On Monday morning, this gorgeous living wall was resurrected to full glory after a months-long sleeping break.
Three big tall guys, protective gloves and a special fork lift (and a sunny morning) were required to get this unit up. Many hours of expertise, preparation and labour took place prior to this. Great work, everyone!
Students and staff working hard.
Looking fresh, pomp and proper. Center column left empty for research purposes.
Three commendable men did the final reassembly: many thanks to Jamie from BCIT Supplies & Management, and Colin and Sean, students in the Advanced Acoustics course of the Building Science Master’s Program. One of them will be conducting acoustical tests on this unit and getting some real valuable data that we are all eager to see.
This unit has been around for a while; it had a “previous life” producing delicious strawberries, flowers, herbs and salad greens, and attracting butterflies and hummingbirds during summertime. Every year or two the wall can be replanted with other species to experiment, which is what we are doing now.
The unit is unique among all other types of green walls at the Center for Architectural Ecology because it is freestanding and custom-made. It is standalone and does not need a real building wall or fence for support, like the other green wall modules we have. It is a fence and wall in itself: the replaceable plant-bed “drawers” are about 6″ thick, the vertical supports add another 2 inches, and the base of the frame is 4 feet thick; plants can grow up to a foot “wide” (because they are planted horizontally). Thus, due to the base of the structural frame, this unit may take up a lot more space than the other green wall systems that are mounted onto existing walls or fences and have a thinner profile ( I showed you one of them, the Modular Green, in a previous post).
This standalone structural steel unit can hold a significant amount of substrate (“engineered dirt” especially formulated for use in vertical and roof-top planting) and thus is the heaviest. It has special applications, such as in urban farming, because it can hold vegetation types that require much more substrate than the other green wall systems can provide. The frame was assembled here at BCIT in our own steel-fabrication facilities, with high quality architectural steel.
It’s gorgeous… and not “behind fences”. It’s right out on our lawn. Come by and take a look!