Chicago?EUR??,,????'???s Soldier Field Park Wins Green Roof Award

Chicago?EUR??,,????'???s new Soldier Field rooftop park, designed by Peter Lindsay Schaudt Landscape Architecture, Inc., has just been named a recipient of one of six nationwide awards bestowed by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities. The new five-and-a-half acre park is located on the roof of a four-story underground parking garage at the Soldier Field stadium. The concrete roof of the underground garage had a moderate slope and needed leveling. But because the garage roof wasn't designed to support the heavy soils loads required to level the park, three-inch to eight-foot-thick slabs of dense polystyrene foam formed a leveling base. Polystyrene foam is sturdy, but weighs only a tenth as much as dirt. Moving the dirt onto the roof also offered a challenge: the roof was not built to support a crane, so the soil had to be moved in bins on a conveyor belt system. Soil depths in the park now range from six to 30 inches. In the deeper soil areas are 84 trees (including a grove of hawthorns along with maple, ash, linden, red oak, elm, hornbeam and tulip trees) with diameters of up to 8 inches. A low-maintenance fine-fescue turf grass, which unmowed produces a ?EUR??,,????'??meadowy?EUR??,,????'?? affect when not mowed was chosen for the park turf along with burning bush and winter creeper as ground cover. The entire site is irrigated with a system similar to one that might be used on a golf course. According to Steven Peck, executive director of the North American trade association for the green roof industry, Chicago is one of the leading cities in the nation using green-roof technology to produce green, open space, and the new Soldier Field Park is a classic example of that technology.