green architecture

Traditionally, the mash up of plants and buildings was an exercise in poetic symbolism. To wit: At the Princeton Ivy Club the mortared walls are well rooted for posterity–literally–with clinging ivy and the shelter of trees.

In the contemporary version, there's a new urgency: Faced not only with the necessity of making the most of our diminishing space and resources, how can we create more public greenspace as our potential undeveloped lands are disappearing?

Here are some ideas for making the most of our finite leftovers.

Besides visually expanding greenspace, plantings on building walls and roofs offer other advantages. Plants act as insulation against heat and cold, absorb rainwater, create wildlife habitat, and on a larger scale help lower urban temperatures and mitigate the heat island effect (a phenomenon of hardscaped cities creating more heat than the surrounding rural space). Plus, the ability of living plants to act as carbon storage batteries in an era of global climate change may be vital.

Interiors can be green integrated too.

The potential of green building is on display in this shop of Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester in the Gangham district of Seoul. The architect was Korean architect Minsuuk Cho of the firm Mass Studies. The building features include a planted façade and a moss-lined internal stairway. For a more detailed vision of the project, see here.

Photos by Yong-Kwan Kim

This building, the brainchild of Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, has been touted for its innovative integration of plants and architecture in a location especially known for its high temperatures, heavy rain, and sometimes day-long power shortages. The plants provide privacy while allowing for ventilation and natural daylighting.

More on this house here.

Below, more Vo Trong Nghia and his work in Viet Nam.

Here, Vo Trong's Wind and Water Bar: Not exactly a construction of living material but material that is only recently departed.

This planted façade is from a mixed-use building in Odawara, Japan.

And this, a banana plantation–or the modern urban equivalent–in the middle of Paris:

The urban forest in Tokyo: Quite possibly the future everywhere.

Public outdoor space is dwindling. The age that brought us the great city parks may be well behind us. But the desire for shared green space remains. What to do?

Rather than hide in their backyards, some enterprising dreamers (disguised as designers and gardeners) have come to save us.

What they do is build green worlds where none existed before. Or sometimes they just better exploit what's already there.

One of the best recent examples of how this might work is High Line.

For decades Staten Island was a place infamous for its stink: Blame Fresh Kills, the world's largest landfill in their midst. Closed to dumping in 2001, plans are now underway to transform this erstwhile effluvium ejector into a lush green space three times the size of Central Park.

This, from Melbourne, Australia:

Macro urban and micro residential:

Barcelona, Spain:

New Orleans:

The size of the garden isn't nearly as important as where it is:

The famous dining plaza of the Hotel Plaza Athénée, Paris:

A concept for Spiral Garden which is to be a self-sufficient vertical public garden as well as a place where social interaction, native vegetation, and urban orchards may coexist. The plan is to build them in cities and run them as a kind of public co-op. More info here.

The proposed vertical Dochodo Island Zoo in Korea:

There's much more to this than merely aesthetics. We don't have to look hard to find more urgent incentives: According to United Nations estimates, 80% of the world's citizens will live in cities by 2050. Swedish architectural firm Plantagon has an idea: The vertical greenhouse.

The greenhouse is a regenerating food bank making food production less costly for consumers and the environment. It also attempts to counter urban sprawl with a self-sufficient alternative. Plantagon's CEO Hans Hassle says this:

Essentially, as urban sprawl and lack of land will demand solutions for how to grow industrial volumes in the middle of the city, solutions on this problem have to focus on high yield per ground area used, lack of water, energy, and air to house carbon dioxide.

More on this here.

Not that aesthetics aren't reason enough.

As George Carlin said, it's not about saving the planet. The planet is fine. It's the people who're f**ked.

Nature will get it back in the end. We may as well give in to it now.

The Nanyang Art School in Singapore: Not overpowering or separate from its environment but assimilating, like a good guest. As other architectural trends go long past their expiration dates, this building will likely remain as fresh as the evergreen fescue that covers it. Nature does that.

Garden styles may trend but they never date.

Picture and source Inhabitat.com:
The roofs create open space, insulate the building, cool the surrounding air and harvest rainwater for landscaping irrigation. Planted grasses mix with native greenery to colonize the building and bond it to the setting.

(The title is taken from Grass (1918) by Carl Sandburg.)

A feeling of floating: Between space and time, in and out, material and immaterial. A place to allow the mind to bend unconsciously toward the infinite. In other words: What's possible with a clever use of light, glass, wood, and water stirred with a few strokes of historical context. This is what the best design can do: It seizes us by the body while simultaneously releasing us from it.

Bliss.

Begin with a dairy building from 1902 on the historic 850-acre Hadspen estate in Somerset, England. Then, tear, rend, gut, re-imagine, and renovate into transcendence.



The attached 215-square-foot pool acts as a heat sink for a biomass power source in the summer.

The architect is Charlotte Skene Catling, principal of the firm Skene Catling de la Peña of London.

More on this here.

Below, the Villa Berkel in Veenendaal (Netherlands). Dutch architect Paul de Ruiter used a different approach here. Historical context was demolished and scattered to the ether: A new beginning.

As before, walls dissolve into landscape, planes rise from texture, private space mingles with public, inside-out and outside-in.

Outside, a waterwall and pool; inside, a water closet where white forms rise out of a stained dark sea. They too float.

The surfaces smooth, the transitions soft, the space deep, and around every corner infinity floats beyond. More here.

Remaking nature has almost surely been a human preoccupation since our ancestors first dragged their hirsute knuckles groundward. Despite humankind's best efforts, technology‒as sexy as it is‒still has a long way to go to prove itself nature's equal. (Granted, nature had a good head start.)

Two architects who seem to understand this well are Argentinians Martín Fernández de Lema and Nicolas F. Moreno Deutsch.

Their project in Mar Azul(completed in 2007), a forest near the seaside resort area of Villa Gesell 400 km outside of Buenos Aires, mingles the mechanic with the organic in a manner as comfortable and unassuming as humanly possible.