Lufa Farms, the Montoni Group and KUBO built the Laval greenhouse. New structural building codes may be needed to ensure that future designs meet the engineering requirements and safety standards for new roof-top uses, but our future vision holds that these rooftop farming systems will evolve into highly efficient, highly automated, and low maintenance functional components of all flat-roof commercial architecture in the near future.Īlterrus’ VertiCrop Downtown Vancouver parking lot Greenhouse Current greenhouse designs are fairly conventional large scale growing spaces that you would typically see on the ground, but flat-roof greenhouses designs are moving into new territory with modern lightweight materials and self supporting space-frame shells. New UV stable, strong, transparent materials like ETFE films are making their appearance in low weight tensile structures, such as greenhouses, but we are searching for even better materials that will be the hall-mark of futuristic roof structure design.Ĭompanies such as Lufa Farms of Montreal, Canada, and Gotham Greens, of NYC, have shown that rooftop farming is feasible, and beneficial. The view from the air, flying over any urban center shows clearly the abundance of under-utilized, rooftop square footage. Flat-roof, low rise, wide sprawl structures are the mainstay architecture of commercial operations around the World. In America alone, over 3 billion square feet of warehousing space has been constructed from 2000 to 2012, and the totality of actual unused flat-roof space in North America is difficult to quantify. Think of a large flat-roof architectural design like a shopping mall, grocery store, manufacturing plant, or a warehouse. Rooftop greenhouse design is one of the best ways we can address that ecological footprint. That space is the actual ecological footprint of the buildings below, and until that space is properly integrated, we are not fully ameliorating the fundamental design flaw of much of today’s commercial flat-roof architecture. Urban spaces hold a great deal of potential when you look at the amount of unused rooftop space. Rooftop Greenhouses Flat Rooftop Greenhouse Design
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