Floating Ripple Vases (by oodesign)
Fill your favorite container with water and float the vase. According to the movement of the air, the plants change their position within the container.
(via yousaucyclown)
Villa Vals by Müller and SeArch architects, Switzerland
The warmest place after all is under ground! :)
High-rise gardening
When is a skyscraper not just a skyscraper? When it’s a garden too.
Image:Boeri Studio
Forget London’s monolithic new Shard, all eyes will surely be on the Bosco Verticale when it opens in Milan at the end of this year. The new skyscraper promises to bring a hectare of forest into the city’s central business district, as well as hundreds of new homes. Rather than cold steel and glass, the surface of this high-rise will ripple with organic life.
Made of two towers – one 80m high, the other 112m – Bosco Verticale is currently being planted with 730 specially cultivated trees, 11,000 groundcover plants and 5,000 shrubs. One of the principal architects, Stefano Boeri, calls it both “radical” and an “experiment”; a reaction against the “high parallelepipeds, clad by glass, steel or ceramic” he’s witnessed in Dubai.
Trees being installed onto the Bosco Verticale skyscraper in Milan. Image: Marco Garofalo
Jill Fehrenbacher, editor of Inhabitat and a follower of architecture trends, says proposals for buildings featuring copious vegetation are increasingly common. “I have yet to see very many of these ‘living building’ designs become reality, which is why the Bosco Verticale is such a big deal,” she says.
The interdisciplinary team working on the project includes botanists as well as engineers. Their research has ventured into testing the wind resistance of certain species of tree in wind tunnels, as well as finding a suitably lightweight substrate able to meet plants’ nutritional demands. The residents’ needs are also important – trees will be trimmed so foliage doesn’t interrupt their views.
Boeri explains that the Bosco Verticale “hands over to vegetation itself the task of absorbing the dust in the air and of creating an adequate micro-climate in order to filter out the sunlight. This is a kind of biological architecture, which refuses to adopt a strictly technological and mechanical approach to environmental sustainability.”
(via wespeakfortheearth)
Introducing Tim Seggerman!
A talented architect from Brooklyn, NYC, Tim has taken a previously cluttered and cramp house and has transformed it into a beautiful, cabin-like, space.
(Source: really-shit, via dirtyxygirl-deactivated20130502)
