Thanks. Unfortunately the renderings always look a little better than once its built. Growing vegetation on buildings is a cool idea but in practice it’s a difficult due to the harsh environment and low soil volumes, which often lead to sick or dead plants. Hopefully they have the proper design and maintenance strategy to minimize that.

That said, this technique has a huge potential to increase greenery in cities as the article correctly points out–the vertical structure allows for more vegetation over the same footprint. Not to mention that high-rise areas of cities tend to have the least greenery of any development style, so I support any way we can squeeze it in there.

In response to a suggestion for a million tree planting campaign, one of my mentors once said we should instead aim for a trillion leaves. He was referring to the increased leaf area of larger trees, but the same applies to smaller plants that are stacked vertically like this. Trees are the most bang for your buck but I’ve thought about trying to develop a program to encourage green roofs, vines, and other greening of buildings because that’s a lot of unused space at the moment.