Truly Living Roofs

If a roof is not made of thatch it should grow thatch.

We need truly living roofs — roofs that are not just used for cultivating crops, gardening, but for cultivating the weather proof membrane of the roof itself.

The roof should be regenerative in this way, it should reproduce itself without requiring materials from elsewhere, synergistically.

This synergy we've yet to see attained, but we need it.

This requires materials research and development.

Consider a roof designed for hemp cultivation and bee colonies.

Now imagine a waterproof sheathing, a building material, made from the beeswax and hemp hurd.

Concept for a harmonode roof design:

• Sheathing:
  The roof structure is multilayered. The hemp grows in the beds above a utility/crawl space. Below the crawl space the insulated "building envelope" layer is watersealed using sheathing/waterproofing produced by the roof itself.
• Structure:
  Trusses made from coppiced sticks. See coppicing pdf in the research+developement campaign for explanation of growing the truss material.
• Exoskeleton:
  The building envelope should not be a simple exterior layer (technically multilayered as exterior sheathing, insulation, and interior finishing, a compound layer), but a whole system that includes various functions including seasonal adaptation and the crawl space mentioned in sheathing.

Maintainability

Part of the exoskeleton concept is that it's designed to be maintainable.