Green-Roof Logo Lifts Loyola Brand to New Heights

Paul Steinbach Headshot
Loyola Chicago Alfie Kz Green Roof A 4 Medium
[Photos courtesy of RDG Planning & Design]

Before the Alfie Norville Practice Facility at Loyola University Chicago opened in August 2019, it was well-established that the venue serving basketball and volleyball would be topped with a green roof — the sustainability-minded school mandates such measures on all its buildings. What sets The Alfie apart is the creative use of the square footage and planting system afforded the design team. Live Roof supplied the system of two-foot-square, four-inch-deep trays covering 9,500 of the roof’s 14,300 square feet and providing the bed from which four different blends of sedum plants would sprout and flower perennially. RDG Planning & Design came up with the pattern — a portion of the LU Wolf face peeking from within the available image area proportions. And though Live Roof offered to recreate the official logo’s sharp lines and curves, RDG’s landscape architects instead opted to maintain a pixelated look produced by the trays within the system. The result is subtle yet unmistakable branding visible not only from a neighboring student residence hall, but by passenger planes flying overhead. “With green roofs, the trend is often to have one monochromatic plant system — all one color, very clean — or the very organic, large drifts of different plants that look very natural,” says Sara Poetting, a professional landscape architect at RDG. “With the grid system and the idea of the logo, we really wanted to get creative and have a chance to play with it more than we usually get to. We wanted to celebrate how the systems are put together, and we wanted to do something that was a little bit more special to celebrate the student-athletes.”

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