Sustainability Awareness Week 2020: Green Roof Virtual Tour

Sustainability Council

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Title
Sustainability Awareness Week 2020: Green Roof Virtual Tour
Contributor Names
Palmaccio, Al
Date
2020-10-05
Description
Sustainability is a key component of FIT's mission and is embedded in the college's curriculum and operations. During virtual Sustainability Awareness Week, from October 5 to 9, 2020, we invited our community to learn about recent innovations from leaders in the industry, experience FIT's efforts to make a positive impact on the earth, and discover new ways to live with a smaller footprint.
From the street level, FIT's imposing brutalist buildings are a signature of New York City's urban landscape. Look at FIT from above, and a greener picture emerges. Nearly an acre of green roofs, made up of hardy succulents in the genus Sedum, offer numerous environmental benefits. They insulate the buildings, improve air quality, help cool the neighborhood, and absorb rainfall, mitigating flooding in the city's sewers during storms. Also, atop the Shirley Goodman Resource Center, solar panels provide electricity for the grid.
To create FIT's green roofs, sedum plants, which are hardy succulents that require little watering or maintenance, were installed on the roof in large trays.
Green roofs do all of the following: help insulate the buildings, reducing the need for heating and air conditioning; absorb carbon dioxide, improving air quality and lessening the college's carbon footprint; reduce the heat island effect—the reason New York City is a few degrees warmer than its environs—making FIT's climate more livable; soak up water during heavy rainfall that would otherwise flood the city's sewers, thus preventing untreated sewage from flowing into the Hudson and East rivers.
Type
Moving Image
Lectures
Subject
Sustainability
Fashion Institute of Technology (New York, N.Y.)
Green roofs (Gardening)
Sustainable architecture
Rights
In Copyright
This video was produced by the Fashion Institute of Technology ("FIT") and is the property of FIT. FIT expressly prohibits the copying, displaying, or uploading to a website of any portion of this video, except for the purposes of fair use as defined in the copyright laws, without express written permission from FIT. This video has been made available online by the Fashion Institute of Technology Gladys Marcus Library strictly for research and educational purposes. If you are the copyright holder for content in this video and have any objections to this work being made available online, please notify us immediately at [email protected].
Identifier
FIT Repository ID: aod_000869

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Sustainability Council

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Sustainability Awareness Week

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FIT Faculty and Staff Work

Citation

Fashion Institute of Technology. (2020, October 5). Sustainability Awareness Week 2020: Green Roof Virtual Tour [Video]. Archive on Demand. https://archiveondemand.fitnyc.edu/item/23571
Fashion Institute of Technology. "Sustainability Awareness Week 2020: Green Roof Virtual Tour." Archive on Demand, 5 Oct. 2020, https://archiveondemand.fitnyc.edu/item/23571
Fashion Institute of Technology, "Sustainability Awareness Week 2020: Green Roof Virtual Tour," Archive on Demand, October 5, 2020, video, https://archiveondemand.fitnyc.edu/item/23571