Green roof systems

Description

Green roof systems
A guide to the planning, design, and construction of landscapes over structure
By Susan k. Weiler, Katrin Scholz-Barth

Green roof systems: The technology and materials for vegetating roofs and creating usable open spaces over structure have been known for centuries.

Since 4000 BC, practitioners of building and agriculture have utilized the knowledge and materials of their time toconstruct sacred places such as ziggurats, simple vegetated roofs, and remarkable gardens over elevated surfaces.
The building green movement is not new, nor is the practice of using natural resources responsibly to sustain life and encourage the regeneration of natural resources.

In the last five years, the term green roof has taken on ecological and social significance beyond its seemingly simplistic description.

As commonly understood, the term has become an epithet for the reduction of pollution and urban heat islands, for largescale mitigation of stormwater runoff, and for maximum utilization of urban land.

Justifiably, the concept of the green roof as a way to add pervious surface and usable open space without taking up additional land is easy to understand and should be equally easy to implement.

Consequently, many clients, municipalities, architects, landscape architects, and planners have come to consider them as an integral element of sustainable building practice.

More recently, many European municipalities have mandated the incorporation of green roof systems as standard building practice.

Even without legislative mandate, landscape architects and architects have, with the personal will and mandate of their clients, successfully built numerous green roofs as stormwater management systems and as comfortable, accessible, open spaces over structure.

This has happened without fanfare, perhaps because many of these spaces have been imperceptibly integrated with the architecture and surrounding urban fabric, and perhaps because much of what sustains green roof functionality is invisible to the user.