Highrise, skyrise, skyscape

Green is the “in” thing nowadays. The inconvenient truth is that we need to turn our drab and gray cities into green and verdant settings if we are to help counter climate change. Urban greenery has been the province of parks and open spaces in cities of the past (including Manila), but today’s dense and complex cities are looking at other dimensions to greenery.

Parks, street trees, and civic spaces like plazas are ground-based urban elements. More progressive cities and practitioners of forward-looking architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture are looking to expand a city’s greening capacity by bringing it to another level — up.

Vertical greening and green roofs are popping up all over major metropolises in the world. Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore now host buildings with green on their walls, roofs, and anywhere else they can get plants to take root.

The roots of this elevated greening paradigm reach back over a thousand years with the iconic example of the hanging gardens of Babylon.

Even Signapore’s public housing complexes have green roofs and gardens.

The Romans also built roof gardens as their cities grew to several hundred thousands in population. But all pre-modern greening was limited to palaces and a few key buildings because of the limitations of technology and cost.

Today, however, building techniques and landscape technology have improved so that gardens can be set up and sustained anywhere you can hoist them up to. In Singapore, they just opened the Marina Sands, a gaming and hotel complex made up of three 56-story towers with a 340 plus-meter-long skypark complete with full-grown trees (lifted up by crane) and a 150-meter-long infinity-edge pool.

Singapore, in fact, is on the cutting edge of this vertical greening movement. Almost all new construction in the city-state involves high-rise greenery, vertical green, and green roofs. Because of the rapidity of this change in paradigms of design and construction, Singapore is hosting the International Skyrise Greenery Conference 2010.

This important conference has the main theme of “Surfaces of Creativity: Space of Delight,” and is organized by the National Parks Board (NParks) of the Singapore government, the Center for Urban Greenery and Ecology (CUGE), and the International Green Roof Association. The organizers mean for the conference to “be a platform where international urban greenery experts from a broad range of design disciplines and professions — city planners, urban designers, landscape architects, and interior designers, along with builders, policy makers, and the academe will have the opportunity to discuss current trends and future directions for this greenest and fastest-growing of sectors.”

The organizers have invited acclaimed experts and innovators in green architecture, design, and construction. These included Dr. Ken Yeang (a recent Manila visitor) who espouses environmental and ecologically sensitive architecture and planning; Patrick Blanc, French innovator of vertical gardens and green walls; and Emili Ambasz, green and iconoclast architect.

The venue of the conference will be the Singapore National Library, itself now an icon of green architecture and design. It has several sky gardens, vertical green walls and a context on the ground woven in between open spaces and gardens. The topics for discussion will range from technical presentations on green roof design, construction, and maintenance to the benefits of skyrise greenery (which include thermal and energy conservation, noise pollution mitigation, air quality improvement, etc.); and the integration of skyrise greenery with

The Singapore School of the Arts is green on all sides, all the way to the top.

sustainable eco-processes and biodiversity enhancement. The International Green Roof Association will also showcase the most current green technology related to green roof, vertical greenery, and overall green design.

In the Philippines, Makati holds the record for having the most green roofs and skyrise gardens. Its streetscapes and parks are the envy of other districts. New projects in the pipelines of local developers for the country’s premier business district are getting greener by the day and time will come when green roofs and skyparks will be a reality here, too.

Meanwhile, it would be instructive for local public and private officials from other cities in the country to visit modern tropical cities like Singapore to see how to become greener. The rise of our cities depends not just on the height of its buildings but also on the levels of environmental correctness and sustainability that can be achieved.

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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com. For more information on the Skyrise Greenery Conference 2010 log on to http://www.skyrisegreeneryconference.com.