How green grows my roof
Two visionaries see eco-salvation, though in different ways, by converting heat-soaking, rain-sloughing building tops into living things
Sunday, March 18, 2007RANDY GRAGG
As Portland grows more skyscrapers, those who live and work in them get more views: the snowcapped volcanoes, the verdant West Hills, the meandering Willamette River, the neighbors in the high-rise next door . . . and the roofs of shorter buildings below.
Black, gray, silver and white, they look like airborne parking lots, only without the cars. Far worse, most perform like parking lots, too -- heating up to 175 degrees in summer, while channeling the winter rains into the sewer system.
Tom Liptan and Sean Hogan would like to change that, by turning building tops into ecoroofs.
The two eco-activists are waging the same revolution, but on very different fronts. Liptan wants to plant the rooftops any kind of green; Hogan wants to cultivate colorful rooftop art.
As the chief advocate for ecoroofs at the Portland Bureau of Environmental Services, Liptan's goals are modest: to "keep as much storm water as possible out of the city's sewer system." As one of the country's leading horticulturists, Hogan wants to "green the city with a sense of optimism."
Also known as green or living roofs, ecoroofs are nothing new. Evidence of sod roofs dating to 3000 B.C. or earlier has been found in Scotland. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, featured a version. By the Middle Ages they were standard equipment on Scandinavian rural houses.
But in the early 1970s, German designers revived the tradition in higher-tech, lightweight, urban forms to perform the functions they always have: absorbing rainwater, insulating buildings, and cleaning and cooling the air.
In the past decade American cities have joined in, perhaps most flamboyantly in the Midwest, where Chicago Mayor Richard Daley topped City Hall with one and Kansas City initiated a metro-wide goal of "10,000 Rain Gardens."
With more than 80 ecoroofs sprinkled through the metropolitan area and many more on the way, Portland is getting the spirit, too. But, true to the city's tradition, it started at the grassroots, not by a directive from on high. In fact, Liptan's epiphany occurred in 1994, when he looked at the back of a dish-soap bottle, and Hogan's came last year as he fixed the city's highest-profile ecoroof failure.
Liptan has sown many of the earliest seeds for Portland's ecoroof revolution. Now Hogan wants to take the effort to a new plane.
It's not all a bed of roses
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