtyards, the stached formation allow the light and the air to flow through the architecture and surrounding landscape.
The building has 170,000 square meters of gross floor area and will house 1,040 apartment units of varying sizes. The landscape takes more than eight-hectares with the arrangement of the buildings maximizing the presence of the surrounding tropical floral by introducing extensive roof gardens, landscaped sky terraces, cascading balconies and lush green areas. The continuous landscape is also projected vertically, from the planting of green areas in open-air basement voids, through balconies and roof top garden. Cascading gardens spill over the facades of the buildings drawing a visual onnection between the elevated green refuges and expansive tropical landscape on the ground. complex is also embedded within tropical flora, letting nature expand. Sky gardens provide panoramic views across the interlace site and throughout the complex.
The architectural design also incorporates sustainability features through careful environmental analysis of sun, wind and micro-climate conditions on site and the integration of low-impact passive energy strategies. water bodies have been strategically placed within wind corridors as a means of allowing evaporative cooling to happen along the wind paths, reducing local air temperatures and improving thermal comfort in outdoor recreation spaces.
Green Office from 2010 with green roof
The building was designed by RAU Architects from Netherlands, and the aim is to create a concept for a multi-functional office building that combines a spacious interior for comfortable working and ample green space for recreation. The building integrates sustainable transportation and is outfitted with photovoltaic cells and wind turbines to keep the office’s carbon footprint low.
The interior of the office includes an adjustable ventilation system for comfort, as well as surface lighting that will provide more even illumination than traditional lighting. The outside of the building is designed with a verdant green roof and central courtyard — both to invite employees outdoors and to create opportunities for mingling.
To make this development eco-friendly, the architects approached energy efficiency in three ways: first, conservation through efficient insulation; second, re-use by converting kinetic energy into electrical energy (although the proposal does not give specific details about this process); third, clean energy production through the use of photovoltaic cells and wind turbines.
thx very much ^^?