Crocodile Dundee green roof

I am not sure how many people remember the scene from the movie.  The laconic Australian country bumpkin is held up by a scared kid wielding a stiletto on the streets of New York. He smiles at the kid, reaches calmly behind him and pulls out the biggest Bowie knife I've ever seen, and says "That's not a knife, this is."

Well, this might be the Crocodile Dundee green roof.  Namba Parks, a large retail and office complex outside Osaka, Japan, was built in the footprint of the old Osaka baseball stadium.  Completed in 2003 by the Jerde Partnership, the mall has an eight level rooftop garden that spans several city blocks and includes groves of tree groves, artfully arranged rocks, cliffs and canyons, lawns, streams, waterfalls, ponds and vegetable gardens the produce of which is sold from barrow stalls.

I have a general, though not particularly expert interest in reintroducing greenery into the city, including urban forestry and all forms of green roofs and green walls. And because I'm always looking for meaningful ways to change the balance between the  urban heat island enhancing hectares of asphalt and concrete on the one hand, and greenery of different scales on the other, I tinge my general enthusiasm with a habit of looking at just how much green any such project really introduces into the concrete canyons. I hasten to add that this might seem like an annoying negativity, but it is definitely not meant to be.

So, for instance, I find it instructive to compare the art fully angled photograph headlining this post, with an aerial photograph of the development.  It becomes immediately obvious, that even within the boundaries of the site the actual greenery represents a considerably lower proportion of the surfaces than it would first appear.

If we take it as a proportion of the urban fabric when we extend what might be called the 'system boundaries', the introduced greenery is seen to be even smaller.  Superficially, this might be discouraging.  The real lesson of a project like this is potentially much more complex.  Looking at just the proportion of the area of the city represented by a new fragment of green roof top is a good measure of something – perhaps to do with the overall albedo. But it is a poor measure of just about everything else, including what is the experience of the urban fabric at ground level. 

And this is where the excitement of this project lies for me.  If it is able to give people the impression of an experience dominated by forest scale greenery, while leading them past the offerings of a seven storey shopping mall, it is a triumph of design.

The artful abstraction of the natural invites a suspension of disbelief, playing on our associations.  This kind of evocative, but unashamedly artificial materiality was the hallmark of the work of the great landscape architect Laurence Halprin, probably at its most striking at Freeway Park, Seattle.  But those modernist landscapes are now under threat, especially where water features incurred onerous expense to run and maintain. 

At Namba Parks, the sheer abundance of the plant material distinguishes it from those more brutalist historic precedents, and aligns the project much more with contemporary eaxamples like the Highline in NY.  And importantly, like WOHA's Regency Hotel in Singapore, here the artificial landscape is private property, hopefully so integral to the branding of the enterprize that money spent on its maintenance is more assured.

There should be more of it!!

Read more: Japan's Namba Parks Has an 8-Level Roof Garden with Waterfalls | Inhabitat 

Authentic forms? Give me a break.

When I opened up the post on Dezeen, saw this thatched Town Hall in Midden-Delfland by Dutch architects  Inbo, and read the post description, I was prepared to get my unreconstructed modernist knickers in a knot.  For those of you unfamiliar with Australian slang, that means I was about to get indignantly upset, because the idea of putting thatch on these large sheds offended my mid-20th Century principles of 'honesty' of structure, and 'authenticity' of forms and materials.

Then I stopped, looked a bit more carefully, thought a bit harder, and realised that while I may not fall in love, I may have come across a building I could definitely respect.  First, a description edited from the Dezeen post:

The town hall comprises a row of five alternating volumes designed to match the forms of the surrounding hills.  Inspired by the farmhouses typical in the region, the building has a thatched roof folding over all five of its huge curved profiles.  But unlike a traditional thatched roof, which could pose a significant fire hazard, metre-long strands of reed are wrapped tightly around a system of prefabricated panels. "It looks like the reed is all over the building from beginning to end, but that's not actually the case," explained architect Arnold Homan.

You can see that at this point, I would have been getting a bit skeptical.  Let's face it, the large, relatively flat roof form with the box gutter, contrasting with the idea of thatch as I understood it, was what first offended me.  But the next bit of information is what grabbed my attention:

"The thatching clads all surfaces of the roof that are visible at ground level, while the uppermost sections are covered with a mixture of sedum and photovoltaic solar panels."

AHA! A vegetated roof for stormwater management, improved insulation values, summer microclimate with plants doing the shading and cooling by transpiration, vast area for unobstructed photovoltaics?  OK, what else?

 "Windows line the north and south facades of each block to bring natural light through every room in the building. More solar panels are mounted around the glazing and double-up as solar shades.

Honestly, they aren't doing badly, but they could do so much better.  It's the way the architects have broken up the big shed - so good for adjusting the perceived scale - that also creates the vertical glazing at each break, which brings the daylight deep into the space.

Now that I was looking, of course I was seeing the payoff for the simple design strategy of taking a big shed, and incrementally tweaking it to produce a building which effortlessly accommodates a number of sustainable strategies.  For instance the nested 'capsules' for conference areas and other office functions, reducing and segregating the volumes of conditioned space.  The additive elements of airlocks effortlessly inserted into glazing lines.  Other sustainability measures are less obvious, even hidden. Natural underground wells are utilised for heat and cold storage, contributing to a high energy efficiency score.  Paving slabs for the floor of the major hall, wooden fittings and furnishings built from locally sourced timber.

I gave up being wedded to structural determinism of form twenty years ago, when an engineer colleague pointed out to me that the role of structure was to hold up whatever shape space you need, and who cares whether the structure is 'expressed' or hidden?  It's sobering to think that even after that post-structuralist (pun intended) catharsis, I still retained a loyalty to a much more tenuous concept of formal 'honesty'.  This building reminds me that there are other ways of producing good buildings.  Probably better buildings. 

Read the Dezeen article here.