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All Photos/exterior/roofline : flat/roof material : green

Exterior Flat Roofline Green Roof Material Design Photos and Ideas

Stanaćev and Granados not only thought about views from the cabin, they also considered views of the cabin. With that in mind, they designed a green roof planted with creeping redflush that harmonizes with surrounding cypress forest.
Nataša Stanaćev and Manu Granados of Stanaćev Granados Arquitectura designed and built this beachfront cabin in Matanzas, a rustic, windswept area of Chile, while they were living in Spain.
The heart of the camp is the main residence, the Lake House, which has a stacked "cordwood wall" made from Douglas firs found on-site.
Monika and Darren Bennett worked with SM Studio on their custom home in Vancouver, B.C. The main house has 2703 square feet, plus a 514 square foot garage/studio on the rear alley, with a courtyard and pool in between the two buildings.
The bedroom is elevated around five meters above the forest floor, and the space beneath has—like the green roof—been given back to the Bushveld. “Naturally, this space is shadier than the surrounding forest, so it creates a different microclimate for different species to flourish in that area,” says architect Ant Vervoort. “It’s an area that we have cultivated.”
About 100 miles southwest of Mexico City, nine black concrete blocks in a forest clearing make up one family's holiday home. Designed by Fernanda Canales with landscaping by Claudia Rodríguez, Casa Bruma makes elegant use of a construction material that's commonplace in Latin America
“We need an architecture that generates and stores power, an architecture that harvests and recycles water, an architecture that reuses waste,” says Clinton Cole, the founder of CplusC, a design-build firm based in Sydney. “We need an architecture that produces fruits, vegetables, fish, and eggs. We need an architecture where nature and beauty exist symbiotically.” <span style="font-family: Theinhardt, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif;">Clinton’s passion seems more urgent than ever against the backdrop of one of the worst bushfire seasons on record in Australia. Fittingly, he has designed a new home for himself, his partner, and their three children to be an eye-catching emblem for the cause. </span><span style="font-family: Theinhardt, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif;">The three-level, 1,722-square-foot residence fills a wedge-shaped lot in an inner suburb of Sydney. With greenery spilling out of its facade and a working garden sprouting from the roof, it is a self-consciously verdant presence on an otherwise typical street</span><span style="font-family: Theinhardt, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, &quot;Segoe UI&quot;, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, sans-serif;">.</span>
The volumes that contain the living room and a guest bedroom were designed with roof terraces, and green roofs cover four of the other volumes.
Upcycled wood—sourced from fallen trees near the site—was used as part of the shrub-covered green roof.
To turn a home into a permanent residence for a family of four, Rama Estudio attached a prefab glass-and-steel box that extends into the surrounding wilderness.
Dwellings

Winner: Casa Ter by Mesura

Mesura designed a retreat for a family of five in the Catalonian countryside, utilizing regional and artisanal building techniques and local materials for a sustainable home that blends with the landscape.
Winkelman Architecture delivers grown-up summer-camp vibes with this unassuming retreat on the coast of Maine.
Inspired by ancient ruins, Frankie Pappas crafts a green-roofed, brick guesthouse that connects deeply with nature in the South African Bushveld.
The tower features a ladder for access to the utilities, and the roof is planted with native shrubs to soften the concrete construction and reflect the approach taken with the landscaping.
A concrete block tower in the garden beside the home contains a water tank and solar heating boiler with a shower below.
The home requires very little maintenance and features a lightweight construction. The modularity of the design also helped to avoid excessive material waste during construction.
Top 10 Sustainable Homes of 2020: From a carbon-negative cabin to a prefab farmhouse, these resourceful designs captivated readers this year.
The exposed concrete framework cantilevers dramatically from the stone walls.
"In a sense, we treated earth as one of our materials," says Vaitsos. "We figured out how much earth we needed to excavate in order to position this house here. And then we used it to transform the landscape a little bit." This was done to create as little waste as possible.
Each cell denotes a different area inside the house below it and is planted with a different species of aromatic plant from which essential oils can be extracted. The landscaped roof also helps to insulate the home and blend it into the environment.
The circular insertions are custom operable skylights that allow for daylighting and passive cooling.
The Orchard Corral is just below the house, and is home to a large grove of olive trees for olive oil and white wine production. Many of the island restaurants serve the olive oil.
A house in Sydney combats climate change with its own ecosystem.
Niki Bergen and two of her children run up the hill by the guesthouse she and her partner, Andrew Zuckerman, built on their upstate New York property. The structure was designed by Levenbetts, the architecture firm also responsible for the older main house nearby.
“Our creative process is rooted in a process of questioning and listening, and we design our architecture based on values, not a particular aesthetic style,” says architect Benjamin Iborra Wicksteed. “It is why this home is almost tailor made for our client.”
Working with local professionals, materials, and techniques helped the project stay on budget, as the home was designed and constructed based on resources already present in the region.
Carefully placed windows punctuate the minimalistic walls, creating a sensitive relationship between the interior spaces and the landscape.
The clay used to construct the walls doesn’t just have a structural role— it also creates various textures that help the home blend into the surrounding landscape. To keep within budget, the structure of the home was kept as simple as possible—with the notable exception of the soaring vaulted ceiling in the master bedroom.
“Genius loci is one of our approaches to sustainability,” says architect Benjamin Iborra Wicksteed. As a result of this approach, materials were sourced hyper locally—such as stones from the River Ter.
“We investigated past examples—the works of the maestros who did a similar exercise in investigating and understanding vernacular Mediterranean architecture in order to interpret it to the way of living of their time,” explains architect Benjamin Iborra Wicksteed. “Architects worth mentioning here are Josep Antoni Coderch, Josep Lluis Sert, Lanfranco Bombelli, Barba Corsini, and Antoni Bonet i Castellana.”
The firm wanted the materiality of the cabin to be "in harmony with the site," says Shaw. "So, that over time, the building could weather gracefully and the site around it would change, and they would do so in tandem."
The materials were kept simple: a foundation of board-formed concrete that reveals the wood grain of the boards used to make it, Cor-Ten steel siding that will develop a characterful patina, and rafters made of hemlock, a local species. "In terms of materials, we wanted the full exterior of the building to be something that would weather gracefully, that required very little maintenance, and that had a long life cycle," says Shaw.
Sited on a rock ledge, the Far Cabin’s screened porch cantilevers over the forest floor for a tree house effect.
The Far Cabin by Winkelman Architecture is set on the forested coast of Maine.
The front fence is made from sandblasted stainless-steel rods coated in a protective penetrating sealer. The fence is cantilevered out from a concrete beam below the garden, and the gate retracts into an underground pit. “It’s the first of its type in Australia,” says architect Tony Vella. “It was a work of precision to have these thin rods slide down into the ground through 30mm holes.”
The home incorporates a number of sustainable features. Glass walls are protected by concrete eave overhangs and automated external sun blinds. In addition, the heavily insulated walls, floors, and ceiling (with roof garden layers) add to the efficient energy performance of the home.
The home is located across from one of Melbourne’s bay beaches, and it needed to easily accommodate the family’s regular beach visits. “From morning swims to summer days on the beach, the home is intrinsically connected to the sun, water, and sand,” says architect Tony Vella.
Levenbetts designed the guesthouse as a porous block. Every side opens to the outdoors, allowing the landscape to continue through the building. “The idea was to create this total openness and informality and almost undomesticated domestic space,” says architect David Leven. The concrete is textured by its forms on the outside but smooth where it cuts into the building—“almost as though you sliced into it with a knife,” Leven adds.
A vegetable garden is on top of the structure. Placing the garden up a flight of stairs—the form of which shapes one of the house’s openings— protects its plantings from hungry fauna.
"We were interested in this idea of treading lightly on the site. Using a green roof is a logical extension of that.  When you introduce a building that supplants a little piece of the forest floor, it's nice to replicate that on the roof as a return gesture to continue to create habitat for birds, animals,  and plants, and to help manage the flow of storm water," explains McFarlane.
“The clients are passionate about nature conservation,’ says architect Ant Vervoot. “They know how every plant, insect, and animal fits into the greater ecosystem—their curiosity about the Bushveld is insatiable and inspiring. It really is an amazing thing to be around them in the bush.”
House of the Tall Chimneys is entirely off the grid. Power is generated with solar panels; black and gray water is contained and managed before it’s further filtered by the undergrowth; and potable water is collected from the nearby stream. “More important than these technological fixes, however, is the fact that the building requires very little in terms of resource input in order to function successfully,” says architect Ant Vervoort. “Careful design is probably the most fundamental aspect in designing environmentally sustainable buildings.”
“We asked Frankie for a home, and they built us a fantasy,” remarked the clients when House of the Tall Chimneys and House of the Big Arch were completed.
The guesthouse is located in a private reserve in the Waterberg, a mountainous region about three hours from Johannesburg.
The green roof was designed to give back the space that was taken up by the building’s footprint to the Bushveld and the animals. It is planted with site-endemic grasses, aloes, and creepers. “What pleases me one hell of a lot is that the building is completely hidden when you’re more than 20 meters away from the structure,” says Vervoort. “It’s invisible, and I’m super proud of that. The most important aspect of this building was to revere the site. I use the word revere because we didn’t just respect it—we treated this site as if it were God. I think we should do that more as architects.”
“The chimneys are in essence two big columns with some beams between them, and they look a bit like rugby posts,” says architect Ant Vervoort. “The crossbars of the rugby posts hold up the timber beams.”
A brick path leads through the forest to the entrance of House of the Tall Chimneys. “Bricks are a really cost effective way of creating space,” says architect Ant Vervoort. “Over and above that, when used correctly, bricks create complex patterns that I don’t think it’s possible to mimic using other materials.”
The entrance to House of the Big Arch is a nine-meter-tall passage, which creates a high-pressure system that pulls cool air into the kitchen.
House of the Tall Chimneys is the guesthouse of House of the Big Arch, also by Frankie Pappas. The two buildings share the same material palette, and are linked by a long path through the forest.
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