August 29th, 2011
It comes to me whenever I am in Vancouver: an urge to watch the sunset. Pulled by memories of blue Pacific waters buffeting a tangerine sky, I make my way to English Bay Beach, where I find a seat on one of the large pieces of driftwood that have been arranged on the sand, and join hundreds of others in the nightly spectacle.
Last month, though, on my final day in Canada, I was taken to watch the sunset from the roof of the new Vancouver Convention Centre, a sharply geometric structure that rises from a broad concrete plaza next to Coal Harbour. As I climbed the metal staircase up to the roof, I was sceptical that it would be anything close to the English Bay experience. When we arrived, I was surprised. Built at a slight angle, covered in wild grass, with a gravel path cutting diagonally across it, the roof feels like a country meadow that has somehow found itself three stories above ground. Watching the sun set from there, over the water of Coal Harbour and the tall fir trees of Stanley Park, was a surprisingly bucolic experience.
On the surface, that sounds reminiscent to other recent experiments in aerial urban greenery, like New York’s wildly popular High Line. But the convention centre’s roof has more local roots. In many ways, it is the latest product of a style of urbanism born in 1978, when Arthur Erickson designed Robson Square, a large civic centre in downtown Vancouver that combined provincial law courts, a municipal art gallery, government offices and a series of public spaces.
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June 15th, 2011
Perhaps not quite what you’d expect.
January 26th, 2010
Hong Kong’s public housing estates are going green. In recent years, the Housing Authority has been using its estates as laboratories for the latest green technologies, a move that could help reduce Hong Kong’s air pollution and encourage more sustainable building practices.
Some of the authority’s latest efforts can be seen in Yau Lai Estate, a newly-built housing estate in Yau Tong that opened last year. Standing near the estate’s main entrance are three green walls covered in a mix of grass and climbing plants. While the walls also serve a decorative purpose — the arrangement of red and green plants on one is based on a drawing of a fish made by Yau Tong schoolchildren — a study completed last November found that the greenery cooled temperatures on the walls’ exterior surface by up to 16 degrees. Temperatures on their interior surface dropped by 1.5 to 3.5 degrees.
If the green walls are adopted on a widespread basis, they could significantly reduce housing estates’ energy consumption by cutting air-conditioning costs, said the Housing Authority’s chief architect, Clifford Cheng Chiu-yeung. They would also help cool the outside ambient temperatures. That in turn would reduce Hong Kong’s urban heat island effect, which has been making summer weather even hotter and more unstable than normal.
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December 28th, 2009
Container gardening is the ultimate form of urban greening: space-efficient, low-maintenance and productive. People in Hong Kong have been doing it for generations.
Last summer, on a sunny but oppressively hot day, I found myself on the roof of a 1960s-era highrise apartment building in Kwun Tong. Among the lines of billowing laundry were several clusters of potted plants maintained by the building’s residents. Though most were decorative plants, there were some fruits being grown, including kumquats and tomatoes. Anyone interested in growing their own herbs or vegetables could have easily done so.
Unfortunately, informal rooftop gardens like this are set to become a rarity. The Kwun Tong building on which these photos were taken will be demolished next year for a massive redevelopment project. Newer buildings tend to have smaller roof areas and no room for plants. My building has just two flats per floor, for example, which makes for a very small roof, most of which taken up by stairwell entrances and an elevator machine room. Even if I tried to start a container garden up there, it’d probably be cleared away by the building management.
The government is pushing developers to include green features in new developments. The public housing authority, whose buildings house more than a third of Hong Kong’s population, is experimenting with green roofs, vertical greening and community gardens. But there’s something to be said for giving people a bit of empty space and letting them do what they want with it.
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November 26th, 2006
Image rendue du Plateau aux toitures vertes
Les toits plats font partie de la culture de construction à Montréal et dans bien d’autres villes du Québec. Au lieu de maintenir des déserts de goudron et de gravier sur nos toits, nous pouvons y faire pousser des champs, des potagers et des jardins. Au-delà des avantages de climatisation naturelle, de gestion des eaux de pluie et de prolongation de la vie du toit, les toitures végétales sont simplement belles.
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