Kevin Songer at Avid Group introduced me to this incredible concept. Living walls, vertical gardens, vegetative roofs... All support a sustainable lifestyle. Regarding indoor air quality, vertical gardens greatly improve the air you breathe and enhances the beauty of otherwise stark, commercial interiors.For examples of some beautifully done vertical gardens, visit Patrick Blanc's website and click through to "Walls" for a detailed slide show of his work.
Studies have shown that people are happier when they have a connection to nature, whether or not it's a window allowing an outside view, or the cubicle farm with a plant in every cube. Humans thrive on that connection.
Along with that, any school kid can tell you that plants feed oxygen back into the atmosphere, while we feed carbon dioxide back. It's that circle of life thing. We also know that a number of plants actually clean the air, removing harmful off-gassing from formaldehyes and other VOC's.
Now, imagine a living garden in your office. Or in your hospital. Imagine the walls thriving with life. Imagine balconies with drought-resistant succulents of varying shades of greens, reds, oranges, browns. Imagine our downtown buildings sprinkled with vegetation on the roofs to combat heat island effects and reduce carbon footprints... and on walls to aesthetically enhance the structure and pump oxygen back into the air.
There's a lot we can learn about living walls and vegetative roofs, and I know there's a number of questions in need of answering (Won't it die? Doesn't it take a lot of irrigation? Won't it be riddled with bugs?). Valid questions... but questions with positive answers.
Let's get a conversation started, as I know our experts will chime in.
4 comments:
The team at Breaking Ground Contracting walk their talk. I understand their corporate office is undergoing renovations soon, and the structure will be LEED certified, complete with those vegetated living interior and exterior walls and a green roof. This is exciting!
It is one thing to talk about becoming green, but another to live it. I hope Mary, Ellen and the others will post a chronology of their green conversion project on Sustainabuild.
Yes, Living walls and green roofs are an exciting concept! Plants remove toxins from and add oxygen to the surrounding air. Plants create a sense of place, set our minds at ease and historically reconnect us with the millions of years our ancestors spent in agrarian surroundings.
Florida presents many challenges with respect to living walls and roofs. We have the hurricane/high wind, heat, drought, intense rainfall and other issues to consider. I'd love to hear from others with living wall and green roof experiences. In the meantime - show your support for the blog and Breaking Ground's Green efforts - post a comment!
Kevin,
You're always so motivating! Thank you for the kind words and we look forward to tapping your expertise when we start our vegetated roof (and living walls.... ).
You bring up an excellent point about reconnecting with nature. There is a definite psychological connection between humans and plants. Why do we bring flowers to patients in a hospital? Why do we keep plants in our cubicles? Why do we garden?
It's all about the serenity.
Green building goes beyond water conservation and energy efficiency. It extends to human sustainability and creating healthy places to live and work.
Thanks again for your inspirational comments!
I'd heard of green roofs, not walls, though, at least not in the modern green building sense. very cool (so to speak). - maxmsf
Kevin, thanks for the kind words. We are doing our very best to 'walk the talk' and what you say (with regard to the upcoming renoavation) is true. We are looking forward with much anticipation to getting started on the design phase of our office. The possibilites are abundant. There will be several stages since, as a small business, capital outlays are always a concern, 'green' or otherwise. We hope the green roof and walls will be one of the first things we accomplish. We will be pleased to share our progress and hopefully through our experience we can help others tackle similar projects. We have already learned a great deal this past year working on another LEED registered project we have here in town. We hope to share the positive results with everyone very soon. Keep and eye out!
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