It’s a Jungle Out There: 10 Green Façades That Use Plentiful Planters

A street corner in Turin, Italy, got a major upgrade when Luciano Pia created an urban jungle at an apartment complex that is more like a treehouse than a housing block. 25 Verde not only makes an oasis in the city with lush, green spaces, but it is also biomimetically designed to be sustainable: When vegetation is in bloom, it creates its own micro-climate, while the building harvests rainwater for watering the plants. Natural ventilation and geothermal technology help regulate temperature.

Image © Beppe Giardino

Indeed green façades are becoming more popular for the obvious reasons of beauty and eco-friendliness, they can be complicated to realize on smaller-scale or lower-budget projects. Often a simple system of planters, large or small, can offer an equally dramatic solution. They can even consume the entire building, as in Vo Trong Nghia Architects’ wonderful House for Trees.

House for Trees by Vo Trong Nghia Architects

Meanwhile, Dutch architects MVRDV have experimented with planters at different scales, from their Torre Huerta Socialopolis and its cartoonishly big pots embedded in balconies, to the Gwanggyo Power Center, where each story has a ring of planters along its outside walkway, making green, hill-like masses.

Torre Huerta Socialopolis. Image courtesy MVRDV

Gwanggyo Power Center. Image courtesy MVRDV

Another leader in green façades and planters is Eduardo Francois, who has completed both real work — including “The Building that Grows” in Montpellier (2000) and the “Flower Tower” in Paris (2004) — and speculative projects, like the “Tower of Biodiversity,” where an entire ecosystem is compressed into a single building.

Tower of Biodiversity by Maison Edouard François.

Here are some of our favorite projects from the Architizer project database that do not integrate their vegetation into the tectonics of their façades but instead opt for the flexibility of planters, expressed as such.

Hotel Lone by Studio 3LHD Rovinj, Croatia

A hanging garden made from a series of wooden baskets with live plants resembles a curtain.

Tower Flower by Maison Edouard François, Paris, France

These giant flower pots hang from the balconies, inspired by traditional Parisian hanging window planters.

House of Niches by ayeneh office, Najafabad, Iran

The house as “niches” carved into its smooth white walls, most of which hold plants, but they can also be used for other decorative elements.

Trees on the Roofby Meditch Murphey Architects, Chevy Chase, MD

By placing trees on the roof, the architects make the whole site a green landscape.

41 Bond by Future Green Studio, New York City, NY

Greenery subtly frames the fenestrations of this 8-story façade in NoHo.

Stacking Green by Vo Trong Nghia + Daisuke Sanuki + Shunri Nishizawa, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam

You might remember Nghia from the House for Trees. This façade is filled with greenery, which plays off the Saigonese tradition of urban vegetation in a dense city.