Toronto
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.
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?
ON SOME LEVEL, THERE’S nothing really revolutionary about green walls. Any city worth its salt has a smattering of old architecture in its downtown core with leafy green vines climbing up its Corinthian facade. We call these buildings part of our collective heritage, and we protect them from market forces, making sure they stay where they are, despite the real estate race going on around them. And the older the better! In the most exaggerated examples, we call them wonders of the world and make pilgrimages to these places of beauty, as in the Angkor Temples of Cambodia, pictured below. There’s something primal about vines intertwining that touches an emotional chord for most humans — probably something to do with our simian ancestry. But climbing vines are just one vertical possiiblity — there’s no reason to stop there, at the monocultural option.
EVERYONE ECO is excited about the recent May 26 Toronto City Council 36-2 decision to mandate the allocation of at least some percentage of the roof space of all newly constructed buildings to topsoil and plant life, and the inclusion of a clause that financially penalizes developers that don’t comply with the code. There’s no need to let the fact that this law is the first of its kind in North America go to our heads — Chicago has over 600 green rooftops, and in Germany, they’ve been building green roofs for nearly 40 years now! Plus, people that profit from real estate development have harshly opposed the bylaw since it means diminished short-term profits for themselves, and have succeeded in watering down the law significantly. But hey, some green roofs are better than no green roofs, right?
