Tasty Building/Landscape Fusions

I am definitely noticing the green wall/facade, vegetated architecture trend... with ASLA's blog asking the burning question: Are green walls 'the green roofs of 2008?' Seems so, at least in a theoretical, paper architecture visual sense - but as mentioned prior, green facades and walls are beginning to literally take root all over. A few notable recent finds:

Treehugger showed us the simplicity of Topiade by Gas Design Group. This overlay facade for existing Louis Vuitton stores that melds topiary forms in, you guessed it, shapes reminiscent of the LV logo... store branding to the extreme. From the renderings, it seems partially artificial and partially vegetated... Interestingly, Gas Design Group is a industrial and product design firm - illuminating for me, that like green roof technology, living wall technology will inevitably be pressured to perform not as a landscape, but as a commodity.


:: images via TreeHugger follow for additional links

On a totally different scale and concept, vegetative-leaning architect Ken Yeang's rendering for a 'bioclimatic' Elephant and Castle skyscraper in London.

:: image via Treehugger

Our third is another 'component' from a French company called Vegetalis, Greenwall S.A.S. The initial web shots shows some of the structural components for their mur vegetal, which, if my high school french doesn't fail me, means vegetated wall. Makes sense. Part of the appeal of these walls is the modularity, which has created products by a number of manufacturers, which can be installed, removed, adjusted in theoretically a simple manner... My upcoming goal is to collect examples of each of the systems to compare how they work, as well as visit some sites... now I just need to find a way to Paris.

:: image via Vegetalis - Greenwall S.A.S