Green roof on the Tabaret Building Our office has been working at improving sustainability on campus since 2006 and I am happy to say that we have had a lot of success. But one of the areas that we are still hoping to improve after all these years in our green space.  What is considered by many sustainability-minded institutions to be the crown jewel of their campus (lush green spaces) is a bit of a sticking point here at uOttawa. You see, a lot of older institutions were created through land grants or large land donations. This gave institutions the ability to finance the expansion of their programs by leasing and selling land. Not unliked these institutions, the University of Ottawa was founded based on a land donation by the Besserer family. But unlike some other land grants, it was a small parcel of land which means that since then the institutions has had to slowly try to buy up surrounding land. Sometimes this works... sometimes it doesn't. After years of purchasing land and ...

When news finally settled and it was determined that uOttawa, along with every other institution in Canada, was going to close its doors for an entire academic season, there were a lot of projects that were still ongoing. Fast forward to almost two years later and people are starting to come back to the campus, and those projects were completed. So let's take a quick tour of some of the sustainability things that happened on campus while you were gone! UCU Park Just behind the UCU (near the Pivik entrance) the land has been completely landscaped and a new park was created. The small park is a 4-season park with seating, a stone dust path, and a bunch of Indigenous, native, and edible plants. If you are in the garden at just the right time of the year, you can see the wild raspberries! Other improvements include a safer declined path to the building and an expanded terrace near the entrance doors (the former smokers pit) with a new seating area. Morisset Window Mural Safe Wings wor...

After our last post about green roofs at the University of Ottawa, I got a lot of questions about why we can't have green roofs everywhere on campus. If the answer was simple, I wouldn't have to write a entire blog post about it... but since I am writing a post... you can probably take the hint that this is a bit more complicated then a yes/no kind of thing. As a quick reminder, the University has a design imperative in place that implies green roofs will be installed in any case where the building can take the weight without a new support system, that the building is still going to be around in 20 years, or if the roof wouldn't serve better as a place for solar panels. Photo credit - kingcounty.gov HOW MUCH CO2 COULD WE SEQUESTER? First thing people were asking me about was sequester CO2. If roofs can take carbon out of the air, why not do more of this? Of course all plants sequester CO2 but a green roof can't do as much as a tree and certainly not as much as a peat bo...

It's hard to imagine the uOttawa campus without some of its most iconic buildings. It goes without saying that a building like Tabaret plays an instrumental role in the identity of the campus. Not only was it one of the first buildings on campus, but it also serves as the inspiration for the modern logo for the University (although there is missing pillar but we don't talk about that). The Tabaret building was even used as the setting for the movie Decoys in 2014. Another pretty iconic building is SITE . Built in 2002 as uOttawa's response to the massive tech craze of the early 2000's, there aren't many buildings with as many unique architectural characteristics as SITE. Big windows, stainless steel vents, concrete fins, exposed pillars and mechanical duct-work... it is one of a kind (except that Lakehead University built a very similar building a few years later). But I want to talk about another type of iconic building on campus. You see, an iconic building might ...

  Let's take a moment to talk about the old proverbial green hat, more commonly know as a green roof. For years green roofs have been thought of as a nice to have but not really cost effective for most buildings. That perception started to change more recently; manifesting in new policies like the Toronto Green Roof Bylaw . Our campus got in on the action a little while back when we changed our building standards to prioritize green roofs as well. This autumn, the first green roof under this design paradigm is set to be installed on the Perez Building. Since the building is a bit older, our engineering assessment found that a green roof isn't appropriate everywhere, but along the north roof the conditions are just right. This works out fairly well since this part of the building is lower than the other roof sections; meaning that occupants will be able to see the roof from their windows. Stunning views of green roofs from an office or classroom window might be considered the c...

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a meeting with my boss going over the business case for why the University of Ottawa should change our building standards to build green roofs whenever possible (meaning so long as the building can take the weight). The crux of the argument came down to two things... is it better for the planet and does it save costs? Wait, this is too far ahead, I need to go back a bit. A few months ago one of our awesome student employee created a wonderful business case about why the University of Ottawa should install green roofs on campus. She created a case that took into account of bunch of factors, including construction costs, energy savings, storm water management, operating costs, and much more. Ultimately, she came up with a very important finding... Over the life-cycle of a building, it always makes sense to install a green roof over a conventional roof. Wait wait, I guess I should actually start at the beginning. Last year I worked with the ...