Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
As climate change and growing urban populations place
increasing pressure on our cities, innovative ways to make
our towns more liveable are in demand.
In 2008 Visions showcased Australia's first research green roof,
which was developed by researchers at the Melbourne School
of Land and Environment.
Their study identified plants that could survive in extreme
conditions and found that even a small green roof could
reduce Summer energy cooling demand by 38 percent.
The team have now literally built on these results to
develop the Burnley Green Roofs Project which was
officially launched last month by the Vice-Chancellor
and the Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle.
The green roofs have a range or environmental and economic
benefits that can help make our cities more liveable.
They can reduce the energy use in buildings by acting as an
insulating layer and stopping heat gain by the buildings and
therefore reducing air conditioning costs.
They can also act as a sponge absorbing rainfall and
stopping the massive amounts of runoff we have off our
hard surfaces in urban areas and this will improve the
ecology of our streams and rivers.
So despite the benefits of green roofs they're not very common
in Australia compared to overseas countries like North America
and Europe and this is because the Australian climate is very
different and the models that they use over there don't
necessarily work in Australia so we've been developing
substrates and plants to work under Australian conditions.
So as well as this demonstration roof we also have a research
roof and a biodiversity roof where we'll be using to do research
to understand how green roofs can function better.
We've got a range or indigenous plants that act as laval food
sources for butterflies and also including structures such as
tiles and flower pots where lizards and insects can live.
Such a significant roof structure required inventive
solutions from the planning team which was led by
the multidisciplinary design practice HASSELL.
When we began on the project we had to examine all the
limitations working with the existing building so for example
the building is heritage listed. One of the other big limitations
with any green roof is the structural capacity and loading,
what could we actually put on top of it safely.
To get a really high quality outcome with a fabrication of the
space, assembling things off-site allows us to get a much
higher quality result. It's not something that's usually
undertaken in landscape work so much so it's quite unique
and it's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle going together on-site.
It's very much a flexible use space so it's about bringing
people in to showcase green roof technology but it's also
about day-to-day teaching and learning. We have essentially
four main teaching spaces and that's why the edge continually
builds up around there so we've got constant seating
opportunities around the perimeter.
The intention was to create something that was quite beautiful
here but at the same time illustrated a lot of different functional
green roof types. What we have here is fourteen different planting
zones from shallow 100mm depth through to 300mm or 30cm.
Some areas of the roof are irrigated and some are not.
The irrigated sections are working on very low irrigation but we're
using harvested water off the site. And most of the plants here,
probably 95 percent of them we've grown directly in our nursery.
In this particular demonstration green roof there's more than
200 plants here and there would be more than 3000-4000,
we actually don't know exactly but we certainly know that that
number of plants was what ended up on the roof here.
So the ultimate aim of the diversity of all these zones and
different plantings on the roof is to show what's possible.
So there's many, many research questions that can feed our
teaching and better engage us with industry professionals
that we want to bring up here and use this space.