A New Approach to a Green Roof: Artifical Rooftop Lake
Austrian art collective Gelitin has created an installation titled “Normally, Proceeding and Unrestricted With Without Title”. You can row around this four feet deep artificial rooftop lake in boats made from from reclaimed timber and junk-store furniture with oars assembled from old chair legs.
I can’t wait to see measurements from the heat island to see if temperatures around the building are well regulated. Cool idea. Gives the structural engineers some work.
Interesting idea…. must be heavy. I don’t like the idea of water seepage and leaking.
Austrian art collective Gelitin has created an installation titled Normally, Proceeding and Unrestricted With Without Title . You can row around this four feet deep artificial rooftop lake in boats made from from reclaimed timber and junk-store furniture with oars assembled from old chair legs.
Not a bad idea. Would be very heavy, though. And it would probably use a lot of water, depending on the local climate. For my own roof, I’d prefer to add a solar hot water heater and enough PV to power by house first, before I start with a rooftop lake.
If it does end up being able to regulate temperatures in surrounding buildings, all the better. But global temperatures would be better served by reflective white roofs than by rooftop lakes, especially as polar ice melts and darker-colored oceans accelerate warming.
The artificial rooftop lake is NOT a NEW idea.
When I was a child back in 1947, my father was a GI Bill Sophomore Mechanical Engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin, when he built his first house. For economy of heating and cooling, he designed into the house, to the best of my recollection, two main energy saving characteristics.
First, the house was rectangular, and the long axis was oriented east-west, with the long front face to the north having smaller horizontal windows high on the wall. The south facing exterior wall was mostly glass from floor to 6′-8″, with all rooms having a screened sliding glass door to the outside. At night all drapes, windows, and doors would be opened to allow the cooler breezes to cool the interior, and in the morning all would be closed to reduce heat gain during the day.
The wide roof over-hang was calculated to prevent any direct sunlight from touching the windows or slab during the SUMMER. On the other hand, in the WINTER when the sun angle was low, and the drapes left open during the day, the sunlight penetrated several feet into all of rooms on the south facing wall. The sunlight would then be absorbed into the tile floored slab and the furniture, releasing the stored heat for several hours into the night.
Second, the built-up tar and gravel roof was flat, with a two inch perimeter curbing (the facia flashing]designed to hold water. He said it served two purposes. 1) to reflect a great deal of the summer sunlight to reduce light absorbtion into the roof, thus reducing heat generation. 2)In the winter, he drained the roof, allowing it to absorb as much warmth giving sunlight as possible]. For supplemental heat when sunlight was inadequate, he also had a fireplace, and a couple of LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gas (Butane in those days)]space heaters.
Although we could not go “boating” on his rooftop lake, it was a lake none the less. As best I can recall, his energy efficient heating/cooling design was very effective.