Buildings Sprout Living Walls 

White Rock, a small suburb outside of Vancouver, Canada can now boast to having the largest green wall in North America thanks to Green Over Grey, Vancouver, Canada-based company that design and install green walls (also known as living walls). The once bare 3000 square foot wall is now a lush garden of a wide variety of plant life. It is located on the facade of the Semiahmoo Public Library and RCMP Facility.

This living wall is literally a breathing, photosynthesising skin. It consists of over 10,000 individual plants representing more than 120 unique species. Among these are ground covers, large perennials, shrubs and small trees. This self-sufficient vertical garden is affixed to the exterior of the building, although it is also possible to grow such a garden in an interior space. The technology developed for this method is soil-free, and plants receive water and nutrients from vertical supports along the facade rather than the ground. This mimics the capillary action that plants use naturally to grow vertically on cliffs, bluffs, branches or along waterfalls.

BAHAR TOWERS

A quick glimpse at the upcoming weather for Abu Dhabi will show a week of intense sunshine, temperatures steadily above 100 degrees Fahrenheit with 0% chance of rain. In such extreme weather conditions, even architects listing environmental design as their top priority are up against a tough battle. Never mind that the sand can compromise the structural integrity of the building, the intense heat and glare can render a comfortable indoor environment relatively impossible if not properly addressed. For Abu Dhabi’s newest pair of towers, Aedas Architects have designed a responsive facade which takes cultural cues from the “mashrabiya”, a traditional Islamic lattice shading device.

Completed in June 2012, the 145 meter towers’ Masharabiya shading system was developed by the computational design team at Aedas. Using a parametric description for the geometry of the actuated facade panels, the team was able to simulate their operation in response to sun exposure and changing incidence angles during the different days of the year.

The screen opperates as a curtain wall, sitting two meters outside the buildings’ exterior on an independent frame. Each triangle is coated with fiberglass and programmed to respond to the movement of the sun as a way to reduce solar gain and glare. In the evening, all the screens will close.

At night they will all fold, so they will all close, so you’ll see more of the facade. As the sun rises in the morning in the east, the mashrabiya along the east of the building will all begin to close and as the sun moves round the building, then that whole vertical strip of mashrabiya will move with the sun,” said Peter Oborn, the deputy chairman of Aedas.

It is estimated that such a screen will reducing solar gain by more than 50 percent, and reduce the building’s need for energy-draining air conditioning. Plus, the shade’s ability to filter the light has allowed the architects to be more selective in glass finished. ”It (the screen) allows us to use more naturally tinted glass, which lets more light in so you have better views and less need of artificial light. It’s using an old technique in a modern way, which also responds to the aspiration of the emirate to take a leadership role in the area of sustainability,” added Oborn.

NASA Ames Sustainability Base, Building N232

AECOM worked with design architect William McDonough + Partners, guiding NASA to achieve a LEED platinum rating for the new N232 office building. The 50,000-square-foot, two-story facility, known as Sustainability Base, officially opened April 20, 2012.
When NASA planned to add the first new building in 20 years to the Ames Research Center, home to much of the agency’s most innovative technology, the goal was that the facility be an exemplar in sustainability. The result is a working environment that prioritizes user health and comfort with natural daylight, fresh air and temperature control while making minimal environmental impacts. Sustainability Base will save more than 60 percent of the energy and more than 80 percent of the water typically used by a facility of its type.

AECOM’s High-Performance Buildings group provided the innovative engineering

behind this model facility. An onsite fuel cell, roof-mounted photovoltaic solar panels, a geothermal heat pump, passive and low-energy HVAC systems, and intelligent building controls that interact with users are among the building’s advanced engineering features.
AECOM served as architect of record, engineer of record and landscape architect of record for the project, while William McDonough + Partners led the design vision and sustainability goals for the project. The team also included Loisos Ubbelohde (lighting consultant), Siteworks Studio (landscape design), and MBDC (materials assessment).
Awards

• San Jose Journal 2010 Green Building of the Year
• U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) 2010 Real Property Award in the category of Green Innovation
• Nominee, 2010 Presidential GreenGov Award
• Nominee, 2011 Presidential GreenGov award 

Arnulf Park

München | Germany | Completed 2005 

Gardens by the Bay

Singapore

Singapore ‘s latest addition to its public infrastructure success list is the Gardens by the Bay.

Located within the Marina Bay Sands precinct, the attractions within The Gardens include Flower Dome, Cloud Forest, Supertree Grove, Heritage Gardens, The World of Plants, Dragonfly Lake, Kingfisher Lake and Bay East Garden.

There are nine cafes and restaurants for visitors to choose from.

 The Cloud Forest is housed in a dome-like structure that is fully air-conditioned.

A 35-metre tall “mountain” is overgrown with lush vegetation and at the top of this structure is where the world’s tallest indoor waterfall begins its steep ascend down to the bottom.

 Cloud forest water cycle
Before water becomes part of a waterfall, it must reach the cloud forest floor as:

1. Throughfall – rain falling through gaps in the canopy
2. Stemfall – water flowing down the outside of branches and tree trunks
3. Crown drip – most rain hits the canopy and drips from leaves
4. Fog drip – mist turns to water droplets as it comes in contact with vegetation, this can drip from leaves and mosses. 

 The water is either used by the plants and animals for survival, evaporated back into the atmosphere or be stored in the soil and pools, feeding humble streams or mighty waterfalls.

 Some of this water is stored in the soil reservoir and slowly makes its way down the mountain in trickles, gushes or even as part of a mighty waterfall, supplying water to people, plants and animals who live below.

 The moss and lichen covered branches of the cloud forest capture the water from the fog that is blown from the ocean. This process adds hundreds of millimeters of water to the ecosystem every year.

The secret world tells a story of an ancient and long lost world – the plants here belong to families that were abundant in the distant past, yet today, they have become increasingly rare.

At the top of the world, you are at an altitude of about 2,000m above sea level. Below you, the forest floor is at approximately 1,000m above the sea.

Hubmann Vass

Vienna

 The aim of the new circulation system at the Castello di Rivoli and the redesign of the southeast flank of the adjoining hillside is to create a closer link between the city and the castle. Rivoli, a small town on the western edge of Turin, is dominated by this monumental eighteenth-century Juvarra building, which was never completed. The castle, the culmination of a 13-kilometer-long baroque axis heading from the city to the countryside, sits atop a moraine. Castello di Rivoli currently houses an internationally renowned museum of contemporary art. The hill’s ridge is one of the city’s most important green spaces, while the largely unused areas surrounding the castle – particularly those on the southeast – hold potential for urban recreational space of the first order. The design seeks to use the outdoor spaces sustainably and link them more closely to the museum.

 The prominent southeast slope of the hill, the site of the intervention, takes on a new key role. Across from the historic approach to the castle on the northwest side of the hill, facing away from the city, due to its location between the city’s “back” side and the incomplete garden wing of the castle (its monumental terraces were never realized), it remained inaccessible and undefined, an “inner periphery” – for centuries. The divergent scales of the city and the castle come together unmitigated in this interstitial space. This tension creates the setting for sustainable, not-for-profit uses, and can thus be manifest in a positive manner. The design lodges this inner periphery in the consciousness of the city’s residents and visitors on three different levels: as urban landscape with a new planting concept, as recreational space within walking distance, and, by means of the escalators and ramps incised in the hillside, as a direct connection. The small-scale building components in coloured concrete and Corten steel, as well as the surfaces wrought in Istrian limestone, gravel, and rammed earth emerge from the otherwise completely green hillside.

 -Paths and stopping points: The existing narrow streets, which served more to reroute traffic around the city centre than to provide access to the castle, have now been closed to automobile traffic and are the framework for the new system of paths. Embedded in the orchard, a truncated piece of an old street tied into the overall design via stairs and ramps serves as a place to pass time. A group of mature cedars shades a new system of stairs that is interspersed with terraces and flat segments of the path.

Access by escalator: On the side of the hill facing Turin, an intricate pattern of visual relationships is woven by the cuts in the slope and the traces of the spaces embedded within the slope, and dynamically frames the specific scales present in the surroundings – a smaller version of the system of axes in Turin’s landscape, between Venaria Reale, Stupinigi, Superga and Rivoli. The ascent and descent take different paths: via ramps, terraces, stairs and escalators, and through galleries, courtyards and grottoes, a relaxed, rhythmic sequence of movement, deemed La Ronde, provides surprising views of the buildings in Rivoli’s historic centre and Turin’s landscape.