Boundary and skin
Green wall
housing boundary wall school office building parking
A wall or facade covered with plants. It can be a facade of climbers growing from the ground on cables or mesh, or a living wall with substrate and irrigation on the vertical face itself.
What it solves
It shades the wall and keeps it cooler, so less heat gets inside. It offers food, shelter and nesting places to birds and insects in cities where almost no open ground is left.
Today
Choose native climbers planted in deep soil at the foot of the wall, with cables or mesh set away from it. If you choose a living wall with substrate, plan the irrigation, drainage, access for pruning and who will look after it every month.
Common mistake
Installing an eye-catching vertical garden without an irrigation plan or a maintenance budget, which dries up in a few months and is left as an empty structure.
Tomorrow
In hot neighborhoods, boundary walls and blank facades can become green corridors for birds, bees and butterflies, cared for by neighbors. Watering them with rainwater or treated gray water saves the drinking water they use today.
Fact Thanks to transpiration, the leaf surface does not rise more than 4 to 5 °C above air temperature. Sometimes it stays below it.
Where it comes from
- 1University landscape architecture Urbana, Illinois, United States, 1938
A landscape architecture professor patented a planted wall system, which never went beyond prototypes in his backyard. - 2Contemporary vertical garden City of Science and Industry, Paris, 1986
A botanist, an architect and an engineer achieved there the first large indoor living wall that worked successfully. - 3Study of urban birds Staffordshire, England, 2010 and 2011
On 27 walls with climbers, birds nested, fed and took shelter, while on 27 bare walls they were never seen.
Masters
- Geoffrey Bawa Kandalama Hotel, Dambulla, Sri Lanka, 1994
He designed a long building resting on the rock, with a green roof and facades that the jungle gradually covered with climbers. The vegetation shades the rooms and blends the building with the forest.
Appears in the routes
See also
Also in Boundary and skin
Diagrams and texts by LDB Arquitectura. They are shared under the CC BY 4.0 license, which allows them to be used and adapted with credit to the source.