Living Walls
In Situ Plants is a company I discovered at Hermann & Audrey gallery on the weekend. I LOVE their philosophy about “humans’ innate need for affiliation with other living organisms”. For me, I combine that craving for the outdoors with a love of design and voila; I became an Interior Environmentalist. Here is my shot of In Situ’s beautiful installation in the front entrance of Hermann & Audrey gallery, Toronto.
In Situ provides singular, spectacular interior landscapes, vertical gardens, and other plant installations that beautify indoor spaces and reconnect us with nature. They believe like me that it is our duty in the modern world to strive towards sustainability. Like us they own no motorized vehicles, and travel primarily by bicycle or foot! A company after my own heart!
They also got me thinking about other vertical gardens, living walls and the designers and architects that turn plants into the foundations of rooms and buildings; not just the décor. Here’s a highlight reel of some inspirational projects on different continents.
When Anthropologie opened their first European store, they did so with a big, green statement! In London, England, the living wall in their Regent Street shop spans three stories and provides a transporting feeling to the urban chaos of one of the busiest shopping districts in the world.
Patrick Blanc, a French botanist, has been heralded as the inventor of living walls. His project ‘L'Oasis d'Aboukir’ is a 25 meter high green wall that completely covers the façade of a building in Paris’ second arrondissment. There are over 200 different species of plants that have been planted in a way that gives them the appearance of growing in diagonal waves. The project was created for Paris Design Week in 2013.
Photograph by Yann Monel.
Photograph by Yann Monel.
Leaving Europe and swinging back to North America, a project that combined Canadian architecture and Los Angeles style is the Brooks Avenue House. Vancouver based firm Bricault Design created a space that not only connects to the outdoors by large doors the open up to the courtyard, it represents the outdoors with a living wall wrapping around three sides of the building.
Apart for the connection to plants that In Situ talks about, there are other practical reasons to have plants make up your space. In Shanghai, China, pollution is an ongoing factor and Café 27’s plant décor not only reflects their organic menu, but actually helps make the building ‘healthier’. The wall of plants in the glass space are not only beautiful, they purify the air.
Image by Hu Yihuai.