Veg.itecture: VIA Seeing Greens

More Veg.itecture in Action (VIA) from around the world. For those in NYC looking for the practical, the New York Botanical Garden will be hosting a symposium Creating Green Roofs: The Next Steps on March 6th. More from NYC on a L+U favorite, the High Line - with some choice words about the prosaic and the sublime from Hugh Perlman. A post from outofdoors offers discussion on the habitat potential for green roofs in Southern California. Sky Gardens provides some thoughts on the equitable access to green roofs - in particular a response to the overpriced 'eco-woofs' from Sustainable Pet Design - says why so expensive. I'd add why such awful design?

Some of the dialogue is about the difference in vision from reality (which was mentioned a bit in the post related to BIGs Moutain Dwellings), continued in views of the new visuals of Eden Bio from Eduoard Francois (shown first here in L+U). First, the vision:


:: Visual of Eden Bio - photo from Dezeen

And the reality in a few photos:




:: Eden Bio in action - photos from Dezeen

Part of the issue is time. We need the patience to wait out the inevitable timeline of growth of plants to make their way into the project form. For now the green paint and wooden trellis structures will have to suffice in giving a prelude, and see how it shakes out. On the opposite subject - a range of some designs that made it past drawings, photoshop and construction to retain some semblance of realistic implementation:

SESC School for Secondary Education, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
by Indio da Costa AUDT




:: images via WAN

The Wellness Center, College of New Rochelle, New York
by ikon.5 architects


:: images via WAN

YTL Residence Kuala Lumpur
by Jouin Manku




:: images via SpaceInvading

HouseC Chiba, Japan
by Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP Co., Ltd.






:: images via SpaceInvading

Interior Green Wall
Wait until you see the exterior of this one... coming soon.


:: image via Contemporist

A Trio of Asian Roof Terraces
Via Urban Greenery: “Official in Shanghai’s Luwan District hope to have planted 13,000 square meters of roof garden by the end of this year in an attempt to cool down buildings and save energy.”


:: Shanghai - image via Urban Greenery


:: Singapore - image via Urban Greenery


:: Tokyo - image via Urban Greenery

MFO Park
And you can never show too many pics of the great MFO Park, this time via VULGARE.






:: images via VULGARE

To get into some of the mechanisms at play, outofdoors delves into a couple of different ideas in two separate posts, including clinging vines, climbing vines, and espalier - with some examples that work in a California ecoregion.


:: clinging - creeping fig - image via outofdoors


:: climbing - bougainvillea - image via outofdoors


:: espalier - apple - image via outofdoors

And one of the things I really like to differentiate is the highly designed from the more organic... and there are no shortage of opportunities to see these more 'natural' of sem-designed veg.itectural specimens in action - often the subject of Urban Greenery.


:: Building in Cairo - image via Urban Greenery


:: Abandoned castle in Sorrento - image via Urban Greenery


:: taking root - image via Urban Greenery