Roofscapes, a startup founded by three MIT students, is planning to build green spaces on pitched roofs in Paris, to decrease temperatures while improving quality of life. Roofscapes, a startup founded by three MIT master of architecture students, aims to transform the pitched roofs of Paris into
Roofscapes, a startup founded by three MIT students, is planning to build greenspaces on pitched roofs in Paris to decrease temperatures, improve quality of life, and boost climate resilience. Pictured is a rendering of an ongoing pilot project over a former district hall. Credit: Roofscapes Studiostudents, is planning to build green spaces on pitched roofs in Paris, to decrease temperatures while improving quality of life.
The spaces would provide a way to grow local food, anchor biodiversity, reduce the temperatures of buildings, improve air quality, increase water retention, and give residents a new way to escape the dense urban clusters of modern times. “It was always important to us to work with as little contradictions to our values as possible in terms of environmental and social impact,” Faber says. “For us, Roofscapes is a way to apply some of our academic learnings to the real world in a way that is tactical and impactful, because we’re tapping into this whole issue — pitched roof adaptation — that has been ignored by traditional architecture.
“In European city centers, two-thirds of the roofs are pitched, and there’s no solution to make them accessible and put green surfaces on them,” Cousin says. “Meanwhile, we have all these issues with heat islands and excessive heat in urban centers, among other issues like biodiversity collapse, retention of rainwater, lack of green spaces. Green roofs are one of the best ways to address all of these problems.