Katherine Chu- Exterior: Garden & Ambience

The area that my group is doing is the exterior environments. The area that I am going to discuss are the gardens and ambiance.

Due to the reality of climate change people want to have a greener environment and cities to live in, as well as slow down global warming. One of the world's greenest cities is Chicago. Fifteen years ago, Chicago had started transforming themselves into a environmentally friendly city. In order to achieve the goal, Chicago has created a Green Building Agenda that carries out a new direction to the design, construction, and operation of public buildings that help to create healthy, high quality structures, which is environmentally responsible. This action will help improve occupants' health and lower the number of resources being used to build and maintain the building. In order to build up an ambience of‘green’ in the city, they have moved the garden from the ground to the roof. A green roof is a veneer landscape over the traditional roof, it contains plants and soil and other medium to helps insulate, reduce heat and retain storm water.

Here is the link that show how the Chicago green roof look likes.

http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=u4i4woSrYIY

Other than the green roof used create the atmosphere of ‘green’, the café also helps to create a greener city. Most of cafés in Chicago have open eating areas that are called sidewalk cafes, it makes the street have a more cordial ambience. People on the street can see people having wonderful meals and carrying casual conversations, while on the flip side the people who are eating are not embarrass to let people see them having meals. This creates a feeling of being at home while you are on the street, it is because you wouldn't mind your family seeing the way you eat or sit, since you have a special relationship with them. So neither the people on the street or in the café, will mind seeing each other, this is because the open area creates a borderless ambience where every person on the street is treated as family. In addition, many of the sidewalk cafés have no parking spaces beside them, since the cars are off the street it forces people to walk and drive less.