11/11/2007

The Salad Building



Paris is full of fabulous architecture, but few recent efforts are as spectacular as Patrick Blanc's green wall at the Jean Nouvel designed Quai Branly museum. Forget green roofs, the towering wall right on the river Seine looks as if some tropical jungle has finally taken its revenge after decades of deforestation and abuse at the hands of man. There's something post-apocalyptic about it, in a good way.





Grown without soil on a continually moistened substrate of felt cladding that wraps the building facade like a wet blanket, Blanc's 'vegetable wall' is a chaos of chlorophyll that puts passersby directly back in touch with nature. If only we could retrofit the utilitarian concrete block horrors of the last several decades with this stuff. Just imagine how it would spruce up former East Germany's lingering plattenbau.



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey richard,

It's me Phil.

This week I was working on my jobsite in Park City and an old friend of mine from antarctica walked up and applied for a job. He left before you guys got there, but it got to me thinking about life down there and wondering how the dynamic Trio has been. I just tried to send anne an email, but it bounced back.

I'll have to catch up on your posts to see how you're doing.

I'm happy in salt lake, still looking for that perfect job. But I've also started as a columnist for the salt lake city weekly. You can read my stories there at slweekly.com and type "phil jacobsen" into their search engine.

I write about cheap stuff to do. $5 haircuts, cheap beer, drinking contests, but mainly about me.

Tell Anne and Sylvestre hello.
Phil (phil713@yahoo.com)

mgrace said...

I don't know, Richard, I really like the old communist buildings in Berlin along Alexanderplatz. The green building here is cool, but I'd hate to lose those old monolithic concrete monsters.

J Thyme...kind said...

Fantastic!

Cocolei said...

wonderful...
50% of all building should be like this....