London’s new urban greening structure is a ‘garden for insects and people’

Outside the Chelsea College of Arts in London, UK, a 10-metre ‘urban greening’ structure has been unveiled: a showcase of using natural materials in construction to support biodiversity.

The project, Vert, is designed to address challenges that are common to urban areas, such as rising temperatures, heatwaves and declining biodiversity. Its red oak timber frames, fitted with fabric nets or ‘sails’, can support more than 20 species of climbing plants at once. Its designers say that it encourages nature into the city and creates sheltered spaces to gather.

“The structure performs as a ‘greening machine’,” its designer, Stefan Diez, told Positive News, “while also making urban spaces more harmonious and pleasant to live in from an aesthetic point of view. We wanted Vert to break the monotony of our urban environment.”

Vert is a collaboration between Diez’ own design studio, Diez Office, the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), and urban greening specialist agency OMCºC. Constructed from an engineered hardwood, red oak glue-laminated timber – known in the industry as ‘glulam’ – the structure consists of a series of timber triangles that hold suspended biodegradable nets. Despite red oak being considered sustainable and constituting a hefty 18% of North American hardwood forests, it is underutilised in Europe.

Vert is part of London Design Festival and will remain in place until the end of October. Click here for more information.

“Our aim is to create a beautiful place for London Design Festival: a cool, shady, flowering, rustling, buzzing place where you can be close to nature, a garden for insects and people in the middle of the city – somewhere that does you good,” said Nicola Stattman, director and founder of OMCºC.

Vert fills a role typically performed by trees, acknowledges the team. But in an era of acute climate change, climbing plants can be even more effective as they grow many times faster, require less root space and can be ‘harvested’ annually to be turned into biochar, or recycled as raw material for the generation of energy.

Our aim is to create a cool, shady, flowering, rustling, buzzing place where you can be close to nature in the middle of the city

Vert is projected to cool the surrounding air space by as much as 8ºC, cast four times more shade than a 20-year-old tree, and produce as much biomass as an 80-year-old lime tree – all through the use of climbing plants grown over the course of a single summer.

“We want to show that you can implement large-scale greening even on the highly sealed surfaces of inner cities,” said Stattman.

Main image: Petr Krejci