HASSELL in collaboration with the University of Melbourne (Australia) have designed a variety of living roofs for the Burnley Campus. The Burnley Living Roofs at the University of Melbourne’s Burnley Campus is a world-class research and teaching facility – and the first of its kind in Australia. Green infrastructure, including the installation of plants on under-utilized urban surfaces, can provide significant benefits for our cities.
Three separate living roofs make up the facility, each with a specific function. Firstly, the Demonstration Roof acts as an exhibition and interpretive space for day-to-day educational activities. Its design evolved through the layering of multiple functional objectives – starting with the idea that the whole green roof was a wedge, grading from a shallow to a deep profile. It is sub-divided into irrigated and non-irrigated territories, establishing diverse planting zones. Superimposed over the wedge, a circular walkway encounters each micro plant community and includes seating edges and a number of pockets for teaching. A series of red lines whimsically thread through the garden, sometimes tying together these experiences, at other times encapsulating fragments of other experimental landscape zones.
These green interventions can cool the urban environment, reduce energy consumption, mitigate flooding and increase habitats for biodiversity. They provide an opportunity to evolve the way we develop the built environment, to maximize existing infrastructure and lower the need for costly upgrades.
