Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

Green Wall Stands Out

  • 03/01/17
green wall

The green wall on the front of the Culinary and Allied Health building demonstrates KVCC’s commitment to sustainability in a seamless and aesthetically pleasing way.

Green walls transform ordinary wall surfaces into vertical gardens. That transformation from commonplace wall into vertical landscape adds a living element to a building. Green walls are visually appealing, inviting and inspiring, and beneficial to the environment. For example, green wall plants release water vapor that cools the air, helping naturally cool the buildings on which they are installed.

Many green wall installations are still retrofits on existing buildings. However, it has become increasingly common for new construction to be designed from the start with a green wall as an integral architectural feature of a building.

This was the case with the green wall on the front, east-facing façade of the Culinary and Allied Health Building on the Bronson Healthy Living Campus of Kalamazoo Community College (KVCC) in Michigan. “The green wall is not an appendage to the building but an essential element,” says Mike Collins, executive vice president, enrollment and campus operations, KVCC.

The building was designed with a green wall that stands out as a signature statement of commitment to sustainability while fitting seamlessly into the building and its surrounding landscape. Set within a two-foot-deep niche designed into the façade as a recessed frame, the green wall is surrounded by windows on three sides. The windows outline the green wall with light. Their green and blue glass colors symbolize earth and sky to express the building’s design theme.

The 324-square-foot green wall extends the three-story height of the building. Constructed with the LiveWall system from LiveWall, LLC (Spring Lake, MI), the KVCC installation features 30 8-inch and 255 16-inch LiveWall planter modules. The modular LiveWall system was selected because it is engineered with consideration to both the structural and horticultural elements of a green wall.

www.livewall.com

This article originally appeared in the issue of .

Featured

  • Rethinking K-12 Schools as a Continuous Learning Experience

    Most students move through three or more separate facilities during their K-12 journey, yet the built environments they encounter at each stage have traditionally been designed in isolation, with little continuity in spatial language, learning philosophy, or physical resources. Each new school is a reset with different layouts, learning models, expectations, and ways of moving through a building. The next generation of school design is making the case that the first day of kindergarten and the last day of high school can and should feel connected through common support systems and infrastructure in the physical environment.

  • Planning with Clarity: Using AI to Make Better Campus Decisions, Not Just Better Designs

    Higher education leaders are being asked to make increasingly high-stakes decisions about campus facilities amid greater uncertainty than ever before. Social and economic pressures, shifting enrollment, and evolving learning models compete with growing deferred maintenance needs to strain even the most robust infrastructure budgets.

  • Virginia Tech Tops Out New College of Engineering Building

    Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., recently celebrated the topping out of Mitchell Hall, which will soon stand as the largest College of Engineering building on campus, according to a news release. The university partnered with Skanska on the 285,500-square-foot facility, which has an expected completion date of winter 2028.

  • Children walking along bright school corridor with motion blur

    How Next-Gen Design Is Reshaping the Student Experience

    The environments where students learn play a crucial role in shaping their growth in and out of the classroom. By centering design on well-being, flexibility, and purpose, districts can ensure their facilities remain vibrant community assets for many years to come.