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Bringing nature into urban environments has always been a challenge; one of the most spectacular solutions to this problem is the vertical garden. Far more than just an unusual decoration attached to a wall, these gardens are an exciting means of bringing life and greenery to a bleak courtyard, a gray city street or a cold modern building. Vertical Gardens is the first publication to present a collection of the most important examples of this emerging trend. Not content with projecting gardens and cultivating plants on horizontal terrain, those who create vertical gardens apply the principles of hydroponics (a technique of growing plants in water containing dissolved nutrients) and use ingenious framing systems that allow luxuriant compositions of plant life to colonize the exteriors of buildings. Overshadowing the traditional band of less versatile climbing plants, the extraordinary array of botanical species that thrive with hydroponic cultivation allows for the creation of a limitless variety of living compositions with different textures, patterns, chromatic effects, and aromas. The aesthetic result is truly stunning and has attracted the attention of architects and designers such as Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, and Andrée Putman who, in collaboration with Patrick Blanc, have added the vertical garden to their design vocabularies. There are also projects where entire buildings have been imagined as biological organisms, or as a landscape, like the apartment building by Edouard François in Montpellier, constructed out of a mix of stone, wood, metal, and plants. Vertical Gardens explores this phenomenon in thematic sections, which are enriched by the reflections of its most innovative practitioners. This richly illustrated book will be essential reading for all professionals or anyone interested in this fertile new area of landscape design.
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