A prototype green roof on a school in Buenos Aires was successfully installed and demonstrates the potential of the project vision. To demonstrate the potential for green roofs in a city with only 4.5 square meters of green space per capita, a pilot project at Escuela de Jornada Completa Nº 6 “French y Beruti” was conducted in January 2011. The project at the school in the Buenos Aires suburb of Retiro was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency of the Ministry of Environment and Public Space.

Following five regional competitions, 15 Award-winning projects will now compete in the first global Holcim Awards competition for sustainable construction projects. The global phase of the competition showcases the best entries from more than 1500 submissions from 118 countries, and encourages innovative, future-oriented and tangible approaches within the building and construction industry.

USD 220,000 in prize money was awarded to the best entries in the Holcim Awards competition for sustainable construction projects from Latin America. The top prizes went to projects from Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela in a competition that aims to promote sustainable approaches to the built environment. The competition was created by the Swiss-based Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction in collaboration with five of the world’s leading technical universities including the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

The conceptual project aimed at improving urban policy is refreshingly innovative in proposing roof gardens throughout the city. Highly commended is the ambition to improve the conditions of individual buildings as well as more extensive environmental problems at a metropolitan scale. Benefits for the buildings include a substantial improvement of the energy efficiency of housing, as well as increased comfort due to optimized thermal insulation.

This project, entitled Green roofs for Buenos Aires, is conceived at the scale of an entire city. Working with a very simple detail, i.e., the necessary layers to fabricate a grass surface, the proposed scheme gains its significance through the application and multiplication of that detail to a dimension of metropolitan proportion – in this case the city of Buenos Aires.