A Roof for the Birds:: Creating habitat on the Portland Mausoleum roof

This is my comprehensive project that I completed in my final year of the Landscape Architecture program at the University of Oregon. The two-term project was the culmination of my educational career and I wanted to choose something meaningful that would relate to my main interest of creating and designing urban wildlife habitat. I started to ask around and very quickly a project fell into my hands from Mike Houck, the Executive Director of the Urban Greenspace Institute in Portland. He has been responsible for creating Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge as well as a giant mural on the side of the Portland Mausoleum that overlooks Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, and had been interested for some time in creating a green roof for the building. I was lucky enough to also consult with Bob Sallinger, Conservation Director for Portland Audubon as well as Tom Liptan from the Bureau of Environmental Services, City of Portland and local eco-roof expert. In addition I talked with the building manager for the Mausoleum.

This project was a challenge because no plans for the building existed, they had all disappeared, so no measurements or structural information were available for the design. Instead I had to take some measurements and measure the rest from Google Earth.

Read through the presentation with the script added in, for a full detail of the design including goals, hypotheses and design reasoning.

Start with the presentation::