This week, the Vancouver Convention Centre pulls the sheet off it's new, redesigned building, and it's most striking feature is up top: A sprawling, six acre green roof that'll be the largest ever, for a non-industrial application. Designed by LMN Architects out of Seattle (which itself has become a hotbed for cutting edge green architects), it posts some fairly remarkable stats: 400,000 individual indigenous plants, which will help regulate the building's temperature.

We've written before about the largest rooftop solar array; this project by contrast is an enormous garden, which can be just as important--sunlight beating down on rooftops increases cooling costs dramatically; the reflected heat also means that cities such as Atlanta with massive expanses of concrete and asphalt disrupt their own natural weather patterns and increase cooling use in the city at large. Those are all reasons that New York and Chicago are furiously trying to incentivize living roofs.

The Vancouver building also has black water treatment systems and desalination machinery to water the plants, a heat pump that uses seawater, and cooling via radiant floor. The bottom line is a water-use reduction of 60% to 70% over similarly sized convention centers. And convention goers won't be the only beneficiaries: The building itself is stitched into the urban fabric, with 130,000 square-foot waterside promenade, and another 120,000 of public plazas. Oh, Can-ah-dah--standing guard, leading the way toward green conventions.

[Via Jetson Green]