a bit of green

Searching for vertical garden examples, I stumbled upon those plans for a free standing hydroponic plant wall.

It’s a proposal for a botanical garden or a public space, that consists of three large curved walls, free standing, with over than 11.000 plants on the sides of the walls. The plans were made by Peter Kastan, the co-writer of the blog Jungle Walls. The design is colorful, a mix of digital and traditional-like media. Enjoy!

Remember that post about vertical gardens?

I tried to gather information on how to make one, in case you’re one of those with green fingers and not enough space to exercise them, or just want your own green wall.
Green walls can be simple or more complex, depending on your needs. The cost of making a vertical garden mainly consists of the price of the structure materials, which is pretty standard, and the cost of the plants, which can vary greatly depending on your choice of flora.

Here’s a very nice project I stumbled upon, called Creating a Greener House. It’s about the restoration of a 1928 house where great attention was given to energy efficiency. The site contains details about insulation, energy efficient heating and cooling and ventilation. A heat reclamation device is also installed in the form of a shower heat recovery mechanism. Measurements of the actual energy savings have also been made.

A green wall at São Paulo.

A green wall is a wall partially or completely covered with vegetation. Green walls can either be free-standing or part of a building. There are two main categories of green walls: green façades and living walls. The vegetation for a green façade is attached on outside walls, but there is also the case of indoor living walls where the vegetation lies on interior walls. Green walls are also referred to as living walls, biowalls, or vertical gardens.

Recycling materials is one of the most important things one can do for the environment. That’s exactly the challenge Rural Studio took. Rural studio is an undergraduate program of the School of Architecture at Auburn University that forms a design-build architecture studio aiming to help poor communities of the School’s area. Sponsored by Interface, the world’s largest manufacturer of carpet tiles, they used worn carpet tiles in the construction of a house for a family in Alabama, now known as Lucy/Carpet  House.

House in harmony with nature.

We can almost see you sitting in your house, wondering how to make it more environmentally friendly. Going green will be good both for you and the environment, since you’ll get a healthier life style and long term savings while taking a little step in helping our planet. Supposing you’re not building your house from the ground up, you probably want to improve a house that’s already done: what you need is green interior design methods. Since green products are getting more mainstream attention lately, they have also become a lot cheaper. It is fairly easy and not very expensive to do some green remodeling to your home’s interior to improve its greenness. We will talk a little bit about little changes here, along with some major changes which require a bit more effort and money but they are really worth your while.