Five Borough Building On Randall’s Island Experiments With 7000 Sq Ft Green Roof
August 14th, 2008 by Ethan
This tip comes to us from Natasha of Ft. Green Artisan Market fame:
The current green roof systems planted atop the Five Borough Administrative Building now include nearly 7,000 square feet of vegetation. Unlike most traditional green roofs, the one on Randall’s Island is made up of 12 distinct systems, each one differing from the next in growing medium, plant type, or installation model. Thus, the Administration Building roof serves as an experimental station in which the performance of many different systems can be monitored and compared. The lessons learned from these comparisons can be applied to future installations around the city.
Technical Services’ roof at Five Borough is truly at the forefront of green roof technology with some of the most innovative systems available. One system, called Green Paks, consists of 195 woven polyethylene bags pre-filled with a mineral based growing medium that consists largely of heat-treated shale. The bags were placed side-by-side atop a rolled out root barrier and drainage mat layer. Then slits were cut into the black knit surface and sedum plugs were inserted into the growing medium. Another modular system is made up of 400 aluminum trays that cover 1,600 square feet of rooftop with plants. It offers flexibility in that each 2’ x 2’ tray can be removed, if necessary, to provide access to the roof below. The most recently installed system at Five Borough is made from 100 biodegradable planting trays that will soon decay, contributing organic material to the growing medium, and ultimately providing a monolithic system.
The green roof atop the Randall’s Island Administrative Building serves many ecological purposes, including storm water retention, mitigating the urban heat island effect (the absorption of heat by built structures that make cities 2 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding suburbs or countryside), and energy conservation, to name a few.
Read the full article The Roofs At Parks Are Going Green.
More at NYC Park Department’s blog The Daily Plant.
UPDATE:
While we’re on the subject of Green Roofs, there is a really good overview of NYC’s green roofs up at the Gotham Gazette. They also throw in a mention to GBK and have an embedded video from Business Week on green roofs in NYC. Check it out.
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