Exterior Green Facades and Indoor Green Screens
One of our many options for green walls are green facades, which are installed on exterior host walls and their indoor counterpart, green screens, which uses an internal host walls for installation. Green screens are also used as distinctive partitioning screens, particularly in office or retail spaces.
As more people endeavour to embrace eco-friendly and sustainable designs in their buildings and urban environments, outdoor green facades and indoor green screens offer a proven solution to provide a range of community, environmental and financial benefits.
SRS is New Zealand’s only certified PS3 green wall installer.
Components of Green Facades and Indoor Green Screens
Despite being solutions for different settings, green wall facades and indoor green screens are similarly constructed and require the following components.
Planter boxes or arbours
Below the green façade or indoor green screen, a planter box accommodates the growing media (soil and mulch), irrigation system and drain system. Planted in the mineral based soils are a series of vines spaced to provide required growth of the vine up the supporting wire trellis.
An arbour, in this context, is an ultra-thin trough that accommodates a very lightweight hydroponic (soil-less) growing media to support the growth of climbing or trailing plants.
SRS’s fabrication workshop designs, provides engineer sign off and manufactures planter boxes and arbours and their attachment bracketry to suit your requirements.
Vine supporting wire frames
Climbing vines can come as 2 types:
- “Stickies”- an example is Ivy, where vines have adventitious rootlets that adhere to the host wall surface itself. Over long periods of time this can lead to host wall damage.
- “Twirlers”- an example is Star Jasmine. The vines of this plant type have tendrils that twirl around a wire or another plants stem to gain purchase for upward growth. It is the twirler type of vines that we at SRS Group, accommodate with our foliage support systems.
These vine support wire systems can be made in 2 versions:
- Vertical wires with standoffs. This is a vertical running wire with attachment to the host wall via a 100mm standoff holder, located every 1m up the wire.
- A wire mesh with diamond shaped 160mm or larger apertures, that are threaded onto a peripheral wire looped through the eyelet of a 100mm standoffs permanently attached to the host wall all around the outer edge of the green facade.
Both these are typically done with all materials 316 stainless steel and are designed, engineered, supply and installed by our skilled and experienced rigging team at SRS.
The process of creating your green facades and screens
The SRS foliage team is dedicated to delivering ecologically sustainable gardens on buildings. Ultimately this translates to us only using plants that thrive for their entire natural life span in that location on the building. The process of plant species selection is critical for this and starts with our tertiary qualified botanist coupling growing conditions of the host wall with his extensive plant knowledge, particularly in native flora. Our green wall team has delivered a portfolio of over 200 thriving gardens on buildings, some of which are now aged at 15 years old.
Early consultation with our client’s architects, designers and landscape architects at design phase allows us to develop the design to meet site-specific requirements and a client’s long-term expectations. SRS takes a collaborative approach from this initial needs’ assessment, to design, right through to the building and on-site installation phase. Post building handover is seamless with our annual maintenance programmes that start immediately on installation and covers defect liability periods.
SRS’s has a team of specialist’s horticulturists trained in elevated work on all access equipment including ascending rope access equipment.
It can take many years to get full establishment of the vines to cover the full height and breadth of the host wall. This can be dramatically reduced by using innovated off-site pre-growing techniques and also accelerated growing methods that SRS can provide.
Contact SRS Foliage team to discuss what is possible for your project.
Benefits of Green Facades and Indoor Green Screens
There is no shortage of great benefits in opting for green wall facades or indoor green screens for your home or office. Some of these are obvious and closely align to principles of sustainability but there are others that may actually surprise you.
Improved air quality
Plants are the lungs of the planet. They reduce CO2 and VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds) while enriching the air with O2. Plants also absorb particulate matter that comes with urban smog thus cleansing the urban air and making cities more liveable.
By increasing the number of plants in an urban landscape helps to reduce the effects of air pollution and smog. Green walls do this with the added convenience of taking up no commercial foot space.
Reduce noise pollution
Green facades and indoor green screens provide sound dampening by reducing echo and absorbing noise. The effect is creating a better environment to work in, so as to increase productivity and live in, by increasing a sense of well-being.
Indoor green screens can be seen on both sides and often allow dappled light to filter through the foliage. The effect is providing a wall of vines with 2 sides being viewed while providing zoned spaces within an open plan office.
Sense of wellbeing
Multiple psychological studies show that the presence of plants in rooms improves morale of the occupants, which is a great positive effect for collective wellbeing within the building be it office, home or recreational space.
Supports local ecosystem and biodiversity
Having gardens on buildings acts as an ecosystem that attracts fauna to the urban space creating a natural urban ecology. This increases biodiversity to the area and helps urban farming practices such as honey production.
A great example of this is in Singapore, an early adopter of utilising gardens on the built structure, to mitigate effects of intense urbanisation. Once a heavily polluted city in the 1960s, Singapore has been remarkably transformed with its revitalising of local biodiversity due to initiatives such as the Tree House Condominium – one of the largest green facades in the world.
Another green infrastructure option is a roof garden. One of their main benefits is they absorb rainwater and then when saturated, slowly dispense the excess water into the civil stormwater system.
This has 2 effects:
- Reduces the demand on civil infrastructure during rain events
- Reduces the amount of runoff of stormwater into our waterways and marine ecologies.
Improved aesthetics
The vibrant aesthetics of a green facade or indoor green screen come from the many shapes, colours, textures and sizes of the plants being used. Depending on the style you go for, nothing quite matches a beautifully constructed living wall with a wide range of plants, living and thriving in harmony. Another positive about installing a green facade is they are statistically much less likely to be vandalised with graffiti (or otherwise) than a standard exterior wall. A fantastic preventative measure for maintaining aesthetics too.
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Silo Park Tanks – Green Facade Project
In December 2020, SRS Group was engaged to install green facades around the base of two Silo Park tanks in Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour. Learn more.
Get in touch with us today!
If you’d like to do your bit for the environment and take advantage of all the other great benefits that come with green wall facades and indoor screen partitions, contact us today and we’ll make it an eco-friendly reality for you.
