The Housing Block That Grows Its Own Shade

From the street it reads as a fairly ordinary eight-storey block. Come back in five years, the architects say, and you will not be able to see it at all.

Shade as infrastructure

The building's south face carries a secondary steel frame set eighty centimetres off the facade, and that frame is a trellis. Fast-growing deciduous vines are planted at the base of every second column. In summer they cover the frame and drop the surface temperature of the wall behind by a claimed eleven degrees; in winter they lose their leaves and let the sun back in.

A shading device that needs pruning is still cheaper than a chiller that needs replacing.

The maintenance question

The obvious objection is upkeep, and the architects do not pretend otherwise. A green facade is a living system with a maintenance budget, and buildings that ignore this end up with dead brown scaffolding. The project answers it by making the planting the residents' own — each ground-floor plot belongs to a specific flat.

Whether that social arrangement survives its first decade is the real experiment. The engineering is the easy part.