In the nebulous region where art, landscape and architecture intersect, more opportunities are emerging for seeding the urban environment with something besides Kentucky Bluegrass and strangled sidewalk trees. As urban designers continue to set precedents, we hope it will get easier for cities to bring planting into more unexpected locations, knitting bridges, roofs, and walls into greenways. At any rate, another small survey seems in order:
- Designer Francois Jegou has said, "The first guideline for sustainability is: Use what already exists". By engaging a site's history, landscape architects such as Peter Latz, and Julie Bargmann's D.I.R.T. Studio apply this notion to the postindustrial landscape, remediating brownfields or integrating parks into former factory sites.
- French botanist Patrick Blanc has developed a system for truly sublime vertically-oriented living walls. Rising to several storeys, the Mur Végétal is a tropical garden embedded into felt substrate. Applying his profound knowledge of local microclimates and plant integration, Blanc is known to be one of the only people who can pull off a lasting, self-sustaining, vertical system outdoors. Similar indoor installations claim an improvement in air quality, but who wouldn't want one in their office?
- Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham's Green Green Screen (top right) clearly uses a similar technology, though they've pulled off a reversal - integrating living walls into a temporary construction fence, they've seamlessly incorporated advertising (a requirement for the project) into the planting surface.
- Depending on where we live, green roofs can appear, in principle, mainstream; actually getting them integrated into North American cities can be a challenge. One of the primary benefits of successful eco-renovation and Green Roof projects like the Ford River Rouge Plant is the precedent they set as practical - and not simply aesthetic - solutions. Greening Gotham has pulled together a critical mass of successful local projects to develop a wide-ranging vision of a fully green-roofed NYC (just check out that animation..). As part of Earth Pledge, they've also been involved in creating green roof gardens with schoolkids and integrating kitchen gardens into rooftops.
- Renzo Piano's studio has developed a radically new profile for the new California Academy of Sciences' green roof (more on the project here) by creating a rolling, three-dimensional roof structure, now possible through advances in green roof technologies. (Though short-lived, Griffin Enright Architects' experiment Keep off the Grass - Planar Landscape Phenomena comes to mind.)
