Green Roofs

When done correctly, green roofs provide valuable benefits to buildings and residents. Green roofs create a connection to nature for its visitors and increasing local biodiversity while reducing the heat island effect in summer, minimizing heat loss in winter, and mitigaging stormwater runoff year-round.

Working with urban landscape designers to retrofit dozens of occupied residential buildings in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, TriBeCa and in Brooklyn, the firm has participated in the creation of bespoke penthouse gardens and large building roof-decks.

Our Green Roof design practice combines five (5) practice areas:

     1) Mechanical Engineering: Re-locating or concealing mechanical equipment and ventilation lines to create green roof space in occupied buildings. Where useful, we often find opportunities to include solar thermal hot water systems into the design.

     2) Structural Engineering: Re-designing an existing roof structure and a parapet wall system requires intimate knowledge of NYC timber, masonry and reinforced concrete structures. Our teams specialize in re-purposing real estate for new uses and have been consulting the NYC design communities for decades on structural retrofits.

     3) Thermodynamics Research: Cooper Union. Our most memorable green roofs were part of a research study where we used waste heat to warm the soil of roof gardens in snow-covered Iceland- and were able to grow tomatoes and bananas outdoors while surrounded by snow-covered fields.

     4) Zoning & Agency compliance: Our ability to navigate NYC code to most intelligently integrate green roofs and appurtenances while keeping atop Zoning, NYC Buildings and Landmarks.

     5) High-Performance Envelope Design:  Simply put, come see the highest-performance envelope we are aware of in existence at our CEO Raj Parikh’s personal home. And seriously… ask your second favorite architect or engineer to see THEIR personal home’s wall assemblies (and if they say ‘no’, ask why not)

Put together, we can’t help but innovate.  See published paper at American Society of Mechanical Engineers:   http://proceedings.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=2205035

Roof systems we have designed in private practice include:

• Fully vegetative

• Vegetative with pathways, planters and pergolas

• Private penthouse gardens in multifamily buildings

• Private roof gardens for single-family town-homes

• Heated green roofs

As New Yorkers seek solutions to increase property value while doing everything they can to fight global warming – green roofs are the natural investment.

A sample of our roof and private Penthouse design work is listed below: