I JUST GOT THESE IMAGES of the Green Apple team hard at work from our talented designer Andrea. The job on Golfview Avenue was particularly challenging, seeing as the property is sloped, and there is only a two-foot-wide gap along the side of the house for transferring materials back and forth. Two months ago, I even made a short video of the crew using conveyor belts back to back in order to move hundreds of bricks. A couple of days later, the guys were hauling much larger rocks onto the property and positioning them precisely, no small feat. Notice that it takes four strong men working together to maneuver even one of these babies! Impressive… Let’s just say that I’m not too worried about our work order guarantee; I highly doubt that any of these gargantuan rocks are going to be moving anywhere, anytime soon! Good job, guys.
THE DOWN SIDE OF DOING a tour of green roofs in the autumn is that it can be damp and cold outside. Yesterday, it was both. But the upside is that the roofs that you visit aren’t all green: they’re green and yellow and orange and red, and every shade in between, because in northeastern North America the leaves cycle through the colour spectrum before they fall off the trees and bushes. What a sight to behold!
SINCE MONDAY NIGHT, we’ve been blogging and tweeting from the Cities Alive Conference, keeping you updated with news and views from this North American gathering of Green Roof Professionals. I hope you caught our first installment of photos, pics of the green roof on Toronto City Hall a couple of days ago. Since then, I’ve had the chance to meet some really interesting people from all over the globe doing similar work in the world. I suppose that some of them will be surfing over here to Green Apple Pie to check out some of the media that we’ve been making available from the conference. So here are some shots of the Robertson Building at 215 Spadina Avenue (we already uploaded photographs of the lovely living wall at the Robertson Building exactly a month ago in Green Details). Enjoy! And stay tuned — we will continue to post still pics of green features, and hopefully we’ll manage to upload a little video footage of some of the lectures, as well.
LAST WEEK AT A JOB on Spadina Road, the Green Apple crew installed concrete foundations in the front and back yards of the property. Cement isn’t exactly the most environmentally-friendly of materials, to say the least. To turn limestone into a powder that can be re-hardened into whatever shape your heart desires requires a massive amount of fossil fuels, and releases large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So we don’t take concrete lightly. Sure, it can be used in certain circumstances when other materials can’t cut it, but under the current building system, it is used far too often on jobs that simply do not require it. We decided that the Spadina job demanded it; we’re not purists, but we are trying to push the envelope, and to push ourselves, as well.
EXCLUSIVE! CHECK OUT THESE pipin’ hot pictures of the new Green Roof on top of the rotunda at Toronto City Hall. This week Toronto is hosting the Cities Alive Conference, a three day symposium for everyone involved in Green Infrastructure projects across the continent. Mayor Miller addressed the audience, and then the crowd was invited to tour the roof of the building. It’s not one hundred per cent completed yet, but I was still able to take some attractive photographs before it got too dark out. Don’t miss the thirty-second video clip of the unveiling that I quickly edited and uploaded to the net. So, how do you like Green Roofs now?
