Roofscapes Architectural Studio

Roofscapes is a recent startup from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. The company was founded in 2020 by MIT graduate students Tim Cousin, Olivier Faber, and Eytan Levi with the mission of transforming untapped rooftops into green roofs as a way to mitigate climate change and to provide new outdoor spaces in cities.

In the summer of 2018, Tim, Olivier, and Eytan spent a week with their friend Louis de Saint-Affrique brainstorming a project that would tackle untapped spaces in Paris. The idea for green rooftops over pitched roofs was born, and it has evolved into Roofscapes. In the spring of 2020, Roofscapes was incubated at the MIT DesignX accelerator, and was awarded the first prize of the 2020 DesignX cohort. In 2021-22, Roofscapes was selected by Urban Lab – the City of Paris’ laboratory for urban innovation – to design and build a first pilot project over a roof in Paris.

As designers, Roofscapes try to avoid approaches that would imply demolishing existing buildings or building on land where human impact is still limited. Instead, they consider the built heritage as our most valuable resource and advocate for its enhancement through thoughtful and innovative tactical interventions. Improving what exists is the best guarantee against urban sprawl and the excessive waste of resources.

Creating more greenspaces in city centers has a direct impact on the environment. The lack of vegetation in cities is one of the main contributors to urban heat islands. Their goal is to limit the impact of this phenomenon on the buildings that surround us by covering them with a generous organic layer that reduces surface temperatures, improves air quality, increases rainwater retention and provides new spaces for non-human species in the city.

Roofscapes believes that buildings need to adapt to the way societies evolve, not the other way around. They say, “we design solutions to update spaces and allow more collective and cooperative uses of them.

We reject the idea that the future of cities can be written by a limited number of actors that wouldn’t take into account everyone’s contributions and desires. We picture ourselves as initiators of possibilities for the improvement of our environment, enabling anything from the emergence of regulatory frameworks all the way to the creation of collective visions for living together.”

All text found on Roofscapes website

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