FEATURE: More Buildings Incorporate Eco-Friendly Elements Into Design
Originally featured on September 14, 2015 by The Manila Times
Read the original article here
MORE and more buildings are incorporating green or eco-friendly elements into the designs of their buildings to help fight the harmful effects of pollution.
One of these eco-friendly designs currently in trend is the urban roof garden.
Some of the establishments in the country that have these urban roof gardens are
Rockwell Center and Greenbelt 5 in Makati City, the Medical City in Pasig, the Mind Museum in Taguig and the Sarossa Hotel in Cebu City. All of these establishments use the European-designed Daku Roof Garden Engineering System.
According to DAKU, besides its eco-friendly benefits, roof gardens also present economic advantages as well as the aesthetic effects.
One of the economic benefits of these roof gardens is that it can lower air-conditioning costs since it can reduce the heat absorption of buildings.
DAKU adds that urban roof gardens are not high-maintenance, which means it does not need too many people to maintain the roof garden. It can also reduce irrigation requirements since the DAKU reservoir-and-substrate system can store up to 55 liters of water/square meter.
The DAKU element reservoir-and-substrate system can store up to 55 liters of water/square meter, significantly reducing irrigation requirements. Moreover, the planting medium [unlike normal garden soil] entails far fewer man-hours of cultivation labor, according to DAKU.
The roof garden engineering provider also said aside from the economic advantages that it presents, it also adds an aesthetic value to the building, which will be able to draw in more people to the establishment.
“On a social level, they create recreational spaces, and when used with imagination can even be utilized for small-scale urban agriculture,” it said.
“In truth, choosing the right system not only creates welcome spaces for social interaction and lowers a building’s environmental footprint [likely reducing energy costs], it also often adds to property market value,” it added.
For the past three decades, the DAKU roof garden system has been exclusively installed in the country by Filipino pioneering company Specserv.
Specserv has modified the DAKU Roof Garden Engineering System to service homeowners who also wish to be part of this inner-city ecological innovation
It has dubbed the roof garden system as BUNGKAL (short for Bubong Kalikasan or “Nature’s Roof”) and the recalibrated technology now offers affordable and adjustable light-roof garden systems to residences.