Prefab, Portable Green Roof Installed In Toronto

John Kitchen of ESRI from Lloyd Alter on Vimeo.

Roof gardens? Green terraces? Instant vegetation? That’s what some renters in Canada are doing in a brave experiment to test your lease rights. They’re adding greenery to their rooftops in a way that most owners would be happy to see–except those who see it as a nuisance. I can’t see it happening in Singapore. Most landlords would scream.

green team

Prefab, Portable Green Roof Installed In Toronto
www.treehugger.com
by John Alter

Green roofs keep buildings cool, control water runoff and can be really nice to look at, in those rare situations where there is office space overlooking terraces, like there were at ESRI Canada’s Toronto offices. But what do you do in an existing building, when you are a tenant and not an owner?

That is one of the many problems that Alex Miller, President, ESRI Canada, and landscape architect Scott Torrance had to face. Others included access problems (the only road beside the building was a fire access route) Weight limitations (it is an existing building with occupied office space below the terrace) and the perennial issue in buildings: access window washing anchors.

Landlords don’t appreciate tenants modifying their building, nor do they like a lot of disruption for the other tenants. So even though ESRI’s landlord was very cooperative, they still had to design it prefab so that it could be installed quickly, and they laid it right on top of the existing roof slabs so that it can be lifted up and taken away with no damage to the existing building, if necessary. So calling it portable is a bit of a stretch, but it could be removed and reinstalled somewhere else if it had to be.

Read the complete article.