Making living wall art
Landscape Architect Elif Bonelli’s Vertical Garden
Feb 21st
Landscape Architect Vertical Garden
Istanbul is a crowded city in Turkey that doesn’t have a lot of green space. There’s not a lot of room for landscape architects to build anything green in the downtown core. Due to the crowded space, room to garden horizontally is hard to find which means the gardens you do see are often pricey.
Landscape architecture company Botanic Garden in Istanbul began working on the Gizia Showroom. It’s a new building of one of the leading international textile companies in Turkey. The building is located in an old business area of Istanbul where it’s very crowded. Without a space for a normal garden, both the owner and the architect team got creative and decided to create the first outdoor vertical garden installation in all of Turkey.
There is a small outdoor space at the top of the building. It’s completely surrounded by high walls which means there’s no view of the city from there. The garden is a way for the eye to catch some green space while not taking up a lot of room in the small courtyard.
The living wall is 3.5m high and 6.5m wide. Steel was used to stabilize the structure with PVC sheets attached to that and then a fabric covered the PVC sheets. Pockets in the fabric were created which were then filled with perlite.
The plants in the living wall don’t need soil to provide the nutrients and support. The plants and their bare roots are stuffed into the perlite-filled pockets. The irrigation system pumps liquid soluble nutrients and water up to the top of the garden where it’s distributed across the porous fabric and perlite.
The green wall is covered by a large blue sheet of a stucco net. It gives a bright background to the plants and reinforces the contrast between nature and the concrete jungle; with nature winning! It also helps the fabric stay together as, in this case, the fabric used is organic and it may eventually start to rot. The growth of the plants will eventually cover the blue sheet to make way to a purely green wall.
A German Vertical Garden System
Feb 19th
Green wall planter
Here’s a vertical garden design from Germany. You can see that there are five planters in each module. Their website indicates you can keep the planters straight or angle them depending on what you want to grow. The PLANT-ED WALL ™ is 228.5 cm tall and 112 cm long.
My first thought upon seeing this design is it looks similar to eavestrouphs. You can get PVC eavestrophs from your local hardware store and purchase end caps. They’re about 5″ long and 4″ deep I believe, so you couldn’t grow plants that needed a super large root base, but there are many plants that could do fine in with a 4″ root depth. If you’re into welding, you could make a planter similar to this using aluminum eaves potentially, though it’d be quite the construction project.
The Plant-Ed Wall is an interesting concept anyway that could maybe inspire some design ideas for vertical gardens. It looks like this one has wheels attached at the base which would make them work well as office dividers.
Google translator gave this from their site:
“Lush vegetation, exotic shapes and leaves in a thousand different shades of green give your rooms a healthy living environment and an amazing atmosphere. The plant wall is literally revitalizing and all this space-saving, attractive interior decoration is healthy.
Specially designed columns support Planters in straight or inclined position. Be planted in the boxes with sturdy plants watered hydroponically. At sites with minimal natural light, energy-efficient lighting systems are installed.”
Found at http://www.insideurbangreen.org
The German website: http://www.dieraumbegruener.de
Wall planter
Planted Wall
Green wall
Different types of Vertical Gardens Analyzed
Feb 5th
Tokyo Green Space came out with an interesting chart comparing different types of vertical gardens to one another. It’s easy to see a bunch of different vertical gardens and get overwhelmed, but his chart does a good job of breaking the options and features down into three categories: Corporate, Small Business and Residential with different size systems for each.
Vertical Gardens
Office Divider Greenery
Jan 13th
Here’s a green idea for an office divider. It’s a living wall that’s moveable so you can slide it wherever you want in an office. This is a great youtube video with the interviewer getting solid information about how to build a living wall. You can make the vertical garden different colours depending on what plants you use and some of the benefits of having a living wall are explained in the video such as cleaning the air of a building. This vertical garden used 4 layers of felt and is made of polyester so it doesn’t rot or break down over time.
