Downtown Seattle’s Premiere Roof Garden

April 18th, 2008 — Green Roofs

Aerial View of WaMu Center Roof GardenHigh atop the Washington Mutual Center’s 17th floor lies a roof garden with awesome views of Seattle and Elliot Bay. The green roof serves as a vital social space and is the civic heart of the bank’s downtown campus.

Rather than meet the City of Seattle’s minimum open space requirements, the garden’s usable area was enlarged threefold to provide decks and pathways that showcase views across Elliott Bay while integrating elements that tell a story about the bank, its local origins, and the community it serves.

The roof won a ASLA 2007 Professional Jury Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).

“The balance of textures is really remarkable–you lose sight of the fact that it’s on a roof. We love the reflective surface and elegant plant materials. The screen is a stroke of genius.”

Roof Garden Site PlanAn understated feature of the roof garden is how it combines usable public space for human enjoyment with many broader ecological green roof attributes, including urban heat island effect reduction, storm water retention, and native and drought-tolerant planting. This project demonstrates that sustainable landscape roof design need not be limited to extensive low-maintenance green roofs, but that it can also be practical, social, symbolic, and contemporary.

Proven Green Roof Value

Elsewhere, the ASLA wanted to know not only how much water a roof sheds but they also wanted to verify that a green roof actually worked to achieve its purposes. So, they installed one on their building in Washington, DC and monitored it for one year from July of 2006 to May of 2007.

Their green roof prevented 27,500 gallons of water from entering the Washington DCs storm drain system. As an added bonus, during summer the roof lowered air temperature at the top of the building by as much as 32 degrees when compared to a nearby tarred roof. Even in the winter the roof reduced energy costs by 10 percent through its insulative effects and summertime savings hit two to three percent.

WaMu Roof Garden Photo Pool

Over on Flickr, a photo pool of the WaMu Center Green Roof from a stunning eye-level vantage point. Breath taking photography.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Green Roofs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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