- Good afternoon and welcome to the fall '21 architecture for health visiting lecture series.

I'm very excited for today's presentation by Bruce Dvorak and introduction by Chanam Lee and Jay Maddock.

Today's topic is emphatic design integrated and collaborative design for healthy people and environments.

I'd like to introduce Dr. Chanam Lee.

Dr. Chanam Lee is a professor of landscape architecture and urban planning and the founder director of design research for active living at Texas A&M university.

Dr. Lee's research focuses on linking the built environment with public health outcomes, her expertise is in active living research and transdisciplinary area of research that deals primarily with environmental policy approaches towards promoting physical health.

So, Dr. Lee.

- Thank you for the introduction.

I'm here to share just a few words about landscape architecture for health.

So place matters in health.

Architects and landscape architects are close partners and collaborators in designing such places.

So these places are where we live, work, play, and learn.

These include indoor and outdoor places, including buildings, fields and parks that are part of important health infrastructure.

Landscape architecture has a long history and tradition in designing outdoor environmental places, environments for health.

Dating back to the mid-19th century, Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of the New York central park, already talked about the health and ecological benefits of parks and urban open spaces.

The strong root of landscape architecture in public health has become a bit weaker over the past century or so.

However, we're witnessing the strong reconnection efforts to retie landscape architecture with public health roots.

So today's lecture by my dear colleague, Bruce Dvorak, from landscape architecture, will illustrate an example of such efforts, creating healthy places through collaborative approaches.

I'd like to first introduce you to another dear colleague, Dr. Jay Maddock from school of public health.

He is one of the leading scholars in physical activity research.

His work really recognized the importance of contextual factors and also the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration.

So Dr. Maddock is currently a professor in the department of environmental and occupational health at the school of public health.

And he was the former Dean of the school.

He is co-director of the center for health and nature, and currently serves on the Brazos County board of health as well.

Welcome.

- Well, we have a wonderful speaker today.

I am super excited to hear his talk and I'm sure you will be, too.

Bruce Dvorak joined Texas A&M back in 2007.

He's an associate professor in the department of landscape architecture and urban planning.

He teaches sustainable site design, planning and construction.

In private practice, Bruce was a designer and project manager for a number of recognized green roofs in the United States, including the Chicago city hall green roof pilot project.

Bruce is a member of the green roofs for healthy cities research committee and is an editorial member of the journal of living architecture.

In 2009, professor Dvorak established an interdisciplinary green roof research group here at Texas A&M.

He's published extensively on green roofs and conducts research on green roofs and living walls.

Bruce's recent publication, "Ecoregional Green Roofs: Theory and Application in the Western USA and Canada" explores the concepts of green roofs for North American cities.

The book has received an honor for research from the American society of landscape architects.

Please join me in welcoming Bruce.

(everyone clapping) - Well, thank you, Jay, Chanam, and George, everyone with this health centers group for inviting me to talk today.

I've put together a presentation to address what I think are some critical issues with human culture and the environments, the physical environments that we design.

And this title Empathetic Design actually comes from an interdisciplinary charrette, design charrette that the architect and landscape architect led through the design of a project, which I'll go through in a few minutes.

So I want to share some of that information with you.

So the learning objectives for today for this talk includes several concepts.

First, just to demonstrate what interdisciplinary design is, as is discussed in my book, "Ecoregional Green Roofs", to design or to demonstrate how considering the total environment at the beginning of a project opens up many possibilities through an integrated design process.

And sometimes people have good intentions, but if everyone is not around the table at the beginning, you know, some important concepts and possibilities are left out.

I also want to talk about biophilic design and how green roofs can play an important role in that.

And I'll discuss what biophilia is a little bit kind of, you know, a little background.

But before we go any further, just in case some of you are not familiar with the concept of green roofs, I want you to just give a few words on what they are.

For most people, probably if you see vegetation growing on a roof, you're like, pull those things off, you don't want plants growing on a roof, right, on a conventional roof.

It's a sign that maybe there's something wrong.

However, about a hundred years ago, the early 1900s, a new roofing and waterproofing method was designed in central Europe where they just laid sand on top of a roof to prevent fires from spreading to urban areas.

And spontaneous vegetation started popping up on these routes and a botanist one day noticed the vegetation, started studying it.

And through his research with students, they determined that the ecosystem that was established on these spontaneous routes was actually performing what would become to know as ecosystem services.

Okay, the green roofs absorb storm water, they keep the rooftop cool, there's wildlife visiting the roof.

And it also protects the membrane, the waterproofing system from solarization.

So it can do a lot of different kinds of things.

And here's an image from my book of a grass-based kind of green roof.

So the data that I collected for this book project and the case studies I'll present today came from my sabbatical, my faculty development leave in 2018.

So with my wife and two kids in tow, we left Bryan-College station in a trailer and we didn't come back for five months.

We're on the road.

In between that time, these arrows show the routes, the general route that we took across the Western US.

I visited over 140 green roofs, 53 natural sites, including 15 national parks, some with green roofs.

And then 2019 and 2020, I wrote most of the book with my co-authors.

All right, so why did I write this book?

Well, because the green roofs provide essential ecosystem services that can mitigate ecological imbalances that are caused by urbanization.

So what does that mean?

Rooftops can contribute to accelerated rainfall.

You know, a flash flooding, the water from the roof goes not into the ground but it goes into a storm sewer system.

So those plants delay stormwater runoff.

They can conserve energy in buildings, reduce urban heat islands, so they keep rooftops cool.

They provide biophilic benefits for people that are looking out onto those roofs and they can also reduce building life-cycle costs.

So I'll go through what that can look like for a building owner in the case study.

So there were really no studies of many of these roofs that were out there.

So I wanted to provide some examples of what biophilic design is and explain, you know, what is possible through the design interventions.

If you are familiar with green roofs, you're probably familiar with seeing sedums.

Sedums are low growing, drought tolerant plants.

Many of the sedums that are grown on green roofs in North America are coming from Europe, China, the middle east.

So they really don't have a connection with the American landscapes.

However, some of the integrated designs that are being used on hospitals, they're using native plants, native vegetation.

So to me as a landscape architect, I think it was really important to highlight and feature the good work that people are doing to demonstrate how native plants can be used.

So until the publishing of this book, really a lot of this, I'll just say design excellence, was out there but at this, really unpublished, at that point in time.

So the purpose of the book was to make known the various design interventions.

You know, what can we learn from visiting these sites, talking with people and sharing what they've learned.

So the methods you use to collect the information included onsite visits, interviews with the designers, the building owners, the people who maintain the green roofs and also written correspondence.

So there are many, someplace, some of these projects have websites that they share information on what was there.

So I was able to glean information from there.

As well as peer reviewed publications written about some of these projects.

All right, so that's kind of the background with the book and you know why I did what I did here.

I think a primary purpose of each chapter of case studies is to connect people, connect the culture with the native landscape of the place.

So in this case, the two case studies I'm going to share with you today are from chapter seven and these are in California.

And what you're looking at here is an image of the native San Francisco landscape prior to the development of San Francisco.

So this painting by Theodore Wores was done in 1912.

So today, these hills are covered with streets and buildings, but if somebody wants to know, well, what is the native landscape?

Here's a good example of what that California kind of Mediterranean climates looks like with the vegetation.

Okay, I want to say a few words about integrated design, what the integrated design process is and what the process that people used on some of the projects here.

It's essentially, it's driven by a developer that really understands the value of integrated design.

And I underlined day one here because these projects, and I'm going to show you, they all began with the developer inviting people to the table before any drawings are made, any conceptualization of the project.

And so this developer has quite an extensive background then to understand the benefits of what's going on and all these different shapes, they represent, you know, different viewpoints to the design process.

So the first project I'm going to go through is a hospital.

So in this case, the integrated design process included the architect, landscape architect, engineers, the developer, they invited representatives of doctors, nurses to the table, maintenance staff, people who would maintain the building inside and out, and there may be others there.

And if you, when you, when I go through the project, you'll see, wow, there's, you know, quite a bit that they invested in this project.

So the developer had to have kind of an understanding of how the whole process worked.

So this first little example is what can happen if an integrated design process is not engaged from the beginning.

This project site I visited, which is still a success, but there were some issues with translating what the concept was into reality.

So they had this idea of a hanging gardens of Babylon kind of structure building in Phoenix.

And they wanted to do it with vegetative roof decks, those kinds of things.

Well, the building was primarily designed and I think it was in under construction when the landscape architect was brought into the project and they learned that they could use six inches depth of substrate on the project.

And that really kind of set the project back because most of the plants that people were envisioning to be used, they needed at least 12, if not 18 inches depth in certain places.

So what they had to do was innovate.

They had to put a shallow substrate in some areas and then mound up the substrate and other areas to get a larger depth.

So the project still, you know, was pulled off and you see plants as you walk around, but the process could have benefited greatly from everyone being around the table, kind of communicating what the concept is right from the beginning.

All right, so this brings us to the first case study.

It's the Palomar medical center and this is an Escondido, California.

Escondido lies right between Los Angeles and San Diego.

So it's in that middle spot.

And the developer in this case had a pretty good understanding of what the potential was for an integrated design process.

And I'm going to give a little background on, you know, why would a developer invest this much money in planting gardens all around this property, on top of the buildings, inside the buildings.

I think it's you've got to step back and have a kind of a view of, you know, what do people need?

Where does our culture and humanity come from?

This graph is plotting a human population with time and it's showing essentially the dawn of the agricultural revolution.

So you can see a third less than a billion people on the earth at that time, but what was the human relationship with nature?

It was pretty intimate, right?

We got all of our food from nature, medicine through plants.

People had a 24/7 contact with nature for the most part.

As civilization started building, you know, that changed some but for hundreds of thousands of years what was normal for humans was contact with nature, very frequent contact with nature, right.

During the industrial revolution, still not a billion people on the planet, but the relationship, our relationship, western society it really changed with nature and the economy drove a lot of decision-making.

Instead of people having high contact with nature, we started spending time indoors in factories, inside buildings, kind of losing that connection with nature.

So today, you know, we're actually beyond I think 7 billion people on the planet, exponential growth.

So that means a lot of people are being influenced by the physical environments that we design because most of the population on earth today is essentially urban in some sense or ex-urban.

But you see here buildings with plants on roofs and plants on the ground.

That's all part of the sustainable development and it's really connecting back with our roots, connecting back with nature in some way.

And so that's where this concept of biophilia comes in.

We have an innate connection.

We need to be in contact with nature to be healthy and show a few examples of that with research.

I found this image of New York city right around the early 1900s.

So if you know what was happening in the culture at that time, people were living in dense cities in New York anyway, Dr. Chanam Lee mentioned central park.

So some people were recognizing, this is not good, right, people need contact with nature.

You see horse buggies here intermixing, automobiles would be coming in few years later.

There's no air conditioning, so people are in buildings, it's smelly, not healthy environments and children are working in factories, in schools.

So there's kind of a loss of a connection with nature.

So this quote by architect Phillip Bess, he says that about 2,400 years ago, Aristotle, with the rise of the Western ideals, said that the city is for the sake of the good life.

And that idea prevailed through most of Western culture until the environmental consequences of the industrial revolution called into question the goodness of the traditional urban life.

So if you think of, well, what's the good life and you're living here in the city like this, it kind of helps explain how the suburbs came about.

People wanted out of this environment They needed to connect with nature again.

Well, Philip Bess goes on to say that urban history ever since from the England's early 19th century hygiene laws to the mid 20th century modernism and architecture and planning to today's new urbanism, it is all consisted of efforts to ameliorate the consequences of the industrial city.

Yeah, that's a mouthful.

So there's a lot happening though, right?

We've been kind of chasing, trying to bring, find ways to bring nature and contact with nature back into the city life because all of our modern cities are based on the industrial concepts of the industrial revolution and industrial cities.

So we're trying to figure out ways to move forward.

Think I need to recognize the value of research, peer reviewed research.

Dr. Roger Ulrich did some research back in the eighties, kind of understanding this context, I mean, he knew the human psyche when, you know, people need contact with nature.

So he did this study on recovery times, people in hospitals, the folks that had a view to nature, to green, to trees, they recovered quicker than people who didn't, people who were looking at a blank wall or had no contact with nature, their healing time suffered.

It took longer to recover from that.

So from his study, many people have expanded upon that and explored it from different avenues.

This is one study I came across where people set up an experimental situation.

Some of the participants were in a room, says non biophilic, that means they're in a room like this, no windows, no green of any kind, no connection to the outside.

Other people had a room like this, but there was some sort of green environment of plants, a little living wall or some green element inside that room.

Other people had an outdoor view.

So it had a window, natural daylight, they could see out the window.

And then other people had a combination of these ideas.

(clears throat) So what happened is that they intervened with a stressor, some kind of a stressor, it was an image of some kind.

You can see on the left, the skin conductance level, some measure of anxiety and stress, all those things.

The people with an outdoor view, they started with the lowest level of stress.

Everyone became stressed through that seven minute period.

And then when it ended, you see there's a recovery time.

Well, the people who had a view to the outdoors, they ended up in the best scenario here.

It's kind of interesting to see the way that's, you know, how that played out.

Regarding blood pressure, a little different story, it's a different measure of stress, human physiology, how the body responds to stress.

In this case, the people with the outdoor view, they had the higher blood pressure to begin with, pretty close to the people with non biophilic.

So, there's a little bit of separation there but the interesting thing that happens here when the stressors stops, the people that have used their contact with nature were the only ones to go down, you know.

The combination one went up but it kind of clearly points how important having a view to green when you're trying to recover from something, how important that is.

So a room with a view, if this is a view of a hospital you're looking out, does design matter?

Yes, it does.

Okay, so if this is the norm and people are recognizing that it can be harmful because it's prolonging the recovery period, then something needs to change, right?

Okay, so this title is called empathetic design.

What is empathy?

People might be familiar with sympathy that's pretty well known.

It's the acknowledgement of the suffering of others.

So you're acknowledging that someone else is suffering.

So a pretty simple example of this might be, man, this font's kind of small and light, it might be hard for somebody older to read, right?

They'd have to squint to read that.

So if somebody is publishing a book, whatever, what does that mean?

It's okay to be sympathetic with them, right?

But empathy is the ability to fully understand, mirror and share another person's expressions, their needs and their motivations.

Okay, so it's going beyond sympathy but it's really understanding and mirroring that.

So that's setting that person up to do something about it.

So if the font is small and you're sympathizing for those people, right?

What are you going to do?

Well, you increase the font size so that the older clients can read it.

Okay, so empathetic design is recognizing there's something going on and you're doing something about it.

So when you look at this project, what they did at the Palomar medical center, you kind of understand why they went to the extreme that they did.

I'm imagining, I wasn't at the table, the architect had a video on their website that explained the whole process.

I cannot find that it was an excellent documentary of the process.

But they said they got great feedback from the doctors, the nurses, the people that work there.

And you know, yes, it's for the patients, but it's also for the people that work there.

So in this case, the architect said that he summed up the discussions around the table when they were idealizing what does project could be so they came up with one word and that was empathy.

He said, "This project needs to revolve around empathy, everything we do, all of the design features need to communicate that in some way."

So they translated that as green, if contact with the nature is important then this project better have green everywhere because it's important for the patients we're trying to recover, for the people that work there.

So you'll see here that green is everywhere.

So this view from up above looks out from the top of the building out onto the project site.

And they developed, the landscape architect talked about this green spine, and they developed this idea of green everywhere.

Once you leave your car, you're going to have contact with the nature, from the parking lot all the way up to the front of the building, inside the building and having views from the inside.

So you can look at contrast here, the building, or the parking lot off to the left that's not part of this project, you know, that's kind of the norm, right?

A big asphalt parking lot, no trees, kind of void of contact with nature.

So let's see what they did.

Okay, so when I arrived, I was like, "Wow, this is amazing."

They are paying attention to these ideas and developing it in many different ways.

So the parking lot has a lot of green and people who do studies on this kind of work, the benefits of green, they've recognized that even shadows on the ground, shadow patterns, trees moving in the wind, those kinds of contacts with nature can be just as important as the green itself.

So the entire project is designed around sunlight, the way the sun moves around the site, around the building so that people can have a real enriching and healing benefit.

So to the left is that green spine.

Here's what it looks like.

So there's a safe, lit route.

It's ADA accessible and there are plants everywhere.

This is Southern California, so they're using plant material sparingly, so it's at the locations where it needs to be.

In this case, the trees are framing a view of the building and the roof garden that's up above and at the nodes, the intersections where people are entering into this green spine, they have quite a few lush plants.

And of course they've selected plants here that are beautiful when they're back lit.

So they're thinking about how are people going to view the plant material.

And so they have different hues of green, different colors of green that are there all throughout the year.

Okay, so approaching the building, they didn't want to lose contact with green, right?

So here is bamboo.

It looks like a green screen or living wall, but it's bamboo.

So these plants are growing in the ground and they are visible from inside the lobby.

So on the other side of the glass, you might think, well, what would the alternative be?

It might be looking out onto a parking lot or a drive thru.

So there are places where you can still see out but you have this green screen to look through.

So that green spine that goes from the parking lot out up to the building continues inside.

Once you travel up through the elevator, every floor, every stop at the elevator has a planted terrace.

So there's places to sit, there are interior plants and planting.

So these are fed with irrigation and, you know, nutrients and those kinds of things, but they're bringing plants inside.

So you come out of an elevator, you're greeted with green.

This is one of the recovery rooms.

So this is immediately out of surgery, nice large windows.

People might spend a couple hours here just until they stabilize.

And then they have individual rooms where people can recover, whether it's, you know, a day or a couple days.

This view here is taken from the pillow.

So I just put my phone where somebody's head would be looking out, this is the view they have.

So of course they see the mountains in the back.

If you look just above the sofa, there's some green grass, and that is the roof of this building.

So if you're a visitor visiting someone in the room, this is the view looking out that window.

And this is what they call the green wave.

It's not a flat roof, it's a waving roof.

They wanted to pick up on the rolling topography of the landscapes around.

And they brought in some native plants here, native to California, and also other locations as well.

So one of the interesting things about bringing plants on rooftops is that they're alive, they need to be maintained in things.

So what's important, if there are people maintaining their roof, they need to get up to the roof and bring plants down, sometimes they're bringing tools.

So they provided an exterior way to go up and down to the roof, ingress and egress from the rooftop.

So opposed to that, there have been design installations where there was no outdoor connection.

You had workers bringing plants into elevators, they're interacting with people there.

So if you're going to do something like this, it's a real good idea to have some sort of an outdoor maintenance access for people.

Here's the view looking back from this roof deck and this roof deck is accessible to everyone.

So it's available to the public, to the workers, doctors, nurses, and it as well used.

The day I visited, I saw a doctor come out, he looked very tired, very stressed, and he just wanted a place to go and get away.

So he kind of went out to the edge and sat down on one of these little nooks and crannies.

So by this point in my visit, when I was at the roof, I was just thinking, man, this is amazing, how did they do this?

How do they afford this?

'Cause it's like an incredible kind of environment to be in.

I'll talk about that in a little bit.

A few more views of what's going on here.

So some of the people don't have easy access to that roof deck.

So the higher areas have some smaller rooftop decks that are accessible.

This is also for people and there can be interaction with the staff that worked there at the hospital.

Okay, down on the roof deck, you can see some of what they did with the plants.

If you're familiar with this grass, Muhly grass, this is native to Texas.

It's not native to Southern California, but they wanted to use a plant that would bring color because the native landscape and this part of the country can be kind of dry or just green.

And they wanted to bring brightness with color into the environment.

So they borrowed native plants from an adjacent ecoregion.

This rooftop shows an interior courtyard here.

And what they did with this is to bring daylight into the interior of the building.

So they wanted to bring natural daylight down into the building.

And this is in a visitor waiting room.

So if surgery is taking place off in, you know, down the hallway, people are out here, so they have a beautiful viewing garden to look at.

And this is all on the ground connection.

I should also say that, I'll just back up real quick, that these circles that you see on here, these skylights, these go down into those surgical rooms.

Okay, so these are light penetrations going down, so the doctors doing surgery, they can look up, they have a connection with nature there as well.

That was a pretty innovative idea thought.

So I came across a Facebook page.

I thought, you know, how are these people doing?

You know, they work here, they're in stressful environments, COVID and everything coming through.

Looked to me like it's a happy bunch of people.

So I was happy to see that they enjoy, it looks like they enjoy the environment that they're in.

Okay, so what does all this mean in terms of cost?

What I learned during the process of writing the case study is that the green roof, they recognize that it is, it was more expensive.

Obviously it's going to cost more to do that than a conventional roof, but based on their analysis, they found that over seven years they recovered the cost of the green roofs.

So they were able to recover the money through energy savings, water savings, and those kinds of things.

And that roof membrane that's there, it will be there for at least 50, 60, 70 years.

So there are also embedded lifecycle costs that are brought into that design.

Okay, so the second case study here comes from the San Diego area.

The green roof I visited is just down the corner or is at the bottom of the hill.

This is the site that I visited after I went to the building and they wanted me to come visit here because this is the inspiration for the roof gardens that they used.

So I walked out to the site and my first response was, "Oh man, all these plants died, that's the California drought, and you know, it's too bad."

But I'm not from Southern California.

What I didn't know is that this is the native landscape and the way that the plants survive here is by going dormant during the summer because it doesn't rain, even though it's not hot.

And the San Diego area, it can get warm, but it's very dry for a long period of time.

So in the spring, after the winter and spring rains, the whole landscape comes to alive.

The chaparral, the plants filled with hummingbirds and it's a very bright green environment.

So the place that I visited was the Noah Southwest fisheries laboratory.

And it is right at the bottom of the hill of this preserve, coastal reserve.

And I want to mention that the reserve is not just this hillside but it goes down to the beach at the Pacific ocean, down below the sea level, out into the sea floor.

So they're studying fisheries, oceans, the relationship between the environment and the waters, the ocean.

Okay, so this is the work environment that they designed through an integrated design process.

Again, everybody was involved with this design from the beginning, the architect, landscape architect, engineers, they were thinking, "Okay, if we're going to bring plants onto a roof environment, where's the water gonna come from?"

Yeah, asking all these questions.

So they needed everyone around the table to make those decisions and help work out the design process.

Okay, so this is not a hospital, it's a work environment.

And there have been a few studies just on the value of having views to green and even just having temporary, what they call micro breaks.

It helps with attention restoration.

Okay, this study was done with students.

So some students, there were studying for exam, taking exams.

They had a view to a concrete roof deck and other students had a view of this biodiverse roof meadow.

And they found that the ones with the meadow had a quicker recovery time and by just having that 40 second view, they're able to relief the stress, able to recover and recall things better.

They perform better in their work.

So with that in mind, they wanted to create a work environment for the scientists that would give those kinds of benefits.

And these are some of the plants that were used that are native to the site that I showed you there and also around the San Diego area.

So there are some that are native to this area and there are nine roof gardens here.

They collect the water from the roof and store that in large cisterns.

So they have a sustainable source for water.

And here's an overview of one of the large outdoor open spaces.

So there are scientists that are looking out onto this roof deck.

Also, there's a conference room that looks out onto here, various different levels.

And they did this with about nine inches depth, 23 to nine inches, well nine inches depth of substrate.

So it's not a huge load.

If people can walk on the roof deck, then there's enough structural load to create this kind of a garden setting.

And one of the scientists that works here, she grew up in the rural countryside.

Okay, so she was surrounded by the chaparral, the native landscape as a child growing up.

And when she worked here, over time she found that there little bits of this garden that remind her of her childhood memories from around.

And she wrote this and sent this to the landscape architects involved with the project.

So she says with the little bit of rain that we get every so often this winter, the sage smells utterly fabulous and fills the walkways with the scent of chaparral.

The hummers are everywhere and the first blossoms of spring are filling the courtyard with yellows and purples.

Okay, very poetic statement.

I don't know how many of us can, you know, think of something like that about our work environments or work environments connect us back.

So there's definitely, you know, a connection back to nature here.

There are biophilic benefits that people are receiving from having these kinds of plants, not just sedums from Europe, but these are native plants that's connecting with the people, with their memories and childhood memories, those kinds of things.

All right, so I think we might have time for a few questions.

Is that right, can I open it up to question and answer?

And before we do that, I guess I'll just explain, this is the Sutter hospital in San Francisco.

And I was fortunate enough to come and visit that before the hospital opened, they have Southern roof gardens there and what they did in this case was designed them, install them and get everything established before they brought people in, because it's difficult to do this after the construction.

And once the hospitals open, there's a major disturbance to getting this construction done.

So, this was another amazing space and they are connecting with people and the same kind of goals that we saw from the previous projects.

Okay.

- Quick question.

Is there a difference between access and accessibility to the landscape roots?

- Is there a difference between access and accessibility?

- Visual access versus physically being immersed in the landscape?

- Yeah, and well, in terms of, you know, from a patient who might be in a room and may not be able to get out and move around there clearly is still some benefit from, you know, having views.

So their accessibility in that case is having green visible from their bed, even if they're in mobile.

But let's say a visitor comes, they're in a wheelchair and they want to go get outside, so that accessibility, I guess, is being able to go to a space and be in green.

So I think some of the important concepts with that would be knowing the needs of those people, if there's no shade, if there's, you know, it's not a comfortable environment, it may not be used as much, but certainly I think those are both important ideas.

- [Attendee] The links that you were describing focus primarily on the roof scape, but it seems like there's a strategy for low impact development that is being played out that is both intensive and expensive routes.

Is there a distinction being made between the types of plantings that you would do clearly part of your presentation on native planting?

- So your question is about, you know, ground level vegetation versus what's used on a rooftop, - Correct.

- Yeah.

So I think that Palomar medical center example that we had both examples there, there was a roof garden that had trees and shrubs and flowers, larger plant material, the same kind of plants that you would find on the ground level.

I think that's important for bringing shade and, you know, vertical grain people see it, so a tree is tall and that brings green into the environment.

Of course, along with that becomes the structural requirement, you're bringing people out there, you have heavy plants, so it needs to be on a roof deck that can support the weight.

With that green wave, that was more an extensive type roof that was only a four inch deep substrate so it was not a very heavy roof deck, but with the water, they're able to keep the native plants that were growing there alive to bring the benefits to people that can see it.

And that's not an area where people can go out and walk around.

It's really just a viewing area.

But if you're in the roof garden, you can look out onto that extensive green roof.

- There was a question from the attendees that, Do you ever run into long-term issues with the roof caused by roots?

- Okay, that's a good question, yes.

Well, in the early days, when they were first building roof gardens, they were using asphaltic type roofing membranes that were poured in place.

There was no root barrier and trees are looking for nutrients so there were some issues with that.

But today, you know, that's not an issue.

They're all kind of single climb membranes or preventative ways to prevent roots from attacking the membrane.

So if those plants have what they need, they're not going to try to attack that membrane.

And there is a certification process for both designers, so green roof designers, they can become certified as well as the installers, so that they're knowledgeable of how to install these systems and all of those kinds of things.

You have competent people doing the work.

- [Attendee] What benefit would planting green roofs have for the overall health of the community?

- What kind of benefits would a green roofs have for the overall community?

Well, I think that could come from multiple different perspectives.

If it's a rooftop that nobody will see, it can provide habitat for wildlife and things that maybe are displaced because of buildings and pavements where green roofs are not present.

So it can be this sustainment of wildlife from one perspective, the other would be reduction of urban heat islands.

So if you have like a whole district of conventional roofing that's heating up the air, that's creating a liability, you know, it's creating a hotter environment.

So the green roofs will help play a role, they won't solve the whole problem, but they'll role in keeping rooftops cooler.

And then the third is the stormwater.

So preventing flash floods from roofs, keeping the water cool, which, you know, fish and other aquatic life they can become damaged when water gets heated up from pavements and rooftops.

- [Attendee] You had a question about or made mention of the roof light well illuminating the ER, and that's a concept of borrowed light.

Is there a concept of borrowed view versus immediate proximity to the landscape view versus borrowing views from a distance?

- Well, I think that's the concept of the light, well, the viewing garden is to bring what might be possible beyond the interior of the building, bringing that inside.

If it's designed in a way that, you know, they're paying attention to the angles of sunlight and bringing the light into the space so that the plants are illuminated and you get those, you know, you get to look at light reflecting on the plants, I think it can bring some of the same benefits that you would have looking out onto a landscape that maybe has a further depth perception.

In terms of the research, anything green alive brings benefit to people.

So whether it's, you know, a long view of the mountain or just something that's green, trees, you know, a landscape scene, that brings value and it brings benefit with it.

- [Attendee] How difficult are roof repairs when the material reach the end of their lifespan?

- That's a good question.

Typically from what I've seen, if the membrane is buried deep within, you know, substrate, as long as the initial waterproofing job is done well, that can last for decades.

There are green roofs in Europe that are a hundred years old.

They're just now coming back and re waterproofing those.

And I've seen jobs where they've collected the soil, the substrate, they stock pile it, they store the plants in a spot, they do the re waterproofing and bring the soil back and the plants can reestablish.

So it does, it is an added cost, but, you know, I think it outweighs the expenses of not having a green roof over time.

- [Attendee] How do you see green roofs changing the relationship of suburban slash urban housing since the large drop of suburban housing than having a private green space?

- Yeah, I think a green roofs can make sense with large residential projects.

Multi-story buildings where a roof deck takes the place of a backyard, you know, bringing plants into the physical environment where people are living.

In terms of putting plants on a slanted roof in a traditional residential neighborhood, that's, you know, I don't know, I've seen that happen, but it's, even in Germany, but I don't think that will catch on.

But I think for the large apartment buildings and places where people are giving a roof garden intensive type space is a great idea.

And then an extensive roof to keep the building cool to capture the water, you know, that would be kind of an ideal arrangement.

- [Attendee] Thank you again for your presentation today.

- You're welcome.

(audience clapping) - So I'd like to thank Bruce again, thank you very much, a fantastic presentation.

And Chanam Lee for your introduction and Jay Maddock for your time today.

I just wanted to close with tomorrow, our next presentation.

Oops.

That's on the screen, okay.

Developing a true collaborative team approach and maintaining, let me see, I'm gonna restate that.

So I'd like to thank everyone for, Bruce Dvorak again, for a fantastic presentation.

And I look forward to continuing next week's architecture for health visiting lecture series on October 29th from 2:30 to 1:30, developing a true collaborative team approach and maintaining it through the project, I look forward to the presentation by Crandle Davis from HDR, Dan Thomas from HDR, Chad Anderson from HDR and introduced by our own Bill Eide from Texas A&M university.

So thank you very much.

I look forward to next week's presentation.