Posts tagged green design
Massive Vertical Garden in Portland, Oregon
Feb 11th
Vertical Garden Portland
Wyatt Federal Building is planning to build a row of 250 ft. trellises along the west side of its building. SERA Architects is in charge of the remodel of the entire building and has a $135 million budget from the Federal stimulus fund. It’s a unique vertical garden that’s build on a series of 7 panels called ‘vegetated fins’ that will help shade a cool the west side of the building.
The vertical garden will be eye catching, but functional as well. In the winter when the leaves fall off the vertical garden to reveal bare stems, natural light will be let in the building. The entire budget also includes allowances for solar arrays, electricity-generating elevators and a smart lighting system.
SERA Architects is still trying to figure out what plants will grow at over than 200 feet in the air. To prune the walls, workers will be lowered from the the top of the vertical garden like window washers.
My personal take is that it’s a bit much. That’s going to cost a lot of money out of a stimulus fund where a living wall on a bit of a smaller scale would do well. Building something that high in the air as individual wedges would cost a fortune. I’d say if it was done lower to the ground, it would save an exponential amount of money. Then if some of the savings were used to put up an indoor biowall to actively filter the air as well, it might be a better use of cash to go green.
Via Washington Post
Natural air cleaning
Feb 9th
St. Gabriel's Parish living wall 3m x 8m
Nedlaw Living Walls make living walls with a purpose – to clean out indoor air pollutants and allergens. It’s a different focus than standard living walls/vertical gardens. Given the correct installation of the living walls, they can actually replace traditional air filters in your home.
The leaves of the plants change the carbon dioxide into oxygen, but it’s the roots of the plants that take out most of the chemicals according to multiple studies. The living walls from Naturaire facilitate the process of the air cleaning by using a fan and drawing air from the home through the roots of the plants and back out into the room. That process helps clean out the home of the over 300 voc’s (volatile organic compounds) that can potentially be found there.
The living wall system can degrade and breakdown the VOC’s quickly and naturally, even in large volumes of air and acts as a completely natural biofilter. Since they no only can capture, but also breakdown the VOC’s, they end up being able to remove many harmful pollutants that other air filters can’t. According to their website, the air quality of a space relying almost entirely on an active living wall is at least as good as a similar indoor space using a high-tech ventilation system that replaces the building air up to six times per hour.
You can make the living wall system an active biofilter in one of two ways: hooking it up to the HVAC or using a fan in the back of the living wall. The HVAC is the most effective way because it can filter the air of the whole house. The air is drawn through the living wall and cleaned, then into the HVAC system and then disseminated through the house. The second method works as well, but is more localized as it just draws and circulates the air from a particular room.
Remington Group Living Wall freestanding 2 sided wall 35 meters square
How well does the system work?
During studies at the University of Guelph, common indoor air pollutants were released into the air to determine the living wall’s effect on the VOC’s. A single pass through the Living Wall removed up to 80% of the formaldehyde, 50% of the toluene and 10% of TCE (trichloroethylene). The filter is only 5 cm thick, but the ability to have such a strong effect on the chemicals is amazing.
“Concentrations of toluene and formaldehyde in the aquatic system did not increase during the four-week experiment, suggesting that these materials were readily metabolized. TCE levels in the aquatic system initially did increase slightly, but then plateaued, suggesting a possible capability to degrade this compound. Even before the challenge, we knew that two to three percent of the bacteria present had the ability to break down VOCs.” -From their website
“Through photosynthesis, green plants are able to convert CO2 — which is considered an indoor pollutant — into oxygen. The true impact of this on indoor air quality is minor. To be a true CO2 scrubber would require over 10m2 of wall per occupant instead of the typical 0.2m2required to provide clean air.”
How big do you want the living wall?
The suggested dimensions are 1 square meter or yard of active living wall or biofilter (a living wall with an air circulation system attached) for every 100 square feet of floor space.
Remington Vertical Garden
WESST Corporation (Women’s Economic Self-Sufficiency Team) 420 sq ft
Living walls home owner
Sassafraz Restaurant, Toronto living wall 22 sq meters
Outdoor vertical succulent garden
Feb 3rd
Succulent living wall
Joan and William Feldman had a backyard with a little pond in LA, California. However.. it didn’t have enough green for their tastes so they wanted to spice it up a bit. The didn’t have a lot of room.. land prices being what they are.. so they needed a solution to get some green on the bare walls to make them really pop.
Landscape designer Mia Lehrer and her associate, Holly Kuwayama, came up with a solution.. which was to hang a garden on the wall, that could thrive without much soil or water. Succulents were used as they need little water, so they’re light, and they have shallow roots, so not much soil is required.
Vines can take a while to fill up a space.. whereas vertical gardens can be installed relatively quickly. They also have the added advantage of being able to use a bunch of different colors from different plants in the design. They went various nurseries for the right plants to use in the living wall: echeverias and aeoniums, plump sedums and crassulas, senecios and kalanchoes… which all said and done.. provided a lot of interesting colors.
Succulents vertical garden
The designers came up with using a three-by-five-foot steel armature with two layers of metal mesh to create a wide, shallow box. The box was then stuffed with a blend of sphagnum moss and cactus mix to use in place of soil.. and was planted with hundreds of cuttings. About 45 days later, once the plants took root, the living wall was ready to mount, with eyebolts and heavy brackets.
For maintenance.. all that’s needed is a spray from the hose once a week.. fertilizer isn’t needed at all. The only issue they had was some of the aeoniums grew a bit too big to keep the uniform look of the wall planter.. so they have to be cut back every once and a while.
All in all.. it’s a great design that really makes a small outdoor space green up.
Grass Mirror
Jan 23rd
Grass Mirror
Grass Mirror is a very innovative project from H2O Architects. Adding this green look in your living area would be a nice choice to create natural ambience inside the house.. plus it’s a real eye-catcher. The planter is a rectangular prism cut on an angle to make room for plants. The mirrors can be moved around to make wider gaps and promote different types of reflection of the grass and mirror.
Wall mounted vertical garden
The interested thing is that the Grass Mirror is not made out of a mirror at all, but out of polished stainless steel. It’s an indoor wall mounted vertical garden that’s 43 inches in length, four inches in width, and four inches in height and can be stacked one on another to make a larger reflective living wall.
Reflective vertical garden
Vertical garden diagram
