Integrated Benefits of Outdoor Living Walls

 Green infrastructure occurs in the liminal space where architecture meets landscape architecture, structures integrate with the natural world and buildings adjoin nature. A smart exterior green wall will look similar to the conventional one but will serve more purposes and have more benefits due to the incorporated technology. No other cladding material can provide the following combined benefits:

• Remove air pollutants
• Reduce urban temperatures
• Thermal benefits to buildings
• Improve biodiversity
• Attenuate Rainwater
• Reduce noise
• Increase productivity & creativity
• Improve sense of well-being
• Health benefits

According to a wide-ranging 2016 study the World Health Organisation cites poor air quality as being a link to more than 5.5 million premature deaths annually. In densely populated areas of high rise these pollutants can become trapped in urban street canyons. The potential for Green Infrastructure to mitigate these pollutants has been explored in academic studies.

Plants helpfully capture toxins, gases, and particulate matter by engaging a number of natural processes. The scientific term for this is biogenic regulation. The three main processes that control particulate deposition are sedimentation, impaction, and Brownian motion. These are really useful processes that help to clean the air we breathe. If you would like more details of how these biological processes actually work then please get in touch and we can direct you to some of the detailed scientific research.

Climate change science predicts that London will have similar temperatures to those currently experienced in Marseilles by 2050. London and other UK cities are not designed for these sustained levels of high temperatures and there are plenty of places at street level where heat becomes trapped.

Plants lower temperatures through evapotranspiration—the combination of water evaporated into the atmosphere and plant transpiration—during even the warmest part of the day. On a city-wide scale, the introduction of vegetation can have a dramatic effect on reducing the extremes of the urban heat island effect. The scale of green infrastructure will be directly proportional to the potential impact.