What is Living Architecture Doing Right Now?
For our inaugural blog post, I thought I’d start with the prestigious first office tower of the soon to be Southcore Financial Centre, currently unfolding in the heart of downtown Toronto just south of Union Station, between the Roger’s Centre, the CN Tower and the Air Canada Centre.
An ambitious new office tower, 18 York will have four different green roof surfaces, including two intensive green roofs on the second and third floor and extensive green roofs on the 27th and 29th floors Living Architecture staff worked with the architect (Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg) and the manufacturer (BioRoof Systems) in developing what may be the highest elevation green roof in Canada.
So how can this quintessential downtown landscape become an urban garden? Let us show you how.

As our Principal Rick Buist says, in his green roof presentation (check out the video on our website), the medical mantra applies to green roofing as well: “First, do no harm”. The first concern must be to protect the roofing membrane.
Here’s a photo form a little further along in the process. Notice how the planting beds are now covered in a layer of Fabrene geo-textile. What you can’t see below that, is 4 inches of polystyrene insulation (actually you can see some of it peeking through in the drainage channel in the lower right of the above photo). Underneath that insulation is a layer of Bio-Rootstop root barrier. All of these layers are protecting the integrity of that roof membrane.
Also note the stacks of pavers – those will be an important benchmark later in the process!

Now that the roof membrane is protected, the next step is to build the drainage layer. Here’s shot showing the layers of Bioroof Bio-Retention panels locked together to form the drainage course.
Here’s a closer shot, showing the drain pathways built into the drainage panels. By now perhaps you’re wondering what the plastic wrapped rolls in each pit are? Those are rolls of Bioroof Bio-Void FF, a filamentous plastic mat with a layer of drainage cloth laminated to the top of the roll.
Here’s what the pit looks like now that the Bio-Void has been laid down, showing the filter cloth side up. You’ll recall the way it comes in rolls – notice the three prominent strips in the photos above, where the strips of Bio-Void has been overlapped and sealed with adhesive to absolutely ensure the growing medium stays out of the drainage course beneath.
But it still doesn’t look much like a garden does it?
On a rainy day in May, the blower trucks arrive and begin the process of transferring the specially formulated and prepared Bioroof Bio-Mix Eco-Blend growing media that will support the vegetation on this roof. Using essentially a massive air compressor, the growing media is literally blown through the thick red hoses visible to carefully and evenly fill the green roof area.
Remember the stacks of paving stones from the fourth image in the sequence? They can been seen again here, providing a bench mark to the depth of the growing media that’s just been blown in.
Finally, one by one, the trees begin arriving…
We’re still a ways away from finished here, and it will be looking better and better as vegetation fills in, but it’s come an awful long way, hasn’t it?
