Sustainable Building & Green/Brown Roof

Sustainable Building & Green/Brown Roof

Green Roofs explained - How CAT use them
(Follow the link above for a short video on Green Roofs)

Looking at green roof systems you have many things to consider, one there will be a maintenance up keep that will need to be done on a regular basis. There also will be a load applied to the school structure as a green roof will be relatively heavy, the roofing members will need to be reinforced if this was the case. 

Thirdly you will need to have some sort of root protection barrier as the roots for the plants may interrupt the materials of the roof, a membrane will contain the root to one area. Also with this it is a good way of drainage as the leaves are porous and this filtrates the water but also feeds the bed. 

Along with this you can have many types of plants that can live up on top of the roof, one being sedum, but what we can do for the school project is maybe do a brown roof as this takes earth from the land that is already there and puts it in to use on our project.

                                                    Green Roof, Image taken by Jaspal lehil

Sustainable building

Straw bale insulation was commonly used around CAT with a complete construction of around 450mm thick wall (known as Locking in carbon). Now this is relatively cheap at this moment in time you can only build up to two stories high with this. So this is all good and well for small scale projects but try and put a greater load on this material it will just result in crumbling and falling down.

Recycled glass, incorporating this in any project will increase the amount of light you will bring in to a room or anywhere for that matter. By increasing the glazing you will have large amounts of light which will also control the inside temperature of a space but this has to be layered with other materials that retain an equal or greater thermal property. The wall that was explained to us was made up from 300mm – 350mm depending on the material used.

Earth Blocks (Rammed earth), CAT has used this in most of their buildings from there shop to their lecture room as you can see below. Now CAT have created a earth wall by compressing it and making it a very dense material which holds energy and heat extremely well, this also releases the energy and heat in to the atmosphere throughout the day.

Pros:

- Ultimate Renewable Material               - Compressed Earth Blocks, made from Natural Materials

- Inexpensive Building Material             - Compressed Earth Blocks Can be Made Locally

- Less Waste and Long Life
                                                    Rammed wall at CAT

                          On the left in the pic there is a Rammed Earth wall, taken by Jaspal lehil           

Now looking at the school project I can incorporate green roof system were appropriate as we would like this to be in the higher categories of BREEM. I believe you may be able to incorporate any of the following, Sedum Roof (Green Roof), Earth walls, Pv panels (Facing South) and possibly passive solar.