People often green up interior spaces with measly potted plants placed here or there. Why use small potted plants when you can liven up a space with a full fledge living wall? Living walls can be made up of variety of plants, ranging in color and texture providing great visual appeal. They transform a typically horizontal application to a vertical plane that can add texture and pattern to an otherwise ordinary wall. But these visually appealing living walls have more benefits than their physical appeal, so why they aren’t they everywhere?
Living walls can improve indoor air, absorb noise, and increase energy efficiency. Since plants are natural filtering systems, they are capable of removing contaminates from the air enhancing the indoor air quality and therefore the indoor environmental quality, an important category of LEED buildings. Since people spend about 90% of their time indoors, having clean indoor air is extremely important especially for health reasons. Incorporating plants indoors is a natural way to provide a healthier indoor environment.
Another way living walls improve indoor environmental quality is through noise reduction. The texture and thickness of a living wall can block certain amounts of noise depending on the depth of the plant, the plant type, and the materials used for the structure of the wall. The reduction of noise allows for a more productive working or learning environment. Interior living walls can also provide energy reductions in heating and cooling of outdoor air for use indoors. The depth of the plants provides a mass that serves as thermal insulation limiting the movement of heat.
Many architects have integrated living walls into their designs as focal pieces on both the interior and exterior:
The Rubens at the Palace Hotel in Victoria, London, is the city’s largest “living wall” – a 350 square-foot vertical landscape, composed of 16 tons of soil and 10,000 plants, designed to reduce urban flooding.
Paul Cremoux’s Casa Cormanca in Mexico City conceals a three-story wall of plants behind its slate-clad facade.
Open Planning Project by LTL Architects
Designed by Portuguese architects Luís Rebelo de Andrade, Tiago Rebelo de Andrade and Manuel Cachão Tojal, this three-story house in Lisbon was designed as a vertical garden that includes 25 different Iberian and Mediterranean plant species.
McDonough + Partners’ Bosch Siemens Showroom in the Netherlands boasts a 4-story living atrium.
A jungle of bushy ferns and sprouting begonias fills the windows of Replay’s boutique in Barcelona, designed by Italian architects Studio 10.
The David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center by Tod Williams and Billie Tsiens Architects
They are also easy to make yourself! You can easily build your own smaller scaled version without any professional help.
So the big question is where are you putting your living wall?