Building that Are Alive

In this day of Green Everything, there is LEED platinum and then there is a living building.
What is a living building?
A living building is a self-sustaining structure. Think of it as a Kibbutz in the vertical variety.
It catches and uses its own water. Its toilets flush with one pint (compared to 1.6 gallons for efficiency toilets) and self-compost. Getting the point? It might or might not generate its own electricity through solar panels and/or vegetation by using the heat generated by the building for a greenhouse.

The architecture firm SERA in tandem with the developer Kenton Living Building is creating an excellent example of a living building in Portland, Oregon. While this project does not capture the waste heat generated by the UHI, it pushes the envelope of green building by limiting the amount of water and electricity each tenant consumes. Additionally, to garner enough usable water the team is lobbying Portland for a variance on the anti-gray water ordnance to harness the water from the faucets (10% of the total water supply).

Check it out the project for yourself at: http://www.djc.com/news/en/11189630.html

If energy is not a primary concern and a building has tons of roof space to spare and free falling water from the Catskill Mountains delivered to your apartment, as we do in NYC, it might become alive by harnessing all the resources of its roofs. Stay with me. The luxury high-rise readers of this blog are probably wondering a) if I am on drugs (I'm not) b) what roofs have to offer besides a view, place to smoke, and lounge chairs. Others might be aware of some sort of movement to put plants on roofs, but do not realize the larger context. Plainly put roofs have many resources.

Roofs are not only the homes of HVAC systems (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Cooling) or satellite dishes, but are homes to vast harvestable flat areas that offer space for energy, ecology and light, partially due to Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects.

The ho-ha what Island? An UHI is land that had been changed by urban development. The change causes an enormous amount of energy to be generated because of the material properties of cities, i.e. asphalt and concrete, lack of natural cooling systems, like vegetation, pollution, and, most relevant to this blog, large amount of tall buildings. The buildings have multiple reflective surfaces which bounce and absorb sunlight, block the wind, another natural cooling system, and generate waster hear from air conditioning, factories, industry and other function.

This excess heat, known as waster heat, alters the climate of the city. As we all know the temperature in NYC is much warmer in the night than in the outer lying suburbs, which are geographically quite close.

So how does this relate to green roofs? Well, this waste heat can be harnessed and used to create vegetated systems for roofs. A waterproof, filtered floor or soil is placed on the roof on which vegetation is planted, grown and consumed by the residents of the building. Therefore, the residents are trapping and using the waste heat to grow their own vegetables, grossly reducing their food carbon foot print. Pretty efficient, huh?