The Stevenson Green Roof Project: A Living Laboratory

THE STEVENSON
GREEN ROOF

A Living Laboratory

Consortium Partners

Bronx Guild High School School for Community Research and Learning Federation of American Scientists The Gaia Institute Gateway for Environmental Research and Technology Gilbane Building Company Millennium Art Academy New Visions for Public Schools Pablo Neruda Academy for Architecture and World Studies Pittsburgh Corning Rafael Viñoly Architects PC Salvadori Center Stevenson High School Soundview Health Clinic Tremco Roofing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

The Stevenson Green Roof Consortium, after considering school and community needs, is working to bring a state-of-the-art green roof to the students and teachers at the Stevenson Campus. Unlike other green roofs, this one is designed as a suite of outdoor classrooms where teachers and students can study the wonders of biology together first-hand. And not only biology: working with teachers at several of the schools, we are developing curricular units to support work in other sciences, technology, and mathematics.

The roof will be fully instrumented to measure key variables including water retention, heat transmission, and ambient temperature: in fact, at over 20,000 square feet we believe the Stevenson Green Roof will be the largest fully instrumented green roof in the United States. All of this is made possible by highly innovative design and materials that will greatly simplify installation while reducing the weight of the green roof to a bare minimum and simultaneously supporting the growth of a broad range of native plants. We are offering these technological innovations to the School Construction Authority and the Department of Education as a model for greening the city's inventory of aging school buildings while enhancing the educational opportunities they offer.

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Please address any questions/comments to The Salvadori Center at greenroof@salvadori.org

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This website is sponsored by the Salvadori Center: Our founder, Mario Salvadori, a world-renowned structural engineer, believed that the built environment held all the knowledge that a person needed to be an intelligent and active member of the community. What teachers need to make this knowledge available to their students are tools with which they can "unpack" the knowledge embedded in the built environment.

The Salvadori Center gives these tools to teachers and students through a pedagogy grounded in what it calls "project-based, hands-on/minds-on activities" that employ the principles of architecture, engineering, and the design process. Through this method, teachers and their students can unlock the math, science, art, and humanities embodied in the structures and systems that surround them.

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