Living it up

3 February, 2010

Architects and developers long ago learned that when you run out of horizontal space you go upwards, and now the landscapers are following suite with living walls.

Modern-day equivalents of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon started appearing some five or six years ago and there were a few teething problems. Witness the high-profile case of Paradise Park, in Islington, London, the UK’s first living wall forming one facade of a children’s visitor centre. Sadly by 2009 it was dead.

But isn’t that so often the way with new technologies? Well, they don’t actually die, in the organic sense, but there are usually hard lessons to be learned in the early days for advances to be made.

One company that’s recently produced a high-profile interior living wall is BioTecture. It is the company behind the work at the new Anthropologie store in Regent Street (see case study, right).

‘In 2006 I was working on some urban design work, primarily for the London School of Economics, looking at the feasibility of sustainable greening methods for its campus,’ says BioTecture founder Mark Laurence. ‘It became apparent that the vertical aspects of the built environment had the most underused potential for urban greening.’

He set up his own company as a result, but found many of the existing systems lacking, preferring to develop his own: ‘The key to it is the water distribution and the drainage, because a major problem when you stack it vertically is that, as it drains down the wall, it gets wetter and wetter at the bottom.’

And if you an architect or designer thinking about specifying this kind of surface, there are a few other things to bear in mind (also see also top tips for vertical gardening, below): Plants need light to grow, which an issue may be inside. Also be aware of the lead times involved as the plants have to be grown once a design is finalized, plus the installation is lengthy compared to normal surfacing. And perhaps the most important consideration of all, is maintenance – you can’t just walk away from a living wall. It needs to be continually nurtured and this adds to this cost.