Urban Landscaping: Green Walls

Patrick Blanc: Herzog & de Meuron's Caixa Forum, Madrid, Spain

Green walls have gained tremendous popularity in recent years and offer a great opportunity for an artist to integrate green public art into a building. A green wall – often referred to as a vertical garden – is either free-standing or part of a building with some sort of vegetation, seeking to make amends to the lack of space on the ground. Their notoriety could be attributed to French botanist Patrick Blanc who has helped make green walls into design icons with such projects as Pont Max Juvenal, Aix-en-Provence; architect Jean Nouvel’s Musee du quai Branly, Pairs, France; and architect group Herzog & de Meuron’s Caxia Forum, Madrid, Spain.

Young Architects Boston Group: Parti Wall, Hanging Green, Boston, MA

Parti Wall, Hanging Green, Boston, MA: designed by Young Architects Boston Group

The Young Architects Boston Group, an organization of ten young architecture and design firms, collaborated in the creation of a prototype green wall for the national convention of the American Institute of Architects in 2008. The Group’s intention was to transform a blank brick wall into a lush and green environment while generating awareness for underutilized sites in Boston. The five-story-high planted outdoor installation, named “Parti Wall, Hanging Green,” was suspended from the converted loft building known as The 1850, located at 90 Wareham Street in Boston’s South End.

Green walls not only soften the building’s façade, they can be a public display of creativity, art, and beauty. Some of the benefits associated with green walls are their functional features like:

• Provides sound insulation
• Filters air pollutants to improve air quality
• Reduces the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI)
• Moderates a building’s internal temperature via external shading
• Creates a microclimate, which will help to alter the climate of a city as a whole
• Helps a building retain heat otherwise lost to convection
• Provides storm water management, absorbing 45-75% of rainfall
• Serves as a natural water filter and water temperature moderator
• Provides biodiversity and a natural animal habitat

In Los Angeles, water use is a long-standing sensitive subject. The walls do require regular watering but from what I have been told, by many who are creating these projects in Los Angeles, succulents (including those that do not require extensive watering) really thrive in this type of structured environment.

• Ann Demeulemeester Shop, Seoul, Korea: designed by Mass Studies

Mass Studies: Ann Demeulemeester Shop, Seoul, Korea

• Woolly Pockets

Woolly Pocket: Permanent outdoor installation

Woolly Pocket: Wally diagram

Woolly Pockets are flexible, breathable, and modular gardening containers. They come in two styles: those designed to be placed on horizontal surfaces, and those designed to be hung on walls for vertical gardening. You can use Woolly Pockets both indoors and out; they have built-in moisture barriers to help protect furniture, and they’re equally at home outside in the elements. They’re perfect for creating urban gardens where you have space to garden but no land to garden in. Woolly Pockets are lightweight and can be folded flat, which makes them very easy to use, move, and store just about anywhere.

Woolly Pockets have two main components: the breathable felt and the built-in moisture barrier. The breathable portion is made of 100% recycled plastic bottles that have been industrially felted. The moisture barrier is made according to military standards for impermeability from 60% recycled plastic bottles. We stitch each pocket together by hand with a double lock stitch and strong, UV-resistant nylon thread.

Wally’s felt tongue wicks water to the roots, so you don’t water the plant — you water the tongue. Its breathable front allows excess moisture to evaporate while naturally aerating the soil, and the built-in moisture barrier protects your wall from getting wet.

Woolly Pockets is a family owned and operated company based in Los Angeles and Phoenix. They do everything they can to practice sustainability. Their offices are solar powered and qualify for LEED Platinum.



Sources: Archinect, Woolly Pockets, Mass Studies, Young Architects Boston Group