Category: plants
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Veg.itecture #27
The next installment of the Vegetated Architecture series – with a grab bag of interesting examples. For starters, the announcement that Jean Nouvel’s winning entry for the landmark tower in Paris’s La Defense district (featured in Veg.itecture #18) bested entries by Liebskind, Foster, and others. Some additional images of the project, and a quote via…
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Plants for IAQ
The potential for plants to contribute to remediation of air, water, and soil have all been mentioned at L+U. One item that was discussed in some length was the idea of indoor biofiltration or the use of plants and living walls to provide indoor pollutant reduction. This can be done either passively through introduction of…
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The Power of Plants
It never ceases to amaze me the wonder of plants in all of their many forms and functions. A few night back I caught the end of a special on Nova about the search for the ‘First Flower’ – which highlighted the story of Archaefructus liaoningensis, the “…ancient plant discovered in the fossil beds of…
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Veg.itecture #24
I decided to clean out the archives of great vegetated architecture – partly from necessity and partly spurred a special Architectural Element feature on Vertical Gardens from A Daily Dose of Architecture and by the recent coverage in the NY Times Design & Living 2008 special mag, featuring the likes of Ann Demeulemeester’s vegetated Seoul…
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Veg.itecture #23
It’s been a wild week – and finally settling down to getting some posts that have been in process finished up and out the door. (That is, before heading back to work 🙂 Although Martha Schwartz would disagree, I’m still betting on vertical and horizontal building greening as a way of redefining landscape architecture for…
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Reading List: Inspired by Nature: Plants
This past weekend, I swung by my local mecca of all things printed word, and as always was both struck and disappointed with the selection of architectural titles. One they had in the newish ‘green building’ section at Powell’s was ‘Inspired by Nature – Plants: The Building Botany Connection’ by Bahamon, Perez, and Compello (published…
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Furnish Green
Picking up some threads of a recent post about some inventive site furnishings, as well as the ongoing obsession with Vegetated Architecture brings another melding of the two. A range of vegetated furniture that ranges from the purely decorative to the downright functional. First, a quick shot from Michael Cannell’s blog at Dwell – with…
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Aqueous Solutions Pt.3: Restoration
We complete this aqueous journey (don’t you love when something simple turns into something wonderful?) and we end with some brutal reality and some hope as to our ability to turn the tide of our technological wrong-doing. I would posit that perhaps the most compelling reading of the year so far in landscape architecture were…
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Aqueous Solutions Pt. 1: Use/Reuse
Water is obviously something we rely on for a number of things beyond mere existence. At the root of water, however, is it’s ability to sustain us both physically and spiritually. It’s disheartening then to see how much we take this for granted, or exploit and destroy this seemingly ubiquitous (yet actually very precious) resource.…
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Mimic Nature
Often the use of natural forms is implemented for aesthetic or biophilic reasons, and the resultant forms tend to span the gamut from stunning to awful. We’ve shown examples of abstracted trees here and here – and the use of natural forms often peeks into building both as a metaphor for ecological function as well…