Posts tagged outdoor greenwall
Sustainable Vertical Garden Design
Mar 3rd
Here’s an interesting set of vertical garden designs from Sustainable Garden Design in Perth, Australia. As you can see right away, there’s an interesting choice of plants for the vertical garden due to the climate and the designs are really unique. Using a combination of rocks and interesting building materials, these living walls really stand out… and somehow still work with the landscape.
Unique living wall
Rock Tower Living Walls
Vertical garden as a garden screen
Green wall garden screen close up
Unique Vertical garden
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.
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
Close-up of Goodwill’s living wall
Jan 17th
Goodwill vertical garden
A vertical garden in a Tacoma Goodwill (just outside of Seattle) has about 100 different plant varieties installed. The wall was built in Patrick Blanc’s style and has layers of felt stapled together which hold pockets of dirt for the plants to grow in. It’s watered hydroponically. The wall is 20 by 40 feet.. so a total size of 800 square feet. Blanc even came to visit to supervise the installation of the living wall.
Blanc built his first vertical garden (mur vegetal in French) 30 years ago. He was inspired by seeing plants growing on rocks straight up a cliff using little or no soil.
Ferns, shrubs, liriope and Japenese forest grass are included in the living wall. Theres’ 96 plants total. The epimedium isn’t doing great, but the yews, andromeda and iris are doing well. Even the woody plants are doing well.
Goodwill Living Wall Close Up
A metal frame attached to the building with PVC piping on top of that. Then two layers of felt are attached over the piping and metal backing. Slits are cut into the felt to make little planting pockets. Some of the soil was knocked off the plant roots, then the plants were placed in the felt.
The 20′ by 40′ foot wall has two horizantal bands of drip irrigation (one every 10′ of vertical garden). So the water and nutrients are fed hydroponically. In the winter the system is turned off to prevent the wall from freezing.
