Day 2: Problems with the rooftops, and evaluating the Eco House

May 17th, 2011, 10:39 pm

Over the weekend one of our team members, Ashley, initiated conversation among people of interest in facility services in order to get some head way on our Green Roof project. Ultimately, this lead to the group being directed to John Rigor, who should be in contact over the next few days. Although, some of the people contacted remain supportive of the project at hand, others did not hesitate to remind us of the obstacles ahead: conflict with unions, telephone towers atop of Laurier, liability issues, and problems with the previous irrigation system atop MacDonald Hall.

Members from the group also met on Monday at the Eco-house to view the state of the exterior of the project. Although, we were forewarned of the lack of up keep at the site, we still managed to dredge up some disappointment for what we found. We were unable to decide a realistic goal for this project. Ashley was able to allocate a tentative donation from St. Thomas of Villanova of six to eight flats of flowers that may include petunias, salvia, geraniums, and begonias. The garden of the Eco-House still needs to be weeded, stripped of wood chips, leveled and the soil needs to be turned before planting could even begin, these are a few objective for the team’s action plan for Tuesday’s work period.

Failed Rhubarb and weeds.

This needs to be cleaned up.

On tuesday, the groups moved around a little bit due to the introduction of  Dr. Jennifer Willet’s Earthship project, and we lost 2 members, but gained 4 more. We welcome Jyotsna, Harpreet, Evan, and Natalie to our group.

Despite the rainy weather, we managed a trip out to the Eco House site as a group this time to make sure everyone had a chance to see what we are working with and to put everyone on the same page. We had to do a major re-evaluation of our project and began to look at perhaps a zen/rock-garden based type of space. We saw this as an acceptable and interesting solution for the space because it would be low-maintainence, although we run into the problem of functionality for that space, and again, had to re-evaluate.

The Lot

At this writing, all plans are tentative and the idea of cleaning up the area and donating it to the community garden has been tossed around. It’s back to the drawing board for us, once again. Our goal for before next class is to come up with as many different ideas for the space as we can.

Tweet

Day1: Planter project on residence buildings and eco-house wildflower garden

May 12th, 2011, 10:48 pm

Today our group got things started on our projects allocated to us. We have been assigned two projects from the Greening,Growing and Earthship Architecture. One project is to get the rooftops of the two residence buildings green. In order to achieve our goal we would have to get permission from the University of Windsor’s Vice President of Finance Steven Willox to carry on with our project. We would achieve that by going to see him at his office on Monday and persuade him if needed. We would assure him that the expenses that would occur to renew this project would be covered by Green Corridor by fund-raising and it would only benefit the university in many ways; the image of the university would become better, the buildings would have protection from extreme weather due to insulation etc. Over the weekend every group member would go over the archives for the projects and would gain the knowledge required to achieve the final goals. Also we would have to go to the residence management and ask them for access to the roof tops. We would survey the roof tops and later have a brainstorming session to come up with ideas.

For the eco-house project we need to read the archives and survey it in order to get an idea what it is all about and we plan to do it sometime before our next class on tuesday, we would contact each other and come up with a suitable time for the survey and would come up with ideas for it next week.

Group members:

Muhammad Isa Khan Niazi

Fanny Lai

Laura Gentili

Marcy Boles

Rain Farooqi

Ashley Bujold

Tweet