Into the green facades - values ascribed to a popular cultural phenomenon in urban development

INTO THE GREEN FACADES Values ascribed to a popular cultural phenomenon in contemporary urban development 1

Title INTO THE GREEN FACADES Values ascribed to a popular cultural

in contemporary urban development

phenomenon

Author

Š Ann-Charlott Eriksen, 2019

Academic advisors

Svava Riesto, Associate Professor (main advisor) Marina Bergen Jensen, Professor MSO (co-advisor)

Place Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management Landscape Architecture and Planning University of Copenhagen Rolighedsvej 23 DK-1958 Frederiksberg C

+45 35 33 15 00 ign@ign.ku.dk www.ign.ku.dk Lay-out & cover photo

Ann-Charlott Eriksen

Copy editor

Lenore Hietkamp

Print

Christensen Grafisk

Unless other is stated photographs and diagrams are by Ann-Charlott Eriksen

This Ph.D. thesis was co-financed by UCL University College and Business Academy in Odense (previously LillebĂŚlt University of Applied Sciences) and the University of Copenhagen university of copenhagen d e pa r t m e n t o f g e o s c i e n c e s a n d n at u r a l r e s o u r c e m a n a g e m e n t

university of copenhagen d e pa r t m e n t o f g e o s c i e n c e s a n d university of copenhagen n at u r a l r e s o u r c e m a n ad egpaertm m e net n o ftg e o s c i e n c e s a n d n at u r a l r e s o u r c e m a n a g e m e n t

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INTO THE GREEN FACADES Values ascribed to a popular cultural phenomenon in contemporary urban development

PhD thesis by Ann-Charlott Eriksen 3

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Preface I have always been fascinated by plants growing on buildings. They are constellations of other forms of life, of plants — what we often think of as ‘nature’ — merged with buildings, which we often consider ‘cultural’. As an architect and landscape architect, I was curious to explore such relationships — and the multiple values and roles humans ascribe to them. Green facades, or plants on facades, today flourish in our cities worldwide, and are given a great deal of thought by designers, planners and policy-makers, particularly in light of climate change, ecological crisis and to improve life in cities as urbanization continues to increase. They make an important starting-point for discussions on how we chose to shape our cities, and the values that we base such design and planning actions upon.

One of my initial concerns when I started this research project was that a study of green facades would be too narrow and specific. However, I was quickly proved wrong; exploring this phenomenon opened the door to a complex and highly interdisciplinary field that allowed for exciting travels into and across ideas, interests, values and premises in contemporary urban development. It is my hope that this Ph.D. thesis can bring new dimensions and increased thoughtfulness about the relationship between humans and plants in cities in general and within green facades more specifically.

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Acknowledgements Writing this dissertation has been such a joyful and challenging journey; getting to do a Ph.D. is a privilege! I would not have been able to do conduct this research alone; many are those to whom I owe my gratitude for helping me along my journey, and I want to extend my thanks to all of them.

I would like to thank my supervisors, Svava Riesto and Marina Bergen Jensen, for your effort, time and guidance throughout my research journey. Svava, it has been such a pleasure discussing my work with you — thank you for bringing new insights and perspectives to my project, for all your encouraging words and your positive attitude towards my project. Further, thank you for co-authoring two of my papers and helping me sharpen them. Marina, thank you for all the energy you have brought to my project and process, for your always constructive and thorough feedback and for initiating exciting collaborations. Conducting this Ph.D. would not have been possible without the support, knowledge and the time that you both spent supervising my work.

I would like to thank all my colleagues in Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen. In my day-to-day life, so many of you have inspired me and in different ways taken part in the process of developing this project. Thank you, Guohan Zhao, for cheering me along the way and being such a great friend, and thanks to my fellow Ph.D. candidates and office mates, with whom I shared a wonderful academic and social experience. I hope our Ph.D. club will continue to enrich the lives of future Ph.D. students. Thank you, Anne Wagner, for being a great mentor, for reading my work and always giving valuable feedback.

I am indeed grateful to UCL University College and Business Academy in Odense (until recently known as LillebĂŚlt University of Applied Sciences) for funding this research. This Ph.D. project has been the glue in the partnership constellation between UCL, the Building section, and the University of Copenhagen, division of Landscape Architecture and Planning. Conducting research in such a constellation has been a great pleasure; thanks to all my fantastic colleagues in Odense. It has been so much

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fun! I would also like to thank the students that I engaged with through teaching, workshops, supervisions and study trips; you have inspired me both personally and professionally.

This Ph.D. project has offered me inspiring collaborations. I would like to thank Realdania By&Byg and Frants Frandsen for allowing me to take part in the architectural competition at Oluf Bager’s Plads in Odense, and for interesting discussions. I am so glad that I got the chance to have engaging talks with the design studios Entasis, Leth & Gori, Maali & Lalanda MLAS and Praksis Architects; thank you. I am also grateful that I got the chance to take part in the research department at Henning Larsen Architects and for the knowledge exchange on facades and climate issues. Further, I would like to thank Andrea Kahn for the inspiring discussions and for pushing the project into unforeseen directions — you have an amazing capability of clarifying the most complex issues, so thank you. Also thank you to Ellen Braae and Martin Søberg for the valuable feedback and the encouraging words on my Ph.D. seminars. And Lenore Hietkamp, you have been such a great copy editor; thank you for helping me advance my research and my language skills.

It has been a pleasure to meet and exchange ideas with so many inspiring people at conferences, congresses, seminars and through Ph.D. courses in Denmark and abroad.

I love the fact that as a result, I have become a magnet for peers sending me images of green facades and green architecture projects from around the world.

I am grateful to have such fantastic friends and family‚ thank you all for being there through thick and thin, for listening, for your uplifting words, support and patience.

Last but not least, I would like to thank Jelle for being so supportive, encouraging and caring, for always making me laugh and love in life, for all the fantastic moments, journeys and delicious dinners — I could not have made it without you, min egen.

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Contents

Abstract Thesis summary Dansk resumĂŠ List of scientific papers

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1. INTRODUCTION

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Relevance of doing research into the green facades

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Examining the green facade as a cultural phenomenon

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The multivalent green facade

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Research problem

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Aim, objectives and research questions

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2. THEORETICAL LENS AND METHODS

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Looking into and across: an interdisciplinary approach to the green facade

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A critical approach to examine the contemporary green facade

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Methods used in the three studies

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3. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

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Premises for the design of green facades in an urban context (paper I)

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Conceptualizations of green facades in research (paper II)

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Representations of green facades in architectural publications (paper III)

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4. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

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Discussion of findings

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Theoretical and Methodological reflection

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Implications for design and planning practice

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Limitations of this thesis

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Conclusion

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Perspectives for future research

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Sources Paper I Paper II Paper III

118 139 163 189

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Abstract The green facade is popular in contemporary architecture and urban development.

Designing green facades by combining living plants and building facades materializes the idea of using ‘nature’ to help cities reduce the impact on global challenges such as climate change and loss of biodiversity. Green facades have been adopted by different practitioners, not least architects and urban planners, as well as several researchers, both as a physical object and as an idea. However, the narratives accompanying the green facades seem to be inevitably positive and loaded with unsubstantiated expectations of green facades ensuring a significant contribution to resilient and sustainable green urban development. The lack of critical reflections and apparent unanimous agreement of a positive narrative across professional disciplines prompted this study. Without a critical and reflected approach it is assumed that insights and knowledge generation, important to inform city design and planning research and practice, is prevented. The aim of this study was to unfold the values ascribed to green facades within practice and research, and thus bring forward a clearer and more nuanced understanding of the roles and potentials of green facades in contemporary urban development. Based on a case study of an architectural competition for an urban redevelopment project with strict requirements regarding green facades, I found that intentions may be conflicting and that the green facades are negotiated between different values and interests at multiple scales. Further, to prepare for a more precise discussion of the potential contribution of green facades to green urban development I conducted a review of research literature. The review suggested that green facade research falls into five clusters: green facades are conceptualized as systems for environmental regulation, technical features of buildings, contributors to biodiversity and ecology, enhancers of beauty, and economic and political actors. I observed that the green facade as a concept seems to exist across disciplines, contexts and scales. Finally, to reveal mechanisms behind powerful narratives of green facades, I examined presentations in architectural publications. Specifically, the iconic ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum in Madrid was scrutinized. Presentations exalted this green facade as particularly spectacular, ecological and as a living piece of art work. To put the ‘Vertical Garden’ into perspective, I examined green facades from the everyday

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landscape of Copenhagen through photography, and directed attention to different characteristics of green facade aesthetics. The findings of this thesis contribute to design, planning and policy-making practices in Denmark and abroad, as well as to the literature concerned with green facades specifically, and the role of plants and vegetations as part of the built environment of contemporary cities more broadly. It concludes that the green facade is multivalent: ascribed different roles and values across research and practice that have implications for the design and planning of green cities. Finally, this thesis suggests that future research examine the aesthetic diversity of green facades and seek to provide different modes to understand plants in cities.

Keywords Green facades, plants on facades, green architecture, green urban development, urban nature, urban landscape, spatial design and planning, interdisciplinary, critique

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Thesis summary In the face of environmental crisis and increased urbanization, cities worldwide are looking for ways to respond to the effects of the related challenges and improving life in cities. As a way to meet these challenges, greening has become an attractive tool for cities to increase their resilience, and different forms of vegetation are now progressively incorporated into design and planning agendas. In light of this, green facades, combining plants with building facades, has gained tremendous interest amongst spatial designers and planners in contemporary urban development. A rapidly growing number of architectural projects incorporate different forms of green facades across various contexts of cities worldwide, and green facades are increasingly part of urban plans and policies. Likewise, there is an expanding body of research concerned with green facades. Green facades are often presented as inherently positive and full of potential, and are accompanied by a value-laden rhetoric about sustainable and forward-looking designs. In a time when being green is increasingly popular, green facades can be seen as symbols of sustainability and are – subsequently – favored tools for branding strategies and objects of substantial commercial value. Thus, green facades are not just about facades with plants on them, but a reflection of culture – of human conduct and meaning-making – values, understandings and interests that are more or less explicitly expressed through city design and planning research and practice.

The contemporary green facade is defined by values that today often remain implicit, separate and unclear and that may prevent gleaning the insights and generating the knowledge that should inform city design and planning research and practice. The overall aim of this study is to unfold the values ascribed to green facades within practice and research, in order to forward a clearer, more nuanced and critical understanding of the roles and potentials of green facades in contemporary urban development. The study is guided by the main research questions: what is a green facade? In what ways is it understood today, and which values are ascribed to it?

This thesis situates the green facade as part of the urban landscape and approach it interdisciplinary in order to gain new insights to its cultural production in different 13

contexts, and of the values ascribed to it. Hence, it is examined from different perspectives and across four diverse contexts: i) as part of design and planning practice, ii) as objects of research, iii) as represented and described visually and textually in architectural publications, and iv) as existing physically in the urban landscape.

Through the qualitative methods of document analysis, visual analysis, literature review, interviews, on-site observations, participation in design presentations and citizen meetings and image-making, this study addresses the following objectives: 1.

To identify motivations and premises for design and planning of green facades

in contemporary urban practice

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To unfold understandings and conceptualizations of green facades across

research cultures

3.

To reveal conceptualizations of green facades in architectural publications and

their impact on the design discourse

This thesis shows that the design and planning of contemporary green facades is motivated by ideas about improving the urban environment and building density while also upholding a green city image. The green facade is object to different negotiations in urban development. For instance, designers negotiate different values in the physical context of the city while translating policies and premises about urban plants into form. Across different research cultures, the green facade is predominantly understood and studied as a generic and positive tool that serve environmental regulating functions and that act as technical installations to be placed into the city.

Green facade projects appear frequently in architectural publications, which act as sources of inspiration for designers and planners when they discuss and shape the city.

This study shows that architecture publications can be reductive and present only a handful of iconic key examples: Designs that exalt spectacular, high-tech and often commercial green facades. Designs of green facades that are low-tech, ordinary, and

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situated within the everyday landscape of cities are not presented, yet, as this study shows, such examples can potentially expand present understandings and possibilities in the discourse. Particularly by unfolding the material, spatial and temporal characteristics of the green facade; aspects that are not discussed to any great extent in contemporary architectural publications.

In conclusion, this thesis suggests that green facades should be understood as multivalent – ascribed different roles and values across various fields of research and practice. Findings from this research show that more attention should be given the practice and thinking around green facades specifically, and green urban development more broadly. Finally, this thesis suggests that future research should pay more attention to plant-people relationships in cities, and investigate the aesthetical potential and diversity of green facades within different contexts of our cities.

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Dansk resumé I dag bor over halvdelen af verdens befolkning i byer og urbaniseringen ser ud til at fortsætte. Gennem de sidste årtier har byer over hele verden skulle reagere på miljøudfordringerne og deres konsekvenser, og samtidig opretholde en god levestandard. For at imødegå disse udfordringer er det grønne blevet et attraktivt værktøj i byers søgen for at øge deres modstandsdygtighed. Forskellige former for vegetation bliver nu gradvis indarbejdet i design- og planlægnings agendaer. I lyset heraf har grønne facader, dvs. kombinationer af planter med bygningsfacader, fået stor interesse blandt designere og planlæggere i byudvikling. Grønne facader inddrages i stigende grad i urbane arkitekturprojekter verden over, og grønne facader indgår mere og mere i byplaner og politikker. Derudover er der en stor interesse for den grønne facade som forskningsobjekt. Den grønne facade præsenteres som positivt bidrag til byen og som fuld af potentiale, tit kombineret med kraftfulde og værdiladede forestillinger om skabelsen af bæredygtige designs for fremtiden. I en tid hvor det er trendy at være grøn, er grønne facader også blevet symbol på bæredygtighed og et yndet værktøj i branding strategier. Desuden har teknologiske innovationer og avancerede designs gjort grønne facader til objekter af stor kommerciel værdi. Grønne facader skal derfor ikke kun forstås som kombinationer af planter på facader, men også som en afspejling af kultur og symbol på tendenser i den nutidige by – på menneskelig adfærd og meningsdannelse – udtrykt gennem design og planlægning, forskning og praksis.

Denne ph.d. afhandling antager, at den nutidige grønne facade er defineret af værdier og forståelser, der i dag er implicitte, adskilte og uklare, og dermed forhindrer indsigt og vidensgenerering, der er vigtigt for at kvalificere by design og planlægnings forskning og praksis. Afhandlingen er guidet af forskningsspørgsmålet: Hvad er en grøn facade? På hvilke måder forstås den i dag, og hvilke værdier bliver den tilskrevet?

Denne afhandling undersøger og sammenstiller disse perspektiver, og søger at bidrage til en kritisk og nuanceret forståelse af nutidige grønne facader og deres tilknyttede værdier og betydninger på tværs af forskning og praksis. Dette undersøges gennem en tværfaglig tilgang, der analyserer hvorledes grønne facader bliver produceret kulturelt, gennem forskellige meningsdannelser og værdiopfattelser i byen. Derfor fokuserer 17

undersøgelserne på værdier associeret med nutidige grønne facader i urbane kontekster. Grundlaget er fire forskellige kilder til grønne facader: i) Som led i design og planlægnings praksis; ii) som objekter i forskningen; iii) som repræsenteret og beskrevet visuelt og tekstmæssigt i arkitektur diskursen; iv) og endelig som fysiske og eksisterende bylandskaber. Gennem kvalitative forskningsmetoder, herunder dokumentanalyser, visuelle analyser, litteraturstudier, interviews, observationer, deltagelse til designpræsentationer og borgermøder, samt billeddannelse har studiet følgende mål: 1.

At identificere motivationer og præmisser for design og planlægning af grønne

facader i nutidig byudvikling

2.

At uddybe forståelser og tilgange til grønne facader på tværs af

forskningskulturer 3.

At belyse tilgange til grønne facader i arkitektur publikationer og deres

indflydelse på design diskursen

Denne afhandlings resultater viser, at design og planlægning af grønne facader er motiveret af forskellige værdier og interesser der især fokuserer på at forbedre miljømæssige aspekter af byen og retfærdiggøre at samtidig bygge tæt. Ydermere er der en stor interesse i at bruge grønne facader til at skabe og opretholde et grønt bybillede. Den grønne facade fremstår som et forhandlingsobjekt. For eksempel forhandler designere mellem forskellige værdier i den fysiske kontekst i byen, samtidig med at de oversætter politikker og planer til fysisk form. Denne afhandlingen udfolder de forståelser der er forbundet med grønne facader på tværs af forskellige forskningskulturer, forståelser der påvirker design og planlægning. Dette viser, at den grønne facade overvejende forstås og studeres som generiske og positive værktøjer, der tjener miljømæssige funktioner. Projekter med grønne facader forekommer hyppigt i arkitektoniske publikationer der inspirerer designere og planlæggere. Disse publikationer præsenterer kun en håndfuld ikoniske eksempler: Designs der er særligt

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spektakulære, højteknologiske og ofte koblet sammen med stærke kommercielle interesser. Lavteknologiske og almindelige grønne facader, der er del af hverdagens bylandskab, præsenteres ikke, men som det fremgår af denne undersøgelse kan sådanne grønne facader potentielt udvide diskursen, de nutidige forståelser og muligheder. Især ved at udvide forståelsen for de materielle, rumlige og tidslige karakteristika af den grønne facade; alle aspekter der ikke har fået megen opmærksomhed i nutidige publikationer indenfor arkitektur og design.

Denne afhandling konkluderer, at nutidige grønne facader bør forstås som multivalente – med forskellige værdier og roller tilknyttet i forskning og praksis. Resultaterne viser at mere opmærksomhed bør tilskrives tænkningen og praksisser relateret til grønne facader specifikt, og grøn byudvikling generelt. Endelig foreslår denne afhandling at fremtidig forskning bør undersøge relationer mellem planter og mennesker i byen, samt grønne facaders mangfoldige æstetikker som del af de forskellige bymæssige sammenhænge.

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List of Scientific Papers

Paper I What the green city is up to: Two lenses of criticism for the green facades of Oluf Bager Plaza in Odense, Denmark Ann-Charlott Eriksen and Svava Riesto SPOOL Landscape Metropolis Status: Published, Vol. 5, issue 1, 2017 https://doi.org/10.7480/spool.2018.1.1939

Paper II “Green Facades”: Uses of a Celebrated Concept in Research Across Disciplines Ann-Charlott Eriksen and Svava Riesto Landscape Research Status: Manuscript, planned submission in 2019

Paper III Shifting the Gaze of Green: An iconic ‘Vertical Garden’ and green facades in everyday urban landscapes Ann-Charlott Eriksen Journal of Landscape Architecture Status: Manuscript, planned submission in 2019

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Figure 1a (top): Stefano Boeri Architetti developed the ‘Vertical Forest’ concept; high-rise buildings covered with plants on the facades. Here an image of their project in Milan (Image source: Stefano Boeri Architetti).

Figure 1b (bottom): Stefano Boeri’s is often invited to talks about his work and his visions for creating green buildings in contemporary cities. Here at the Building Green Conference in Copenhagen in 2018.

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1. INTRODUCTION

Relevance of doing research into the green facades ‘Let us multiply the number of green buildings and vertical forests’, architect Stefano Boeri proclaimed at the end of his presentation at the Building Green Conference in Copenhagen in 2018 (fig. 1a-b). Rolling in the background were images of his firm’s high-rise buildings, facades covered with lush and dense layers of green plants hanging from planters. In his talk, Boeri referred to ‘green architecture’ projects from around the world and the many ways in which plants benefit the urban environment.

Designers and planners, he said, should therefore maximize the amount of plants in building schemes, thereby taking responsibility for the environment of our future cities.

Boeri’s plea is not a call in the wilderness but an example of the strong urge to create green facades in contemporary urban design and planning practice. However, while often framed as positive and unambiguous solutions to solve environmental issues and bring humans closer to ‘nature’, green facades are ascribed values and meanings that often remain implicit and unclear, and thereby not discussed. These diverse values are important as they affect our conception of what green can mean and entail, and further the way that the city is designed and planned. This thesis is a contribution to unfolding such ways of understanding green facades and their ascribed values across research and practice, in order to expand and deepen the present knowledgebase, enable critical and reflective discussions, and ultimately contribute to better practices.

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Figure 2a-d The Danish landscape architect firm SLA incorporate green facades in their project ‘Reinvent Paris’, and presents the green facades as having a variety of different functions.

They conceptualize the plants as the machinery in the city (see fig. 2d on the next page).

(Image source: SLA).

A wide range of practitioners and researchers from different fields are into the green facade these days. Like Boeri, architects and urban planning practitioners worldwide increasingly combine plants with building facades, or create ‘green facades’, as is the term used in this thesis. There is now a rapidly growing number of architectural projects that incorporate different forms of green facades, and presentations of green facades flourish in a wide range of publications (fig. 2-5). Such designs have not only gained widespread attention, but are often coupled with a powerful and value-laden rhetoric about sustainable and forward-looking designs (Dunnett et al., 2008; Kellert et al., 2008; Köhler, 2008; Margolis et al., 2008; Dover, 2015). Furthermore, green facades are frequently referred to as solutions to bring ‘nature’ back into cities, to reduce the effects of the current ecological crisis and of increased urbanism (Blanc, 2008; Dunnett et al., 2008; Blanc, 2012; Pérez-Urrestarazu, 2015; Broto, 2016; Van Uffelen, 2016), and to regulate ecological processes (Francis, 2011). The strong motivation to create green facades seems shared across research and practices concerned with green urban development. In this way, research interests and perspectives appear as interlinked with present urban practices, where focuses and findings in research potentially affect the ways that practitioners understand and shape the city, and vice versa. This thesis seeks to clarify such potential links, or lack hereof, in order to contribute to dialogue that reaches across different fields of knowledge and interests. Hence, it critically examines the values ascribed to the green facade across various contexts of contemporary design and planning practice and research.

While green facades are ascribed particular values and are associated with visual

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Figure 3 (top, right): Stefano Boeri Architetti’s ‘Vertical Forest’ concept is spreading worldwide.

One of their recent mega-projects is the Liuzhou Forest City in China, here from an article in Green Building, 2017 (Image source: Stefano Boeri Architetti).

Figure 4 (bottom): Green buildings and green facades appear frequently across different publications; from popular litterature to reserach articles. Here an article from The Wall Street Journal, 2018 (Image source: Stefano Boeri Architetti).

references and narratives related to broader discussions about green urban development, they also exist physically within our cities. Hence, green facades are part of cultural, social, aesthetic, historical, technical, ecological and geological contexts, while comprising a wide range of living species and non-living objects. They can therefore be understood as multivalent cultural products: directed by and reflecting a dynamic patchwork of values and interests, that is affected by and affecting contemporary urban development.

However, despite their multivalent character, the green facade is today most often studied within specialized fields of knowledge concerned with specific environmental functions and techniques of the green facade (e.g. Kontoleon, 2010; Ottelé, 2010; Scarpa et al., 2014; Pérez, 2015). These discussions about green facades are often isolated by the specific aspects of such facades or by pre-conceptions that create

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Nature on the Wall

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How do you make the centre of a modern city more green? The French botanist Patrick Blanc simply grows plants on walls. His vertical gardens have astonished and delighted city dwellers around the world.

The 1,200km2 façade of the Quai Branly Museum in Paris contains over 100 varieties of plants.

Figure 5 Green facades are frequently presented as ‘nature’ in the city and coupled with ideas about creating modern cities. This article was published in Geo International, 2012 (Image source: Patrick Blanc)

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barriers for knowledge exchange. This exchange could otherwise be valuable to help expand the understandings of the green facade and its different ascribed values.

Professionals who design and plan cities, for instance, have to compete for business and must therefore claim certain forms of expertise, which at times contribute to disciplinary boundaries (Thompson, 2016). Though academics within fields of spatial design often look beyond the artificial boundaries of disciplines (Thompson, 2016, p.39)1, few have brought together the many perspectives on green facades to generate discussions that reach across disciplines of research and practice, institutions and scales of green urban development. In this study I therefore seek to contribute to build such bridges by unfolding the values ascribed the contemporary green facade across research and practice, in order to bring more thought and nuance into city design and planning.

What is a green facade? In what ways is it understood today, and which values are ascribed to it?

These questions make up the starting point for this study, where I examine the green facade as culturally produced through critiques. The aim is to unfold the values ascribed to green facades within practice and research, in order to forward a clearer, more nuanced and critical understanding of the roles and potentials of green facades in contemporary urban development. In response I take an interdisciplinary approach, and bring together and examine different perspectives from across various fields of research and practice concerned with the green facade. Specifically, I examine the green facade in four contexts, through three studies: as part of design and planning practice, as objects of research, in architectural publications as part of design presentations and as existing physically within the urban landscape. Generating new insights and expanding the knowledge of the green facade by examining it as culturally produced in these diverse contexts will help enable decision makers, designers and planners to qualify their work and make more informed choices when they intervene in the city. Bringing together different disciplinary perspectives may also improve the capacity for dialogue to reach beyond narrow scopes of understanding, and contribute to more critical approaches towards green facades as a cultural phenomenon in the city. In effect, such dialogue holds the potential to direct and define knowledge in related fields, and eventually the design and planning of cities at multiple scales.

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Examining the green facade as a cultural phenomenon

In order to develop a nuanced and critical understanding of the contemporary green facade and its ascribed values, it is first necessary to situate it in a wider green urban development context. This chapter presents the discussions and tendencies in contemporary city design and planning that are central for the ways that the green facade is defined and understood today.

Green facades as tools for cities to better deal with climate challenges and loss of biodiversity Today more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and urbanization continues to increase (United Nations, 2018). In the last decades, in the face of the environmental crisis, cities worldwide must respond to the effects of environmental challenges while improving the life in the city. In light of these challenges, ‘greening’ has become an attractive tool for cities to increase their resilience and ‘withstand and absorb change to prevailing environmental conditions’ (Lister, 2016, p.305) 2. City leaders are increasingly expected to take leadership roles in addressing resilience at both the local and the global level (Bouteligier, 2013; Janos et al., 2014). The United Nations has, for instance, created ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ to strengthen the response to the threat of climate change, and further promoted cross-country initiatives such as the Paris Declaration on Climate Change (United Nations, 2018). At the EU level, environmental issues have been addressed through policies and initiatives such as ‘Nature-Based Solutions and Re-Naturing Cities’, which aims to turn ‘environmental, societal and economic challenges into innovation opportunities’ (European Commission, 2015). In general, few other parts of the world are as engaged in discussions 29

and sustainability initiatives as Europe (Beatley, 2008). Particularly, countries in the northwestern Europe apply sustainability into urban developments (ibid.). In Denmark, which has long branded itself as a leader in sustainable solutions within energy, climate adaptation and environment, climate issues have been translated into municipal development targets in the design and redevelopment of Danish cities.

One response to improve a city’s resilience towards climate challenges and loss of biodiversity is to increase its quantity and quality of vegetation, in recent years often incorporated into design and planning agendas. Vegetation plays a central role in the initiatives and policies of cities that commit to sustainability; it has become a requisite for good urban development, and deploying vegetation is considered key to making more responsible choices for generations to come (e.g. Gill et al., 2007). Green spaces and green elements are increasingly acknowledged for their potential to reduce the effects of such problems as pollutants in air, soil and water, decreasing biodiversity, changing weather patterns, urban heat islands, and the related adverse effects on human health and well-being (e.g. Arnold et al. 1996; Grimm et al. 2008; Kleerekoper et al., 2012; Kabisch et al. 2016). Particularly, in recent years, green facades, green roofs, different forms of sustainable urban drainage solutions and urban gardening initiatives have been coupled with technological innovation and gained widespread attention across practice and research as potential ways to adapt cities to a changing climate and related issues (see e.g. Berndtsson, 2010; Demuzere et al., 2014; Ignatieva et al., 2014; Santamouris, 2014). Green facades are associated with strong ideas and imaginaries of improving buildings and the urban environment (e.g. Margolis et al., 2008; Dover, 2015), yet, have received little critical attention as part of wider tendencies in contemporary green urban development. Examining the green facade as culturally produced therefore provides a lens into the values at play in such wider discussions about contemporary green urban development.

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Merging ideas of nature and culture in the Anthropocene More broadly, in face of these present urban challenges, researchers from multiple fields have sought to move away from nature-culture dichotomies and to propose new ways to understand relationships between humans and other co-habiting actors. At the core of this philosophical query is the idea of ‘nature’, a concept that appears to ‘encompass a vast spectrum of research activity’ (Gandy, 2008, p. 562). Many researchers have in recent years been concerned with the Anthropocene, a geological epoch used to denote the massive climate change and sedimentations caused by human activities (Crutzen, 2002). Natural and human scientists often refer to the Anthropocene to mark the overwhelming force of the modern human project (Lewis et al., 2015; Zalasiewicz et al., 2015; Tsing, 2017). In light of this, researchers have explored ways to understand and refigure the present epoch, realizing that we can no longer think of nature and culture, humans and non-humans, and nature and cities as separate from one another (see e.g. Latour, 1993; Haraway, 2015; Morton, 2016; Tsing, 2017).

In a recent book by feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway, the author proposes we should ‘stay with the trouble’, referring to the ecological crisis and present environmental issues (Haraway, 2015, p.160). In response to the Anthropocene, Haraway argues for a future epoch, which she calls the Chthulucene, that more fully and aptly describes our epoch as one in which human and other co-habiting actors are inextricably linked in what she calls ‘tentacular practices’: it requires making-with and understanding humans in relation to other actors, such as plants, rather than self-making (Haraway, 2015, p.159).

Following the idea of making-with other actors, anthropologist Natasha Myers, proposes a shift in present approaches towards plants, insisting that ‘we are only because they are’ (Myers, 2017, p.297). Since all cultures and economies, both local and global, turn around plants, photosynthesis should be a keyword for the present era she argues (Myers, 2015; Myers, 2016). Plants should therefore not be understood as separate from humans and reduced simply to the status of ‘non-human’ actors, but 31

instead they should be understood as highly relational and co-habiting in various environments and contexts on the earth. Criticizing the Anthropocene, Myers, in response, introduces an epoch that she calls the ‘Planthropocene’ (Myers, 2016; Myers, 2017). The Planthropocene, Myers writes, names an aspirational era that is marked by a profound commitment to collaboration and positions plants at the heart of anthropologic concerns. It is a rethinking of present power nexuses between plants and people and a way of living for the future, where ‘people come to recognize their profound interimplication with plants’ (Myers, 2017, p.299). As plants are deeply entangled with human practices, Myers proposes a future where humans turn towards plants and foster synergetic relationships between human and plant. Plant-people intimacies or relationships, she writes, are ‘often mediated — even enhanced — through techniques and technologies: a simple pole supports a plant’s tropic turn to the light; nutrient mists microns in diameter quench the thirst of the thinnest root hairs’ (Myers, 2017, p. 297).

The relationship between plants and people is always influenced by certain power nexuses. Humans are the ones who draw up designs, and so Myers calls for a more nuanced and critical approach towards the ways in which ‘people stage relations with plants – whether these relations are intimate, extractive, violent, or instrumentalizing’ (Myers, 2017, p.297). At the core of this discussion are therefore questions of how we understand and define such plant-people relationships. The examination of the green facade - how it is understood, and ascribed values in research and practice – is therefore a way to explore this relationship and an underlying theoretical position in this study. Following this thinking, it is clear that researchers and practitioners continuously define and shape the green facade, the relationship between plant and people, through different actions: through words and images in publications on- or related to green facades, in urban policies, plans and visions, in design briefs, by giving form to the green facade through drawings, images, construction etc. This calls for a multifaceted interpretation of the green facade, by examining it into different contexts and by scrutinizing diverse sources of information.

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Re-establishing relationships between people and plants through spatial design and planning Creating relationships between plants and people has also been a key matter for designers and planners in recent decades. Contemporary strands of design theory and architectural practices reconceive the design and planning of cities from broadened ecological perspectives that includes humanity, human activities and artefacts in different ways (Braae et al., 2017). This has been expressed through numerous concepts such as urban nature (Spirn, 1985), metropolitan nature (Gandy, 2003), landscape urbanism (Waldheim, 2006; Mostafavi et al., 2010), ecological urbanism (Spirn, 2012), green architecture (Wines, 2000; Fromonot, 2003), ecological architecture (Yeang 1995; SchrĂśpfer, 2012), cities of nature (SLA architects, 2016), biophilic design (Kellert et al., 2008), green infrastructure (Ahern, 2007) and ecosystem services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005).

While wedding the theory and practice of design and planning with insights of ecology has gained much attention in recent years, the idea is not new; it has been discussed and described for centuries (see e.g. Spirn, 2012). Ecology, which can generally be defined as the relationship between living organisms and their environment and the processes that shape both (Spirn, 2012, p.557), emerged in relation to the biological sciences in the 19th century. One of the pioneers to introduce ecology into the design and planning of cities was the Scottish landscape architect Ian McHarg. His influential book Design with Nature, published in 1969, promotes an ecological angle for the work of designers and planners, who should include multiple perspectives and provide methods such as the analysis of soil, hydrology, climate etc. McHarg’s work was a critique of modernism and its devastating impacts on the environment, and marked a shift towards an urban design and planning approach that emphasized methods to include nature and natural processes.

McHarg’s approach has had a considerable influence on practice and theory in architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism. Anne Whiston Spirn builds on it by proposing a framework for the design of resilient cities. She was one of the first to coin

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the concept of ecological urbanism that has since developed into other interrelated terms and concepts (see e.g. Corner, 1997; Wines, 2000; Steiner, 2002; Fromonot, 2003; Waldheim, 2006; Ahern, 2007; Mostafavi et al., 2010). In an ecological urbanism framework, urban design becomes a tool for human adaptation, helping address challenges, such as global warming and the ecological crisis, while fulfilling human needs for health, safety, welfare, meaning and delight (Spirn, 2012).

Ecological urbanism is an approach to the design and planning of cities that can involve climatology, hydrology, geography, psychology, history and art, and has an aesthetic dimension, but it is not a style, and works of its practitioners takes many forms. It builds on the understanding that cities are a part of nature and that they are dynamic and interconnected ecosystems (Spirn, 2012). This type of urbanism advocates that the different dimensions of cities can be worked on together through design and planning, and moves away from the isolation of elements of the urban landscape.

From this perspective, green facades do not exist as static and isolated objects; rather, they continuously interact with actions, processes and understandings affecting and affected by them. They consists of living plants and human artifice. Furthermore, green facades partake in urban landscapes, as part of highly relational, complex systems and processes that are characterized and shaped by the ‘action and interaction of natural and/or human factors’ (Council of Europe, 2000, p.9).

Landscape can be conceived as both something mental as well as something physical.

It is a concept that transcends disciplinary perspectives (e.g. Max-Neef, 2005; Deming et al., 2011; Thompson, 2016; Tobi et al., 2017). Thus, landscape conveys a sense of dispelling the modern binary of human and natural, where plants cannot be understood as separate from human values and interests. Situating the green facade as part of urban landscapes is therefore not merely a matter of studying the plants on buildings that simply exist physically within urban landscapes but of examining how green facades are inextricably linked to human values and understandings. This thesis

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will therefore work from the premise that green facades are shaped and defined by how they are designed and planned, discussed, conceptualized and presented orally, textually and visually across research and practice. Hence, these contexts are central for our understanding of green facades, and vice versa.

Urban nature and cultural production Green facades are frequently referred to as ‘nature’ in cities (see e.g. Blanc, 2008; Wong et al., 2010; Balmori et al., 2011; Blanc, 2012; Jodido, 2018). ‘Nature’ is conceived as serving different roles in cities and for humanity, and central to discussions on green facades are various conceptions of nature. The word nature is a contested term; it is a ‘singular name for the real multiplicity of things and living processes’ (Williams, 1980, p.68). It has been referred to as ‘one of the most complex words in our language’ (Williams, 1983, p.219). Spirn points to that nature is both given and constructed, and that it is a mirror of and for culture (Spirn, 1997, p.251).

Today, the concept ‘urban nature’ is frequently used in urban plans, visions and legislations (e.g. Copenhagen Plan Strategy, 2015). It has been described as ‘the consequence of a complex interaction between multiple purposes and activities of human beings and the natural processes that govern the movement of air, the erosion of the earth, the hydrological cycle, and the birth and death of living organisms’ (Spirn, 1984, p.12). Hence, like ecological urbanism it can be understood as a relational concept, aiming to move beyond nature-culture dichotomies. In this way, the green facade is the materialization of such a relational approach in city design and planning. Urban nature is also expressed through form and shape; designed in different ways it can provide specific spatial and material properties, according to the values designers or planners have about urban nature and how they understand it. It is therefore a cultural production, reflected not only through built designs but in drawings, visualizations, texts, images and oral discussions. It is evident in how designs are discussed, how they partake in specific urban contexts and how they are

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represented through texts and images, and also through plant care and maintenance.

Recent publications about design of urban nature point to the need for a more critical and nuanced debate be directed such aspects in contemporary urban practices (see e.g. Lister, 2016; Braae, 2017). Particularly, researchers have called for treating spatial design and planning as cultural and political activities and as generators of cultural products (see e.g. Meyer, 2008; Thompson, 2017). Landscape architecture theorist Elisabeth Meyer notes that design and planning should be seen as “cultural products with distinct forms and experiences that evoke attitudes and feelings through space, sequence and form” (Meyer, 2008, p.10). In this regard, understandings of the green facade and its ascribed values are expressed through a wide range of textual and visual representations and sources, design and planning actions and activities and through physical green facade designs, which all in different ways contribute to such cultural production and furthermore shape the spaces and buildings of cities. Examining the green facade as a cultural phenomenon, this study therefore seeks to expand the existing discussion beyond predominant focuses on ‘solving problems’ and making innovation, by asking more basic questions about the values that shape our contemporary cities.

Ecosystem services and urban green infrastructures Many of the arguments for why and how to design and plan green facades depart from natural science-based research on urban ecology and other environmental sciences.

More broadly, these perspectives have been influential for the design and planning of green cities in the 21st century (Steiner, 2011). Particularly, the ‘ecosystem service approach’ has gained much attention across different fields of research and practice in recent years. In the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, ecosystem services are defined as ‘the benefits that people obtain from ecosystems’ (MA 2003, p.

38). The approach, referred to as interdisciplinary, began in the 1970s (Basnou et al., 2015) 3. In city planning, the health (and success) of ecosystems is based on their ability to provide humans with benefits, or ‘services’ — supporting, provisioning, regulating and cultural services (Katz-Gerro et al., 2015; Hølleland et al., 2017). Following Myers

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(2016, 2017) thinking in terms of plant/people relationships, the ecosystem service approach promote a certain hierarchy in which the primary function of plants is to service humans in different ways.

The ecosystem service approach was developed in close relation to the ‘urban green infrastructure approach’ (Ahern, 2007; Basnou et al., 2015), which is central for the thinking around the contemporary green facade. Urban green infrastructures are conceptualized as strategic ways to design and plan cities, by creating interlinked systems of green elements and spaces in cities (see e.g. Ahern, 2007; Gill et al., 2007; Ignatieva et al., 2013; Dover, 2015). Thus, it appear as a way to spatially organize urban environments to support ‘ecological and cultural functions’ (Ahern, 2007), and provide ecosystem services in a cost-effective way (Dover, 2015). Particularly, it has been referred to as a climate change adaptation strategy that can help cities regulate their temperatures and stormwater runoffs (Gill et al., 2007). Researchers identify three elements of urban green infrastructures: lawns and other horizontal green spaces, green roofs and green facades (Ignatieva et al., 2013). The green facades and green roofs are particularly presented as design solutions that allow for integration of green infrastructures into existing built contexts (Ahern, 2007; van Bohemen, 2002; Dover, 2015). Thus, conceptualizing the green facade as a strategic planning tool to improve ‘ecosystem service functions’, and coupled with ideas of making ‘ecologically sound urban environments’ (Francis, 2011, p.1430). From this perspective the green facade appear as a design and planning solution to be added in the city in order to provide different positive services to humans.

While green facades are often presented as straight-forward and easily created through design and planning actions, the expression of such a common goal prompts fundamental questions about how we understand and approach green facades, about the role of plants and nature in relation to humans and as part of our cities. Echoing Myers (2017), these fundamental questions are not neutral, but reflect the ways in which humans involve themselves with plants; asking these questions is thus central for understanding how plant-people relationships are created and exist within urban settings.

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The multivalent green facade

This thesis defines ‘green facade’ as a collective term to cover all combinations of plants and building facades, in any situation or context, that are designed and planned intentionally by humans 4. The green facade is cultural by virtue of existing through human conduct and meaning-making, yet as the green facade in different ways is shaped by plants, they also continuously affect our understanding of the green facade.

Hence, while this study examines the values ascribed to the green facade, it acknowledges that such values do not exist in a vacuum, but are also continuously affected by what is traditionally is defined as ‘natural’, such as soil, plant growth etc.

The term ‘green facade’, consist of green which refers to plants and facade which refers to a particular architectural element. In this study, the green facade covers such terms as ‘living walls’ (e.g. Köhler, 2008), ‘vertical gardens’ (e.g. Blanc, 2008), and ‘vertical greening systems’ (e.g. Wong et al., 2009), all variations of the phenomenon.

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The ‘green’: an umbrella term that needs critical attention The first word in ‘green facade’, green, refers to the plants that grow on the facades.

Increasing this ‘green’, introducing green elements and green spaces, in cities is often presented as a straightforward task across various policies and urban development initiatives (e.g. Copenhagen Plan Strategy, 2015; Odense Plan Strategy, 2015).

However, such an initiative, while ascribed a positive value, often conflicts with other values or ideas. ‘Green’ is for instance often equated with ‘sustainability’ and ‘nature’, powerful terms frequently discussed in relation to each other, yet their meanings diverge depending on their context; they are thus loaded terms and less straightforward than the apparent role they play in contemporary urban discourses and in policymaking (see e.g. Spirn, 1997; Gandy, 2010; Braae, 2017). While some people present ‘green’ solutions as positive ways to increase the sustainability of buildings and cities, others criticize them for being the opposite: ‘green’ designs with plants, presented to us as ecological and as bringing ‘nature’ into the city, may for instance turn out to be designs that are highly manipulated and controlled and demand substantial resources (e.g. Ignatieva et al., 2013).

‘Green’ is an umbrella term that contains many meanings and that is used in different ways in urban development (e.g. Doherty, 2017; Hauser, 2018). It is often linked with artefacts and activities, such as ‘green technologies’, ‘green buildings’, ‘green architecture’, ‘green cities’, ‘urban green’, ‘green growth’ etc. Or, as is the focus of this thesis, ‘green facades’. Researchers have demonstrated how ‘green’ is a value-laden and at times highly reductive term (e.g. Hauser, 2018). While ‘green’ at first sight positively connotes aliveness and naturalness, it

incrementally serves the uncritical, fetishistic desire to metaphorically

hyper-compensate for a systemic necropolitics that has variously taken the

form of the increasing technical manipulation of living systems, ecologies, the

biosphere, and of very “un-green” mechanization (Hauser, 2018, p.2) 5.

More concept than color, the word is often reduced to a metaphor stripped of its

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material, epistemological and historical referents (ibid.). Cities use ‘green’ in branding strategies, for instance to attract citizens and tourists and boost investment and business. Such use is not necessarily based on qualified assessments and investigations on what ‘green’ really entails, and is at the risk of becoming a tool for ‘greenwashing’; of using the ‘green’ in marketing on false premises, an aspect that has been a point of critique for contemporary green facades (e.g. Gandy, 2010; Zaera-Polo et al., 2014).

Such mechanisms will be a topic of investigation in this study, as they are important for how the green facade is understood today.

While in ‘green facade’, the ‘green’ refers to plants, this use as a collective term to describe plants has been criticized in recent years. Anthropologist and theorist Anne Tsing finds ‘green’ to be a reductive term to describe plants because it refers to a single color, and not to plants’ multitude of colors and textures (Tsing, 2018). It describes living plants whose appearance and characteristics are more than just ‘green’, especially when we consider that plants also possess material characteristics, are seasonal and exist both above and below ground. Furthermore, as Myers (2016, 2017) reminds us the ‘green’ refers to plant-people power nexuses, relationships that need to be examined. The ‘green’ in ‘green facade’ is clearly a loaded term that requires more thought and nuance when referring to living plants and the roles they play in human conduct and meaning-making. Such considerations should not only be discussed within research, but also needs to be connected to practice. Hence, requiring studies that looks across these contexts.

The general confusion about what ‘green’ entails obstructs interdisciplinary dialogue in research and practice, dialogues that are urgently required, considering the anthropogenic effects on climate and biodiversity (e.g. Hauser, 2018). While ‘green’ should be used more carefully, it also holds the potential to open up perspectives to interdisciplinary approaches that entangle fields of understanding. Green facades are components of these discussions, and therefore provide a lens into discussions on what the more general word ‘green’ means and entails in contemporary urban development.

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The facade: a melting pot for different values, ideas and understandings The other word in ‘green facade’ is facade, referring to a central architectural element.

Facades are not neutral surfaces; they are material, have form; they are sites where interests and understandings are negotiated at different scales in urban development, such as legislation, standards, aesthetic preferences, historical values, economic interests, urban plans, ownership, etc.

The facade of a building is often referred to its front—the exterior walls oriented towards the public. ‘Facade’ originates from the Italian faccia, meaning the face of the building (Oxford English Dictionary). The facade is a much-debated element in architecture and has been theorized from multiple perspectives. The facade originates in the Renaissance, a period in European history between the 14th and the 17th centuries, and has been referred to as a Western invention (Bek, 2010). With the introduction of new drawing techniques in this epoch, studies and presentations of buildings began to appear as plans, sections and elevations, e.g. of facades (fig. 6). As a result, architecture has since been communicated in new ways through pictorial representations, which have affected spatial design in the widest sense across architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism (Bek, 2010). The facade gained status as a separate element that expresses and is given meaning through the way it is viewed and understood. Thus, with the Renaissance, it became a primary meaning-generating element, both by itself and in relation to other architectural elements and the building’s surroundings (ibid.).

The facade as a meaning-generating element was also central in the work of the 19th-century German architect theorist Gottfried Semper, who wrote that the facade was originally developed as a primitive structure to support, secure and create spatial enclosure (Forty, 2000) (fig. 7). Semper claimed that it was the enclosure of space, by using woven fabric as walls, that was the first architectural act, and not the tectonic construction of ‘primitive huts’ (Forty, 2000 p. 233) 6. The artistic endeavor of facades in particular is the result of a need to make and express meaning (ibid.).

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Figure 6 (top): In the Renaissance buildings were studied and presented through plans, sections and elevations. Example of drawings of the St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican State from the middle of the 16th century (Image source: Ward, 2012) Figure 7 (bottom): Semper claimed that ‘The Caraib Hut’ from the ‘Great Exhibition’ of 1851 in London demonstrated his ideas about the interrelationship between architecture and the motifs of practical art (Image source: Hvattum, 2004).

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Figure 8 (top, left): Antoni Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia (constructed from 1882-) in Barcelona is an example of Catalan Modernisme, with organic forms and Gothic references (Image source: archdaily / Expiatory Temple of the Sagrada Família).

Figure 9 (top, right): Victor Horta’s House from 1901 was built in Art Noveau style with organic ornaments in the interior and exterior (Image source: archdaily / Creative commons).

Figure 10 (bottom, left): Adolf Loos’ Steiner House in Vienna from 1910 shows an example of the simplistic style at the time (Image source: Gibberd et al., 2017).

Figure 11 (bottom, right): Venturi Scott Brown’s extension of the Sainsbury Wing National Gallery in London in 1991 shows an example of a Postmodern idiom (Image source: archdaily / Matteis)

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The changing expressions of facades and their designs can be understood as reflections of the time and society in which they were created, and the facade has been central in symbolizing the epochs in the history of architecture. For centuries, Western architecture has largely been used by classical idioms institutionalized through the Renaissance and dominating design until the 20th century. Architects in the late 19th century, a period later termed historicism, creatively used facade elements to establish links to earlier building styles, such as the medieval, Gothic and Baroque, resulting in a variety of facades and meanings through the use of ornaments and motifs (fig. 8-9).

Modernist architects of the first half of the 20th century often tempted to strip building facades of ornament, which they understood as insincere, unnecessary and immoral. Strong voices through this epoch were architects like Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, who directed attention towards machines and industrial products as the ideals for architectural form and expression (Le Corbusier, 1925; Loos, 1962) (fig. 10).

In response, postmodern architects such as for instance architectural theorist Robert Venturi again viewed the facade as a carrier of meaning and reintroduced the ornament (see e.g. Venturi et al., 1972) (fig. 11).

Recently researchers have sought to create a synthesis of the many roles of architectural facades by defining them as layered surfaces with a biologically regulating function that concerns the facade’s temperature and moist regulating abilities, and a semiotic communicating function that refers to the ways in which the facade expresses meaning and has a symbolic role (Selmer, 2003). Facades are also products of our time, constructions that reflect cultural concerns (e.g. Dahl, 2003).

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Figure 12 Kevin Lynch viewed buildings as edges in the city (Image source: Lynch, 1960).

Besides being a meaning-generating and regulating element, a facade also has the potential to bring form to buildings and urban spaces. Through its materiality and openings, a facade both connects and separates the modes of life in the city, the interior and exterior of buildings, the private and collective spaces. It helps define the form of spaces in cities. American urban theorist Kevin Lynch has for instance referred to facades as edges in cities, acting as lateral references and helping people to orientate themselves in the city (Lynch, 1960) (fig. 12) 7. In this way, the facade and its elements — its materiality, texture, form, details, ornaments, sizes, colours, degree of openness, function etc. — affect how people experience singular buildings as well as outdoor spaces in the city (ibid.).

Facades are therefore not just simple building surfaces; they are ascribed different meanings and values and contribute to our timely understanding of buildings and cities, as well as giving physical form to our urban spaces. Designing facades with plants on them is therefore a cultural activity based upon and expressing certain cultural values of the time in which they were created. This thesis therefore examines the facade: its physical and symbolic expression of time and values as ‘green’, as a facilitator of various plant-facade constellations, and as building walls framing urban spaces.

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Figure 13 (left): In LeCorbusier’s Maison Clarté in Geneva from 1930, planters were integrated into the terraces on the facade of the building structure (Image source: Fondation LeCorbusier) Figure 14 (right): In the Aarhus University building by Danish architects Kay Fisker, P. Stegmann and C.F. Møller from 1928 climbers were central for the architectural expression (Image source: Dansk Arkitektur Center).

The changing roles and meanings of green facades While ‘green facade’ comprises green and facade, green facade is also a concept of its own, as the combination of the two. While green facades are studied and designed within a wide range of contexts today, it is not a new phenomenon (see e.g. Köhler, 2008; Zaera-Polo, 2014). Understandings and values associated with green facades have accumulated over time and in response to changes in society 8. When examining contemporary green facades, it is therefore necessary to unfold such perspectives in order to illustrate the present state of knowledge and research possibilities in the discourse, as done in the following.

Plants have long played a central role in architecture, their form symbolically conveying particular meaning, or incorporated, alive, into designs of buildings.

Growing plants on building facades has served different purposes; such ‘green facades’ were used 2000 years ago in the Mediterranean region (Köhler, 2008). Around the world, green facades have long been part of vernacular traditions, to provide shade, grow fruit and for ornamental purposes (ibid.). Throughout the industrialization period in Europe and into the early twentieth century, climbing plants were used extensively (Köhler, 2008). Green facades were popular in German-speaking countries, where different movements promoted the use of climbing plants in building schemes, along with new species, especially decorative flowers and different types of climbing plants (Dunnett et al., 2008, p.193).

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Green facades were also part of modernist architecture, exemplified through designs by the French architect Le Corbusier and the Danish architect Kay Fisker (fig. 13-14). The district gardener in Copenhagen, Willy F. Hansen, wrote about the qualities of ‘plants on walls’ in 1935, noting that plants contribute their changing color and texture to the buildings and create variation in the urban environment (Gartner-Tidende, 2019).

With the emergence of the environmental movement since the 1960s and 70s, interest in green facades has been renewed; green facades became part of urban strategies and a tool to create more environmentally friendly buildings (Köhler, 2008). Incentive programs and initiatives in the 1980s, such as ‘Begrünung’ in Berlin and ‘Nature Does Not Stop at the City Border’ in Copenhagen, encouraged green facades in order to improve urban ecology (see e.g. Hauxner, 2010 p.57) (fig. 15).

The beginning of the 1990s marked a shift: new techniques emerged whereby plants could be grown in growth mediums on structural systems attached to building walls, encouraging more specific incorporation of plants in designs (see e.g. Blanc, 2012; Van Uffelen, 2016). A central figure in this innovation was the French botanist Patrick Blanc, with his ‘Vertical Garden’ concept developed in the late 1980’s (e.g. Blanc, 2008; Blanc, 2012). Though some of the principles had already been introduced by landscape architect Stanley Hart White in 1938 (Hindle, 2012), such designs were previously considered too marginal or technically challenging (Gandy, 2010) (fig. 16-18). Today, technically advanced designs have gained a strong foothold worldwide. They act as points of reference for contemporary design and planning and circulate across globally oriented and highly image-driven practices (see e.g. Margolis et al., 2008; Taudte-Repp, 2010; Jodido, 2013; Dover, 2015; Broto, 2016; Mostafavi, 2016; van Uffelen, 2016; Jodido, 2018; Byggros; Butong).

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Figure 15 Many green facades were created as part of the initiative ‘Nature Does Not Stop at the City Border’ in Copenhagen, and plants were increasingly popular as part of new constructions (Image source: Hauxner, 2010).

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origins of the vegetation-bearing architectonic structure and system

Downloaded by [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] at 13:29 24 April 2012

J. Coma et al. / Building and Environment

figure 3.

US Patent 2,113,523 Drawing Sheet 2 of 3. Inventor Stanley Hart White.

figure 4.

US Patent 2,113,523 Drawing Sheet 3 of 3. Inventor Stanley Hart White.

Figure 16 (left): Stanley Hart White developed a ‘Vegetation Bearing Architectonic Structure and System’ in 1938 (Image source: Hindle, 2012).

Figure 17 (middle): The first ‘Vertical Garden’ by Blanc from 1986, located in Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris (Image source: Patrick Blanc).

Figure 18: Today green facades are particularly studied as techniques, and their potential to regluate the urban environment (Image source: Coma et al., 2017).

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The interest in developing further advanced techniques and examining the environmental aspects of green facades is also prevalent in the rapidly growing body of research. Particularly, contemporary researchers claim that green facades can provide

Fig. 4. GW made with polyethylene modules filled with co

different ‘services’ to humans, such as regulating environments of cities (see e.g. Alex-

found calculate andetcompare passive andri et al., 2008; Wong et al., 2009;parameter Sternberg et al.,to2010; Ottelé al., 2010;the Wong

energy savings for vegetated greenery systems was the thermal behaviour et al., 2010; Perini et al., 2011; Marchi et al., 2015; Pandey et al., 2016; Sulkje al., averaged of external wall surface temperatures [4].

Threeet different parameters were usedFrancis to define thermal performance 2016) and enhancing ecology and biodiversity (see e.g. et the al.,dynamic 2011; Ignatieva of the construction system, detailed as follows:

et al., 2013; Collins et al., 2017). These publications tend to classify different types of

The thermal stability coefficient (TSC): ratio between inner and

green facades based upon their technical properties — the structural system applied outer thermal amplitudes.

The and the growth properties of the plants (fig.reduction 19-20). of daily maximum wall temperature (DT) for both

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VGS in comparison to the reference.

The thermal lag (h) between inner and outer wall temperature peaks observed for each facade orientation.

3. Results and discussion

energ perio cubic reach Howe linear contr the co To energ conse expec comp than

Bygning nr 1 (Albani karréen)

Bygning nr 16 TBT Kvarteret

PLANT ON FACADE TECHNIQUES

C

GREEN FACADES E

D

LIVING WALLS

Jordplader Jordplade

Vokser ikke op I Frostfri jord op af væg Vokser ikke op SELF-CLIMBING PLANTS Kobles på vandingssystem kobles (DIRECT) på vandingssystem

system ingssystem

Monteres Monteres grøngrøn

Planter på wire

Potter på dæk

I Frostfri jord op af væg

I Frostfri jord op af væg

SOIL BASED WALL SYSTEM

ESPALIER

som grønne væg i store facader Grønnejordplader Facader Planter og wire/gitter systemer Grønne Facader

cader

Planter på “bar” væg

MODULAR BASED ESPALIER

plade

SPONTANEOUS WALL VEGETATION (DIRECT)

CLIMBERS WITH GROWTHkobles på vandingssystem LIVING WALL SYSTEMS SUPPORT (INDIRECT) (INDIRECT)

Højde afhænger af planter

ARTIFICIAL WALL VEGETATION (DIRECT)

LANDSCAPE WALL (DIRECT)

HYDROPONIC

Grønne Facader Grønne Facader Facader Grønne Potter på dæk

Figure 33. Urban plan references.

The reference images of green facades in the urban plan shows prime-examples from all over the world Pottekasetter Jordplade Pottekasetter &&Jordplade (Images by Entasis, 2013)

FELT LAYER SYSTEM

GRODAN MODULAR SYSTEM

PLANTING BOXES

Eks Eks

Eksempel på rumlig placering af grønne facader

Eksempel på rumlig placering af grønne facader

WIRE- AND GRID BASED SYSTEM Bygning nr 9 Rosengade kvarteret

Figure 19 The terms used to describe and classify green facade techniques are many. This diagram Bygning 1 (Albani plants karréen) shows one example ofnrhow on facades are classified across reserach publications.

This thesis uses ‘green facade’ cover all combinations of plants and facades, and not jordplader som grønne vægto i punkthuse Bygning nr 16 TBT Kvarteret departing from the technical aspects of such installations.

Bygning nr 9 Rosengade kvart

Figure 34. Diagrammatic placement of green facades.

The diagram from the urban plan shows how the green facades could be placed at various levels on the building, indicated with Bygning nr 1 (Albani karréen) green.

(Image by Entasis, 2013)

Grønne vægge

ønne vægge

Principper

cipper

C

D

E

Planter på wire

Potter på dæk

I Frostfri jord op af væg

I Frostfri jord op af væg

Grønne vægge vægge Grønne Principper Principper

Bygning nr 16 TBT Kvarteret

Jordplader Jordplade

Vokser ikke op I Frostfri jord op af væg

ystem

Vokser ikke op Kobles på vandingssystem

Højde afhænger af planter

kobles på vandingssystem

kobles på vandingssystem

Monteres Monteres grøngrøn

pottekasseter som grønne væg

jordplader som grønne væg i store facader

A

er på væg

fri jord op af væg tem afhænger af planter

C Jordplade

B

D

Planter på wire

C

Planter på wire Pottekassetter Højde afhængerJordplade af planter I Frostfri jord op af væg I Frostfri jord op af væg Vokser ikke op I Frostfri jord op af væg Vokser ikke op Højde afhænger af planter Vokser ikke op kobles på vandingssystem kobles på vandingssystem Monteres grøn kobles på vandingssystem Monteres grøn Monteres grøn

E

A

Planter på vægD PotterPlanter på dækpå væg

B

AA

C

BB

D

CC

Pottekassetter Jordplader Pottekassetter Potter påEdæk Figure 35. Green facade techniques. The diagrams fromJordplader the Planterpå påvæg væg Planter urban

plan shows the

Pottekassetter I frostfri jord opafad I Frostfri jord op vægvæg

Pottekassetter Pottekassetter different green

Vokser ikke op Jordplade Vokser ikke op Vokser ikke op

facade techniques

Jordplade Jordplade that

Vokser ikke afop Planter på wire ikke Vokser I Frostfri jord opop væg

E

DD

Planterpå påwire wire Planter

P Po

Potter på dæk jord op af væg I Frostfri

I IF

exists Højde afhænger af planter I Frostfri af væg today.

Vokser ikke op I Frostfri jord op af væg I Frostfri jord op af væg Planter på wire Potterjord på op dæk Figure 20 (Image

by Entasis, 2013) I Frostfri jord op af væg I Frostfri jord op af væg Vokser ikke op afhænger I Frostfri jord op på af væg I Frostfri Vokser jord op ikke af væg I FrostfriHøjde jord opafhænger af væg af planter Højde planter på væg kobles vandingssystem Højde afhænger afafplanter planter kobles på Vokser ikkebygninger opopvandingssystem Højde afhænger af planter Referencer om der vokser på en begrænset flade i nye I Frostfri jord op af væg I Frostfri jord op af væg Kobles påvandingssystem vandingssystem Kobles på Kobles på vandingssystem Kobles på vandingssystem Kobles på vandingssystem kobles på vandingssystem Vokser ikke op af planter green facade kobles på techniques vandingssystem Højde afhænger afvandingssystem planter kobles på vandingssystem A typical schematic presentation Højde of afhænger different Monteres grøn koblespåpå Monteres grøn kobles vandingssystem Højde afhænger af planter kobles på vandingssystem Monteres grøn kobles på vandingssystem Monteresgrøn grøn Monteres grøn Monteresgrøn grøn Monteres Monteres grøn (Image source: Entasis, 2013).

Monteres

jordplader som grønne væg i punkthuse

kok

Monteres grøn

jordpladersom somgrønne grønnevæg vægi jordplader

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Research problem

The prevalent focus in contemporary research and practice is particularly on technical and environmental aspects, which is separated into discussions concerned with specific features of green facades. However, as green facades are part of multidimensional urban contexts and situations, and ascribed a wide range of values, we need perspectives that look beyond green facades as technical and environmental design solutions.

Little attention has been directed to the green facade from this broadened perspective, and furthermore, to cast light on the values that are at play in shaping the green facade and the city more broadly. This is problematic, given the great focus within urban design and planning on bringing together plants and people. Particularly when considering that in creating such relationships, humans are often the ones who tend to draw up the lines (Myers, 2017). This calls for critical investigations to reveal insights into dynamics of contemporary design and planning, and that generate new understandings about the premises behind such complex tasks. Bringing together different perspectives will be crucial for making better urban environments that facilitate and support various forms of life.

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The green facade exists at multiple scales simultaneously, both physically and conceptually, from the smallest detail or fragment, to building structures, urban spaces, cities and beyond. The green facade has the potential to facilitate meetings between plants and buildings, nature and culture, different interests, values and understandings. It provides a lens to examine green urban development as a negotiation of values and meanings.

Contextualizing the contemporary green facade shows that not only is it an object for discussion but it is multivalent: ascribed various values and visual references in different contexts. However, though the green facade is a multivalent phenomenon, its ascribed values across research and practice are unclear. Shifting to see that a phenomenon like the green facade is many things at the same time may help cast light on aspects that would otherwise be overlooked. This requires examinations of how the contemporary green facade is shaped across scales and contexts of city design and planning research and practice. Investigating and unfolding such values ascribed the green facade can ignite new thinking that impact designers and planners understandings and actions, and eventually their ability to approach present urban issues.

To clarify the values ascribed to and affecting the contemporary green facade, it is important to approach the green facade as having no inherent value that is absolute, easily definable, universal or ultimately objective. Rather, it depends on its context and complex networks for the value and understanding ascribed to it. The green facade exists through human perception and meaning-making: negotiation, action and lack of action, textual and visual representation. In the examination of the green facade, it is therefore necessary to incorporate different perspectives and create a multi-faceted interpretation. Values ascribed to the green facade are expressed through the texts aboutand images of green facades in research and practice, through the different frameworks that affect design, such as urban planning policies, strategies, visions, design actions and representations (e.g. photographs, drawings, visualizations). Investigating these sources are important since knowledge and understandings of the green facade crosses

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research and practice; visual representations are tightly linked to the way we talk about and approach the green facade, and how we study, design and plan green facades, and vice versa. Defining green facades thus affects practices concerned with the design and planning of cities, and can be important tools to direct the design, maintenance and transformation of the urban landscape.

To expand the understanding of the green facade as a cultural phenomenon requires investigations that look into different contexts of research and practice, and by use of diverse sources of information. This wide scope of potential investigations is here narrowed down and specified into three studies that examines the green facade in four contexts: -

as part of design and planning practice

-

as objects of research

-

as presented in architectural publications

-

as existing physically in the urban landscape

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Aim, objectives and research questions

The overall aim of this research is to unfold the values ascribed to green facades, in order to forward a clearer, more nuanced and critical understanding of the roles and potentials of green facades in contemporary urban development. It does so by focusing on green facades found in cities in Western countries, a geographical area that is highly influential on the research and practice of the contemporary green facade globally (see e.g. Blanc, 2008; Dunnett et al., 2008 ; Margolis et al., 2008; Balmori et al., 2011; Blanc, 2012; Broto, 2016; van Uffelen, 2016) 9. The study roams over the spatial design and planning fields, i.e. landscape architecture, architecture, urban design- and planning, and includes contributions from across research and practice in urban discourses. Accordingly, this study draws on literature from the specific field of design research, the broader disciplines of arts, humanities and anthropology, and ecology, environmentalism and building technologies.

The study pursues three main objectives: to identify motivations and premises for design and planning of green facades in contemporary urban practice; to unfold understandings and conceptualizations of green facades across research cultures; and to reveal conceptualizations of green facades in architectural publications and their impact on the design discourse.

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Research questions In response to these aims and objectives, the research questions of this thesis are formulated to unfold, nuance and clarify understandings associated with the contemporary green facade. It has been guided by the main research questions: what is a green facade? In what ways is it understood today, and which values are ascribed to it?

The main research questions are divided into three sub-questions:

1.

What are the premises for the design of green facades in a contemporary

urban context? (paper I)

2.

How are green facades conceptualized in research? (paper II)

3.

How are green facades represented and conceptualized in architectural

publications? And how can such understandings be nuanced and expanded?

(paper III)

Directed by the research questions, this thesis comprises three studies. In response to question 1 the green facade is investigated as a part of design practice and urban policies, by examining a large architectural and urban transformation project in Odense, Denmark. Question 2 is answered by examining the green facade as an object of research, scrutinizing texts and images from different research cultures. Question 3, finally, examines design presentations of an iconic green facade project as it appears in architectural publications, and explores green facades as existing physically within everyday landscape in the city of Copenhagen. This thesis is not intended to provide a comprehensive answer to all aspects of these questions, but presents three specific studies as a contribution to unfold, nuance and invite to continued critical discussion and reflective practice.

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The following presents the research approach, the theoretical lens and methods, used in this research, chapter 2. It elucidates how critique has been understood, used and developed theoretically and methodologically in this thesis. This is followed by chapter 3, which presents the findings of the three studies done for this research. Chapter 4 provides a final discussion of the outcome of this thesis. This is followed by a discussion on this thesis’ implications and limitations. Finally, the conclusion outlines the detailed contribution of this study and provides perspectives for future research.

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Notes

1

Thompson (2016) refer specifically to landscape architecture in his text. However, the statement can also be applied to a wider context of spatial design and covering landscape architecture, architecture and urban design.

2

Greening cities is often coupled with ideas on increasing urban resilience. Resilience, as a lens, refers to ‘the ability of an ecosystem to withstand and absorb change to prevailing environmental conditions’ (Lister, 2016, p. 305). Urban resilience thus implies changing urban structures through adapting, reorganizing and evolving to improve the sustainability of cities and make them better prepared for future climate changes (see e.g. Folke, 2006; Nelson et al., 2007).

3

The concept was born at the confluence of diverse environmental sciences with the increasing interests in ecology of cities from the 1970’s and onwards due to increasing urbanization and as cities were found to account for the majority of the greenhouse gas emissions globally (see e.g. Schneider et al., 2009; Basnou et al., 2015).

4

Studies illuminate that plants colonize and grow on buildings without human intervention (Madre et al., 2015), often referred to as ‘spontaneous’ green facades or walls (see e.g. Dunnett et al., 2008; Gandy, 2010). The lack of human action, here also considered a deliberate action, such as the neglection of buildings or lack of maintenance, may result in growth of plants on building facades.

One example being the city of Detroit in the U.S, where major economic and demographic decline have resulted in the abandonment of thousands of houses, some of which have become favorable habitats for plants.

5

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Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as the ‘power and (…) capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’ (Mbembe, 2003, p.14).

6

In his book Essay sur l’architecture, the 18th-century French writer Marc-Antonie Laguier claims architecture, like all arts, found its principles in nature, based upon a rational system where ‘architecture points to the natural building and instructs humanity in its principles’ (Forty, 2000, p. 221). He illustrates this with the construction of primitive huts, where it is possible to distinguish the parts fundamental to architectural order from those introduced only as a result of need, or those added by caprice (Forty, 2000, p. 222).

7

Edges in cities may consist of impenetrable lines, such as the base line of a building complex or the wall surrounding a garden (Motloch, 2001). Edge is also synonym with border, referring to the line where an object or area begins or ends (Merriam-Webster), e.g. the physical distinction between where the urban space ends and building facade starts.

8

Though not the focus in this thesis, historical studies of green facades appear as underexplored in contemporary research, and would make an important contribution to the field.

9

While the green facade has gained much attention globally, and new designs are increasingly created worldwide, designs, planning initiatives and techniques related to it are often inspired by practice in Western countries, or are even created by design studios located in this area (see e.g. Blanc, 2008; Dunnett et al., 2008; Margolis et al., 2008; Balmori et al., 2011; Blanc, 2012; Dover, 2015; Jadido, 2018; Stefano Boeri Architetti). Exploring contemporary green facades from a Western context may thus have a great influence on the understandings and approaches in a globally oriented discourse.

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2. THEORETICAL LENS AND METHODS

In order to develop a nuanced and critical understanding of the contemporary green facade this thesis examines the green facade though critiques. This chapter presents the critical approach used to examine the contemporary green facade into four contexts, through three studies. However, as this research situates in both the fields of spatial design and planning and involves perspectives from many more fields, its approach is first an interdisciplinary one, outlined in the first section of this chapter.

Looking into and across: an interdisciplinary approach to the green facade Since this thesis brings together various perspectives by investigating understandings in research and practice, it engages with norms, values and languages that differ between research cultures. These are frequently referred to as ‘interdisciplinary’ approaches, which means looking across or between disciplines, to ‘provide a frame of reference, methodological approaches, topics, theoretical canons, and technologies’ for research and practice (Stock et al., 2011, p.1090). Such efforts are now widely recognized as a vital part of effective responses to present urban challenges (Rylance, 2015).

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This study uses an interdisciplinary approach to generate vital and new understandings of green facades in the context of present design and planning activities, both in research and practice. It thus explores how green facades appear across multiple contexts and scales, looking for this information beyond disciplinary boundaries.

Particularly, it seeks to gain a multi-faceted interpretation of the green facade as culturally produced, through cultural analysis and by use of insights from the design and planning fields. Specialist knowledge make important contributions to present understandings of the green facade, however, to answer complex urban challenges, we need perspectives that also look across disciplines, and of research and practice. This study aims to do so by bringing together different perspectives on the green facade.

A critical approach to examine the contemporary green facade Critique of the contemporary green facade In the domains of spatial design and planning, critique is frequently used in activities of teaching, in the professional arena and in academic research. Critique means a detailed analysis and assessment of something, such as of a designed project or of a theory (Oxford English Dictionary). While critique more broadly refers to a wider set of meanings 10, it can be characterized as a thorough examination of a specific object or situation, and can take form as for instance a written or visual piece of work, such as an academic article (e.g. van Dooren, 2018).

Critique is important for propelling theory and practice in arts, however, the role of the critique in reflection on design in spatial design and planning seems to be less specific (e.g. McAvin et al., 1991; Meyer, 1997; Diedrich et al., 2018). In landscape design, researchers have in recent years called for more attention be given critique (e.g. van Dooren, 2018), and activities within these fields has recently focused on critique in different ways 11. A person doing a critique is a critic, and has been referred to as a specialist in evaluating design and planning projects, typically addressing a concrete

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built project (van Dooren, 2018). A basic observation for this thesis is that design and planning takes place at many scales, over time and include a wide range of activities.

In the studies of this research I therefore also include other objects of critique, and explore what doing a critique could concern and how it could look in a spatial design and planning research context. I do so by examining the green facade as part of urban plans, visions and policies, through evoked materialities of design drawings, as presented in architectural publications and by investigating how research contribute to the practice and thinking within spatial design and planning. In this way I seek to make a contribution to positioning critique as an academic activity.

Doing critique as an academic activity The potential of critique to generate new understandings and knowledge, makes it a well-suited academic activity (see e.g. Swaffield, 2006). This requires that the critic is reflective upon their position, has an opinion or point of view. Furthermore, as an academic activity, doing a critique requires theoretical and methodological endeavors of a critic. This has been described by urban design theorist Miriam Gusevich:

Critique goes beyond serious criticism in the process of self-reflection: it

investigates the theoretical foundations of judgement (...) If criticism is a

reflection on architecture, critique is a reflection on the conditions of

criticism (...) (Gusevich, 1991, p.15) 12

While criticism and critique are two interlinked modes of evaluating urban landscapes and buildings, critique can be understood as a mode of investigation that requires two levels of reflection. Firstly, it involves the critic to be self-reflective; it demands the critic to be aware of their position and further, to be clear and transparent about this position. Secondly, becoming aware of that position means relating the critique to the larger professional field in which it is situated, requiring reflection upon the targeted field and topic. In this way, a critique becomes relevant; it can even have a generating role when it contributes with new understandings and knowledge to its field, and 65

beyond. Examining the green facade into different contexts thus requires that I clarify my research position, that I am transparent and that I situate the research topic and focus within a wider city design and planning research and practice context.

Critique, as an approach and mode of thinking in research, needs to be linked to theory. The conceptual interdependence between theory and critique has been described by landscape design theorist Simon R. Swaffield. In his publication on the link between theory and critique in landscape architecture, which here is applied to design and planning of urban landscapes at large, Swaffield points to how doing a critique typically focus upon the specific, yet ‘requires a theoretical foundation from which to draw concepts and criteria’ (Swaffield, 2006, p. 23). At the same time, ‘theory always involves some degree of generalization’ that ‘in a design discipline must be constructed and continuously reconstructed from particular cases, events, and experiences’ (Swaffield, 2006, p. 22). In this way, the critique goes beyond data collection and just delivering information; it involves moments of thorough examination, evaluation and discourse. Further it involves moments of generation in which phenomena, tendencies and projects of spatial design and planning are retrieved, reopened, reformulated and resituated (Gusevich, 1991). Critique, in this study, is therefore used as a structured academic activity, where I seek to ignite new thinking and unfold overlooked, implicit and unclear perspectives on the contemporary green facade.

How critique is used in this thesis In this study I use critique as an analytical and generating strategy; as a vehicle to unfold, clarify and bring together perspectives that otherwise would remain separated or implicit. Furthermore, I use critique as a strategy that allows for explorations into different contexts, materials and sources. It is a way to read design and planning projects, spatial and physical spaces and buildings, texts and images in publications from practice and research, and to open up and generate understandings that adds to present state of knowledge. The examination of the green facade as a cultural phenomenon requires studies that look into diverse sources and contexts of both

66

research and practice. Hence, I examine the green facade through a kaleidoscopic approach that consists of three critiques and that contribute with sections of in-depth knowledge on the green facade in specific contexts, departing from different perspectives and by use of heterogenous sources across research and practice. I consider critique as a way to build and interlink understandings: the values that are at play in research and practice concerned with green facades define the way that we approach, think of and shape our cities. These are not just defined by research or by practice, but by both – as interlinked modes of understanding, studying and practicing the city at multiple scales.

I examine the contemporary green facade by use of critique in three ways: In paper I, critique operates as a strategy to explore the premises behind the design of green facades and the inherent values ascribed to them, in the context of a contemporary design and planning practice. By way of a case study of an architectural competition and a large urban transformation project in the city of Odense in Denmark, I direct particular attention to how green facades are understood through two lenses of design criticism. In order to examine the values ascribed the contemporary green facade, I draw upon the work of the American film, dance and theatre critic and philosopher Noël Carroll, to investigate architecture as design work and to thus make ‘grounded evaluations’ by examining the intentions of artists (Carroll, 2009).

However, as the premises for the design of the green facade are defined not just by the artist, but by the wider urban design and planning context, I draw upon the work of architecture theorist Mary McLeod to expand the understanding of design and examine it as part of a broader domain of urban discourses and processes (McLeod, 1987).

In paper II, I use critique to unfold how green facades are conceptualized in research, drawing upon cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (Bal, 2002). Peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals make important contributions to how the contemporary green facade is conceptualized. Today, such publications rely on 67

different disciplinary perspectives that are seemingly unaware of one another, resulting in lack of dialogues across different viewpoints. This paper aims to contribute to knowledge migration between those fields, in order to have more nuanced debates on green facades in particular and about the role of ecology in the city more broadly.

In paper III, I use critique to investigate an iconic green facade design, the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum in Madrid, Spain, through analysis of visual and textual presentations in contemporary architectural publications. These publications make important contributions in the discourse as they define what- and how to look at designs of architecture and urban spaces, and act as important sources to inspire designers and planners. With the help of cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s perspectives on concepts, the study shows that texts and images of green facades contribute to the formation of concepts and thus the production of meaning (Bal, 2002, p. 26). In order to expand the perspectives on contemporary representations of green facades, the paper is inspired by the visual cultural theorist Irit Rogoff’s ‘look away’ strategy (Rogoff, 2005). Looking away from the ‘Vertical Garden’, the critique is used to examine the green facades in the everyday landscape of Copenhagen.

Methods used in the three studies Examining the green facade: theory of knowledge The methodological point of departure for this thesis has been an explorative and inductive approach (Cresswell, 2009), in order to unfold, clarify and contribute with new links within the discourse surrounding the green facade. The inductive approach was taken based upon the current topical knowledge gap and the separate understandings in the discourse. Studying the green facade interdisciplinary, I therefore seek to ‘bridge’ objectivist and subjectivist paradigms, and bring together knowledge and understandings from different discourses (Swaffield, 2006). Doing so, I collect on-theground information and provide qualitative research on green facades, attempting to ‘make sense of and interpret the phenomena in terms of the meaning people bring to them’ (Denzin et al., 2011, p.3).

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Premises for the design and planning of the green facade in practice

I

Conceptualizations of green facades in research

II

Presentations of green facades in architectural publications and new modes of representation

III

Image-making, photography

Semi-structured interviews

Informal talks

On-site observations

Rhetorical prĂŠcis mapping

Visual analysis

Paper

Document analysis

Study

Figure 21 The methods used in the three studies

Methods I developed the studies of this thesis within a poly-perspective framework, where each study and paper respectively reveals a kaleidoscopic section of the topic. In this sense, the three studies focus on four contexts that are central to understand green facades as culturally produced in different ways. I used different methods to gather and analyze the empirical material, and include multiple sources such as document analysis, visual analysis, literature studies, interviews, on-site observations, participation in design presentations and citizen meetings and image-making through photography (fig. 21).

Some of the methods recur across the different studies of this thesis, adapted to the context and situation in which they were applied. This is described in the following, where each subsection elaborates upon the research design of the conducted studies and presents the methods applied.

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Premises for the design and planning of the green facade in practice (paper I) A case study approach was taken to respond the first research question: What are the premises for the design of green facades in a contemporary urban context?. Case study research is an empirical method of inquiry into a contemporary phenomenon (e.g. the integration of plants on facades through design) within its real-life context (e.g. as part of an urban environment and as part of a visual representation culture) (Yin, 2014). The design competition ‘New Oluf Bager Plaza – Two New Houses and a Plaza’ is a single-case study. By investigating an architectural design competition located within a large urban transformation project in a medium-sized European city in Denmark, multiple scales of green facades could be examined. While the case is located within a specific Danish city, a generalization of the findings can give insights that are valuable to other design and planning contexts where green facades are central tools to reach quantity and quality targets of vegetation.

The case study process was iterative; I moved back and forth between collecting and creating empirical material from different sources and interpreting and analyzing the material. In the study I followed the process of the ongoing design competition closely, allowing insights through encounters with different actors and materials along the way, while also providing information about how certain dynamics and negotiations were conducted on a human one-to-one scale. Further, the case study dealt with analysis of texts and images that were produced in the years before the architectural competition.

In the case study I included many sources of information and used different investigation techniques and methods: document analysis and visual analysis of the design and planning material; direct observations through participation at design presentations, at citizen meetings and at evaluation sessions; informal talks with the building owner and other key actors; semi-structured interviews with the designers in their studios; and photographic registrations on-site. In the study I investigated a design and planning project in process, where the analysis drew upon intentional design representations and their evoked materialities as well as on-site observations.

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Conceptualizations of green facades in research (paper II) To answer the second research question: How are green facades conceptualized in research?, I was inspired by discourse analysis. Discourse analysis helps to reveal the meaningmaking structures in research on green facades. The cultural production of the green facade is continuously mediated and defined by textual and visual representations. In light of this, research articles takes a central position in the discourse as they contribute to knowledge generation, and thus also the construction of meaning; directing what matters in the discourse and drawing attention to particular aspects of the discourse in research and practice (see e.g. Chouliaraki et al., 1999; Fairclough, 2001). Analysis of research publications on green facades helps unfold understandings that defines and directs future research and practice.

I started the study with a literature search in the databases Scopus, Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar, using the specific term ‘green facade’, as well as related terms such as ‘living facade’, ‘vertical greenery systems’, ‘green wall’, ‘living wall systems’, ‘living wall’ and ‘vertical garden’. Searches were delimited by article title, keywords, abstracts and topic, and peer-reviewed articles and books written in English. The search period was from January 2000 to January 2018, as the development of green facades has been particularly strong in the last two decades. For these searches, I identified more than 200 articles. These were screened based on their abstracts, to see if the articles were within the scope relevant to the study. Of the identified articles, more than 60 were found relevant to the topic based on their content, and these were included in the study. I created rhetorical précises, structured and analytical paragraphs, for each article. These supported reflective and critical readings of the research publications and helped expose underlying value frameworks and understandings (scribd). I used the rhetorical précises to map patterns in the research literature, and divided them into themes. These themes became the categories referred to as ‘clusters of research’ in the paper, and based upon analysis across these clusters of research, common characteristics of conceptualizations of green facades were found.

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Presentations of green facades in architectural publications and new modes of representation (paper III) To answer the third research question: How are green facades represented and conceptualized in architectural publications? And how can such understandings be nuanced and expanded?, I combined two methodological approaches. Firstly, I was inspired by discourse analysis as a way to understand the meaning-making structures of texts and images presented in the architectural publications 13. I did so by focusing on one specific case, the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum in Madrid, and how it recurs across different architectural publications. These publications act as a central sources of inspiration for designers and planners, and show particular works of design while also imposing specific ways to look at these designs. In this way, analyzing how a specific green facade design project is presented in architectural publications helps unfolding the meaning structures in the discourse that define and direct future research and practice.

To investigate how the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum is conceptualized across architectural publications, I used document analysis of text and images and rhetorical précis mapping. Documents analyzed were the different architectural publications that contain or concern the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum. The result was a metaanalysis of the content in architectural publications and their meaning-generating role in relation to green facades generally, and the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum specifically.

I started the study by scrutinizing architectural publications, books and articles, concerned with themes such as ‘sustainable architecture’, ‘green architecture’, ‘garden city’, ‘green buildings’, ‘vertical gardens’ and ‘vertical landscapes’. This was supplemented with specific searches for the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum in the databases Scopus, Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar. Six books and three articles were found relevant to the topic and were thus included in the study.

I created rhetorical précises for each publication, engendering reflective and critical readings of the project to help understand the frameworks in which the design was 72

presented through text and images. The rhetorical précises also included an overall analysis of the images in the publications. I used the rhetorical précises to reveal common understandings across the publications, and discussed them thematically.

These were supplemented with observations and images made through a field study of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum.

In response to observations made in the field and the analysis of the design literature, critiques and the conceptualizations of the vertical garden at Caixa Forum by others, I applied a second methodological approach. Inspired by visual cultural theorist Irit Rogoff’s ‘look away’ strategy to generate new insights (Rogoff, 2005), I redirected attention to other green facades that exist in the urban landscape. Moving from a meta-analysis of writings and images of the vertical garden at Caixa Forum, I applied a situated approach to explore various green facades as part of existing urban spaces and contexts (see e.g. Haraway, 1988). Specifically, I explored green facades through image-making, as a way of seeing the world and acting as a form of thought, speech and memory that is defined by my position as image maker and my focus on- and act of making visual compositions (e.g. Rose, 2001; Spirn, 2012).

The situated approach of observing and making images in this thesis was based upon repeated visits and explorations of green facades in the urban landscape of my hometown, Copenhagen, in the period between 2015 and 2019. I categorised the images according to the year and location they were taken, and analysed them based upon their content. Analysis of the images drew particular attention to aspects of time (i.e. the plants’ state at various times of the year, their growth, the changes in the surrounding context and situations in which the green facades partake), materiality, aesthetics and how the images are composed and how they show different levels of detail in the green facades. The analysis shifted between image analysis, image-making, image descriptions and making links between text and images, and was an iterative process.

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Notes

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The word critique refers to a wide set of meanings, as articulated in the field of philosophy through Immanuel Kant’s ‘Kritik der reinen Vernunft’, or ‘Critique of pure reason’ translated to English, from 1781. See for example translation by Meiklejohn, 2011.

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Examples being the dedication to criticism in the section ‘Under the Sky’ in the scholarly Journal of Landscape Architecture, critique section in the Dutch professional magazine Blauwe Kamer and recent special issues in scholarly journals focusing upon critique such as SPOOL Landscape Metropolis ‘Criticizing Practice, Practicing Critique’ (2018). Other efforts to develop critique in fields concerned with design of landscapes is reflected through a number of seminars on the topic, along with academic courses at Ph.D. level (e.g. two courses offered by SLU in Sweden entitled ‘Criticizing Practice, Practicing Critique’ (2016) and ‘Criticality In, On and For Design’ (2018), and ‘Constructing Criticism’ offered by the University of Copenhagen in 2016).

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In her writing on criticism, Gusevich focus particularly on architecture. Though, the role of criticism can be expanded to contain fields of spatial design and planning at broad, both working in and with private and public domains.

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Inspired by discourse analysis, the study uses the same approach as presented in the sub-section ‘Conceptualizations of green facades in research (paper II)’.

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3. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

This thesis examined the green facade as part of design and planning practice, as objects of research, in architectural publications as part of design presentations and as existing physically within the urban landscape. This chapter summarizes the findings of each paper according to the three guiding research questions.

Premises for the design of green facades in an urban context (paper I) The green facade provides a lens to study tendencies in contemporary green urban development. The practice of designing and planning green facades and the values and premises associated with such processes together prescribe specific ways of understanding and making green facades, and in a broader sense, how plants are incorporated into the contemporary city. These interlinked activities and modes of understanding play important role in defining how our cities are shaped at multiple scales. In this regard, paper I examines green facades as part of the architectural competition ‘New Oluf Bager’s Plaza – Two Houses and a Plaza’, situated within a larger urban transformation project, ‘Thomas B. Thrige Street’ and covering a substantial area in the city centre of Odense, Denmark. The following section address the first research question and summarizes the findings from paper I.

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Designing green facades Using the first lens of criticism, the study drew upon art criticism (Carroll, 2009) to investigate the projects of the architectural competition at New Oluf Bager’s Plaza as works of art by examining them as physical artefacts and as cultural expressions based upon the intentions of their makers. This was done by scrutinizing the texts and visuals from the competition entries and written comments by building owners, observing the designers oral presentations of their work, and analysing the competition aims and the design brief, supplemented with semi-structured interviews with the design teams.

The findings show that the designers struggled to combine the different values and requirements for the design project. This struggle was expressed in the design drawings and through talks with the designers. The building owner of the New Oluf Bager’s Plaza required that the new buildings be integrated into the existing urban environment without compromising the historical qualities of the area. Furthermore, the project was conceptualized as an exemplary project where the new buildings would be part of a climate change adaptation solution, through local management of storm water and establishment of green facades. However, most of the architect teams left green facades out of the designs in their first competition entries. In response the building owner pointed to this as a requirement, and proposed the teams rework their designs in a more innovative manner so that green facades become central in the architectural expression. In the second round of the design competition, the design teams had reworked their projects and included green facades. However, these did not articulate the temporal qualities of the plants, such as their growth and seasonal changes.

Instead, the designers treated the plants more as static architectural decoration and as communicative elements, rather than exploring plants as living material, with perceivable characteristics and related to larger landscape processes.

In interviews with the design teams, the designers said they were concerned with what they considered a key challenge: how to combine and balance the conflicting aims of adapting to the risk of storm water in innovative ways while also adapting to the

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historical buildings. One team said they could not even see the relevance of experimenting with climate change solutions at all in this context, as they found it too delicate. When asked to characterise their works, the designers described the plants metaphorically and as static entities in line with other architectural elements.

In examining green facades as part of this design work, a key finding was that the designers negotiated the values and requirements through the architectural form: making designs that prioritized the buildings over plants, and fitting plants into the form of the building. In this way, the designers countered the program by not introducing new architecture that expressed innovation and sustainability, and instead combined vegetation and facades in ways that resembled historical architecture, to achieve the goal of historic preservation.

Green facades as part of the public realm Analysing the intentions behind the designs for the architectural competition New Oluf Bager’s Plaza, it was found that green facades were a major theme in the competition because of the ideas and interests that existed prior to competition. Thus, the findings from the first examination redirected attention towards the underlying agendas of the project: the requirements, ideas and premises set out for the larger urban transformation project of Thomas B. Thrige Street, which included New Oluf Bager’s Plaza. Drawing upon a mode of design criticism that relates to a broader domain of urban discourses and processes (McLeod, 1987), the second part of the study therefore interrogates the wider urban transformation project of Thomas B. Thrige Street.

Scrutinizing urban strategic planning documents, official policies, legislative documents etc., showed that these documents created multiple premises for the competition.

Specifically, they prescribed that the new urban district at Thomas B. Thrige Street should be a dense city, though it should not compromise the ‘green’—the inclusion of

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nature. As a result, the urban plan for the area proposed to maximize the amount of greenery by designing plants on buildings in various ways. In response, the municipally-approved physical development plan defined specific quantitative measures requiring greening 30% of the facade length of each building of the area. The plans for the area argued that green facades provided many benefits to the urban environment, generic arguments which legitimized green facades as the ‘right type’ of greenery for the area.

However, the study found that green facades and roofs primarily served as rhetorical devices to justify the dense building scheme, which thereby eroded the conflict between maximizing the amount of built-up space while upholding a green city image. This was particularly evident as the plans and visions for the area perpetuated a global architecture discussion of green facades as novelty features, with little concern for how they related to the specificity of the historical urban fabric of Thomas B. Thrige Street, its landscape, its cultural practices, and its accumulated meanings. The inclusion of green facades was therefore not so much about the area itself, with its multiple meanings and practices, as a response to a pre-existing interest in creating a dense urban district, an idea that was accompanied by strong economic interests. In light of this, a central role of the green facades at Thomas B. Thrige Street was to serve as semiotic gestures that supported economic agendas and ideals towards density.

Negotiating the green facade Ultimately, paper I highlights the complex relationship between values and interests at multiple scales in processes of designing and planning green facades in cities. Significantly, green facades are negotiated amongst different actors and urban plans and policies. Examining the architectural competition of New Oluf Bager’s Plaza as part of the larger urban transformation project for Thomas B. Thrige Street showed that the designers and planners faced challenges when trying to qualify and define plants and their role in the city. There were tensions between the different values and interests and the associated design and planning premises for the area. Vague and general arguments were used to promote green facades as solutions to improve the urban environment, translated into quantitative targets to be met by the building

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owners and the designers. In this way, green facades were generalized as good, and few attempts were made to qualify what green facades are, what they do and what they need to succeed, and further how they partake in specific urban contexts and situations. Thus, the study indicates that it is challenging to make designs within existing and specific urban environments, while also responding to generic, global discussions and visions of making green cities.

The many roles ascribed to the green facade in design, planning and policies in the case of Odense show that the green facade is not a simple and neutral design or planning solution; rather, it is a powerful tool that carries meanings that diverge, conflict or simply remain implicitly understood. In this way, it demonstrates that design and planning initiatives intended to increase green elements in cities are not as straightforward and unrestricted as they so often are presented in urban and policy-making discourses.

Conceptualizations of green facades in research (paper II) Conceptualizations of green facades affect urban and architectural practice and can be central for directing the design, maintenance and transformation of the urban landscape. The sub-sections below address the second research question and summarizes the results from paper II, which examined how green facades are conceptualized and understood across different disciplinary cultures in contemporary research.

Five clusters of research Based upon literature searches, and then collecting, analyzing and sorting research the publications concerned with green facades, this study found that green facades are conceptualized in five ways (fig. 22). These are referred to as clusters of research in paper II.

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RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS

synthesis

BULK OF LITERATURE

analysis and sorting

GREEN FACADES AS

Environmental solutions

Building technical features

Enhancers of beauty

Contributors to ecology and biodiversity

Political and economic actors

Improve human and non-human habitat

Tools for branding and dense city schemes

GREEN FACADES DO Improve human habitat

RESEARCH GOALS Provide ‘how to improve’ knowledge

Figure 22 Contemporary research on green facade can be divided into five clusters. The diagram demonstrates the process of analyzing, sorting and defining the clusters of reserach and their characteristics.

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Reveal unspoken values

The first cluster of research was concerned with how green facades were conceptualized as environmental solutions. Publications dealt with environmental regulating features and potentials of green facades using quantitative methods, such as measuring the reduction of air pollutants and CO2 in streets, positive contributions to human health, cooling urban environments and reducing noise pollution.

The second cluster conceptualized green facades as technical features of buildings, particularly as tools to reduce energy consumption. Green facade solutions and techniques have been tested for their potential to optimize building function, using quantitative measurements over time. These publications are concerned with categorizing green facades according to the technique applied, i.e. the structural system and the growth medium used for the plants.

Understanding green facades as contributors to biodiversity and ecology made up the third cluster of research in paper II. In these publications green facades were conceptualized as solutions that may improve or reinforce biodiversity and ecology in cities, without compromising human activity and social uses of urban spaces and buildings.

In light of this, they point to that the facades of buildings cover large areas, and hold the potential to facilitate growth of plants and thus to maximize greenery in cities.

In the fourth research cluster, green facades are considered enhancers of ‘beauty’, able to ‘improve’ the aesthetics of cities. The publications in this category typically look at the measurable and seemingly generalizable perceptions of ‘beauty’ and its (desired) effects on human health and well-being.

Finally, the fifth cluster of publications addresses green facades as political and economic actors. Key discussions occurring in this group of research were concerned with what green facades represent and what they do in terms of their ecological sustainability. Practices around green facades were criticized for being driven by commercial forces and the contemporary design and planning of green facades for relying on the semantic power of the idea that ‘green equals good’.

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Characteristics of research Paper II shows that across the five clusters of research, there are commonalities in how green facades were conceptualized, as well as some blind angles. The key findings of paper II concern these characteristics and their implications and provide new perspectives.

Contemporary research, paper II explains, characterizes green facades based upon their measurable and positive effects. Green facades were understood as tools to both support and counteract human activities. Green facades were referred to as objects with predictable positive functions, and the facades of buildings as surfaces to exploit for these purposes. The paper discusses these understandings and approaches from a spatial design perspective and points to new paths for knowledge migration.

Another key finding is that green facades were understood to be strongly oriented towards novelty, and were often referred to as new and innovative objects in research.

Little attention has been given green facades as part of architecture’s history; the focus instead has been on developing new terms, products and ways to classify green facades.

Finally, the study found that green facades were often presented as detached from urban contexts in research publications. The majority of research publications on green facades presented them in physical and temporal isolation from the urban spaces and landscape processes in which they engage. Further, green facades were viewed as systems or as part of systems on different scales, which reflect various understandings of landscape.

Green facade as a concept ascribed different meanings The study shows that green facades appear as value-laden objects whose meaning cannot be determined once and for all, rather, they are cultural constructs that are shaped and developed across different research cultures. The different understandings and uses of the concept ‘green facade’ expose various agendas, different perceptions of value and context (fig. 23). In this way ‘green facade’ is a contested concept. Another

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GREEN FACADES

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Figure 23 The green facade is defined and understood in different ways across research, it crosses boundaries and may act as a starting-point for interdisciplinary discussions in contemporary green urban development.

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finding is that green facades cross boundaries: they exist across multiple disciplinary boundaries and may be starting-points for interdisciplinary discussions. Furthermore, the study showed that green facades are many things at the same time. They are physical objects partaking in urban spaces and buildings, combinations of plants and building materials, cultural concepts, and tools used in branding strategies. Unpacking the concept and its associated meanings helps clarify what ‘green’ entails, thus making an important starting point for interdisciplinary dialogues in research and in practice.

Representations of green facades in architectural publications (paper III) Paper III examine how green facades are presented in contemporary architectural publications by analysing the specific case of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum in Madrid, Spain, an iconic design that acts as a key reference in the green architecture discourse. Visual and textual presentations of green facade designs are powerful tools to direct attention and generate meaning that influences the design and planning of green facades, and vice versa. In response to the findings of the analysis, the paper draws attention to alternative readings by presenting examples of green facades from the everyday urban landscape of Copenhagen. The sub-sections below address the third research question and summarize the results from paper III.

A spectacular design The first part of the study showed that the ‘Vertical Garden’ is iconic because it is used in narratives about how to provide ecologic benefits to the urban surroundings. It unfolds how architectural publications draw particular attention to the design as a living painting and its unique aesthetic characteristics. Meanwhile, it is criticized for the same things it is praised for, demonstrating that the green facade is used in value-laden and often conflicting rhetoric in architectural publications. Furthermore, such rhetoric is particularly driven by a desire for novelty and to display technically advanced designs. The study thus demonstrates that presentations of the green facade in architectural publications are reductive. Furthermore, it was found that the ‘Vertical Garden’ is presented using visual references and imaginaries that draw upon ideas of nature as harmony and in balance with humans.

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Looking away: green facades in the everyday landscape A key criticism addressed in paper III is that architectural publications often presents a reductive view on green facades – that there is more to the realm of green facades than the literature reveals. In response, the paper shifts focus by ‘looking away’ from published designs towards other examples of green facades, specifically those in the city of Copenhagen, examined through situated explorations and image-making over a three-year period. By identifying the characteristics of these green facades, which has gained little attention in contemporary architectural publications, it started unfolding and describing the diverse aesthetics of green facades. It show that these characteristics are caused to some degree by the passage of time, and plant life that is a temporal, living, changing, material and relational aspect of the built environment. While these characteristics of green facades rarely factor into today’s practice and thinking around the ‘green’ within our cities, they are central, as this study shows, for understanding the value of plants on facades and their appearance in the city. Furthermore, the ‘Vertical Garden’ appear as a generic design solution that is part of a context with strong commercial interests, whilst the green facades of paper III take part in the everyday landscape of the city. This aspect of green facades is often unspoken, yet central in a time with great interest in increasing plants in cities. Hence, paper III redirected attention away from the singular focus on spectacular green facades to the multiple aspects of green facades that are often overlooked in contemporary architectural publications.

A reductive view on green facades Findings from paper III show that architectural publications exalt particular design projects as works of art and as cultural signifiers, and not as part of the everyday landscape and the public sphere. The architectural publications thus provides a reductive view of contemporary green facades, of their ecological and aesthetic possibilities, their relation to specific urban contexts and as multidimensional and everchanging combinations of living plants and facades. The paper thus calls for more critical attention be given architectural publications and their central role in defining the way we understand and value green facades.

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4. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

This study revealed several ways in which contemporary green facades are valued and understood as part of design and planning practice, as objects of research, in architectural publications as part of design presentations and as existing physically within the urban landscape. The analysis of the green facade into these different contexts also directed attention to separate and at times conflicting or diverging values and understandings. These aspects are addressed in this discussion, which consists of six sub-chapters. Firstly, it discusses and contextualizes the findings from the three papers relevant to urban design and planning. Secondly, it reflects upon the theoretical and methodological approach of this thesis. Thirdly, it discusses the implications to practice, while the fourth sub-chapter define the limitations of this research. Finally, the conclusion is presented in sub-chapter five, followed by perspectives for future research.

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Discussion of findings: values and understandings defining the contemporary green facades Given the goal of understanding the green facade more fully, the overall findings indicate that the ‘green’ in green facade is associated with different ideas about nature and its role in the city, while often generalized as good without further qualification.

The facade, though a central architectural element, is often presented simply as a surface whose primary function is to support ‘the green’ (paper II). Its role in expressing and generating meaning often remains implicit and undiscussed across practice, research and architectural publications. In research and practice, green facades serves as a semantic device to express ‘greenness’. It often emerges from strong values, particularly positive images about improving the urban environment, and of giving hope and optimism in face of climate challenges (paper I; paper II; paper III). As a result, discussions about city politics, economics and other agendas are not brought forward.

This was found prevalent across the studies of this thesis; in the case of Odense the design and planning was overshadowed by strong ideas of the ‘good green’ (paper I), in the case of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum the branding effect was particularly central (paper III), while in research the green facade is approached as good from many different angles across research cultures (paper II). Despite the great focus on the ’green’, the characteristics of the green facade that this study identified – spatial, material, changing, aesthetic, historic, cultural and social – are often not addressed in contemporary research and practice because they are not prioritized, overlooked or are found too challenging to engage with fully. This chapter discusses these findings in detail.

Green facade in climate change adaptation This study shows that concerns about climate change, which have gained a strong foothold in the contemporary design and planning of cities, often have a direct effect on the way designers think about the role urban spaces and buildings can play in alleviating the impact of climate change. The green facade is promoted as a central tool to reach a city’s targets of climate change adaptation (paper I). The conception of

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the green facade as salvation for climate challenges is shared across different strains of research and practice. The green facade also frequently plays into arguments for ‘innovative’ design solutions and for making sustainable cities and buildings for the future (paper I, paper II, paper III). In particular, green facades have environmental functions and thus the potential to benefit humans, such as improving ecology, reducing air and noise pollution, retaining storm water, reducing the energy levels of buildings and providing visually pleasing effects (paper I, paper II, paper III). How the contemporary green facade is understood and ascribed roles to in cities is thus influenced by the ecosystem service approach, in which the idea that an ecosystem provides services is central to arguments for why the amount of green facades should increase in cities (e.g. MA, 2005). A key characteristic of this approach is that the green facade is conceptualized as a straightforward design solution that holds the potential to solve issues of climate change, and thus must clearly contribute to the urban environment. However, such simplistic approaches towards the green facade and the design and planning of the city are not as unproblematic and easily achieved as often presented in contemporary research and practice.

Designing green facades in specific urban contexts While green facades are often found to be conceptualized as generic solutions to be placed anywhere in cities (paper II), this study reveals that such a generalization is problematic. The design competition of ‘New Oluf Bager’s Plaza’ (paper I) demonstrates that in the practice of making green facades designers have to respond to and mediate the many agendas and values in design briefs and urban policies while negotiating within existing physical contexts. This was exemplified by the designers’ struggle to create green facades that combined aspects of climate change adaptation that expressed ‘innovation’ and at the same time consider the historical qualities of the site, two dimensions that the designers found conflicting. Ideas in policies and planning may have many positive attributes, but they are not as easy to apply as initially

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intended and presented; the task of making buildings and urban spaces that are adapted to climate changes require expanded and more nuanced views about the properties and values of those contexts already existing within a city. As designers working in cities intervene within existing contexts, they will need to combine different agendas to succeed in making good urban environments for the future.

Furthermore, constructing green facades as part of buildings in cities does not happen in a vacuum; such work is also influenced by national and global tendencies. For example, spectacular and high-tech designs elsewhere in the world, such as the ‘Vertical Garden’ in Madrid, or the ‘Vertical Forest’ in Milan, were sources of inspiration in plans and visions for the new urban district of ‘Thomas B. Thrige’ in Odense (paper I). And in architectural publications, these examples recur and act as sources of inspiration for designers (paper III). Not only are they presented as novel and innovative green facades in cities, they are also often exalted as symbols for ‘good’ green facade practice and as ideals in the discourse. Yet such designs are also strongly motivated by commercial interest (e.g. Gandy, 2010; Zaera-Polo et al., 2014). Green facades modelled upon these ideas are now appearing in cities worldwide.

Commercialized techniques Although recent technical developments have resulted in the commercialization of green facade techniques, commercial interests seek novel and spectacular facades erected with challenging technical solutions and are employed to illustrate designers’ or developers’ awareness of ecological or sustainable issues. Those technically challenging methods of creation, however, often contradict the intent. Plants grown in a growth medium attached to the facade, for example, similar to the technique used in the ‘Vertical Garden’ concept, have few, if any, ecological functions and demand many resources (e.g. Gandy, 2010; Ignatieva et al., 2013). This confusion around the green facade, and whether it can be characterized as sustainable, ecological, etc., is a barrier to understandings of exactly what a green facade is and what it can do, a confusion strongly influenced by commercial interests. What are the implications of

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this tendency? And how can we determine if a green facade is ecological? Sustainable?

Made to serve commercial interests? These questions seems appropriate to ask in a time when designers increasingly adopt and direct attention to technically challenging green facade solutions. Any insights around the green facade as a spectacular feature have potential beyond just the green facade; it is one of many other technical solutions to meet challenges of climate change, such as green roofs, sustainable urban drainage solutions, urban gardening initiatives etc.

While the implications of commercializing green facade techniques appear to be underexplored in contemporary research, and in many ways is approached uncritically in contemporary practice, some research has been done on the commercialization of green roofs. Using similar techniques as with green facades, the commercialization of green roof technology and its mass production has led to a certain homogenization, and researchers say this has implications for the biodiversity and ecology of cities (Ignatieva et al., 2013). The same may apply to green facades.

Furthermore, such homogenization can affect not only the biodiversity and ecology of the city adversely, but also our understanding of the plants and their aesthetics, an aspect that has received remarkably little attention in both research and practice today.

The study in this dissertation of the iconic ‘Vertical Garden’ addressed this topic to some degree; the design of the ‘Vertical Garden’ appears in a wide range of architectural publications and provides strong ideas about how ideal green facades look and partake in contemporary cities (paper III). Such ideas are now spreading, and the ‘Vertical Garden’ is now just one of a rapidly growing portfolio of green facade designs that are often of commercial interest or installed in contexts of strong commercial interest, all designs that are particularly spectacular, lush and colorful all year round.

That these characteristics are becoming so common is problematic considering that such designs, and their aesthetic expression, impose reductive and refined ways upon our ability to perceive and understand plants in cities more broadly (e.g. Girot, 2011).

If they are the standard for plant aesthetics in cities, they are misleading.

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Finally, such homogenization is also a cultural issue: If all places resemble the same form, buildings and urban spaces, it may take away some of the unique characteristics of places. The city is diverse and multidimensional; the places within it different, which has a value in itself. This is for instance true when walking through the city, where the historical times of the city becomes visible. Hence, homogenization challenge these characteristics.

Plants as architectural material and temporality Green facades consist of plants and building facades, and are both spatial and material. However, the spatial and material properties of plants are quite different from those of buildings: plants are alive and change over the course of their growth, with different seasons, etc. In contrast, facades of buildings are more static – they consist of non-living materials and appear as done when they have been built. While this element of change is a key characteristic of the green facade, it was found to be a challenge in contemporary research and practice. In making a green facade, the design projects for the ‘New Oluf Bager’s Plaza’ (paper I) demonstrated how the plants – their characteristics of growth, their aesthetics, and their temporal qualities – were given remarkably little attention. Instead, the designers created solutions where the plants were highly controlled and shaped to the forms of the buildings. This was also the case in the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum (paper III); though this project was designed in a radically different way, it can also be characterized as a highly controlled way of working with plants, and fitting them to the form of the building.

This thesis suggests a shift is required in the way we approach plants. Designing and planning the green facade should be done as a negotiation with the plants of that facade, treating them as living and changing beings. However, as demonstrated in this study and as Myers (2016) reminds us, when humans create plant-people relationships, humans define and draw up the designs, often deliberately. A profound question is thus how to rework our approaches to and understanding of plants in cities and their

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relation to humans. One way is to first acknowledge the plants as having both material and spatial properties, with different requirements, in order to move beyond ideas of the green facade as something simple that can be easily fitted into building schemes or as a technical installation that can be simply placed into the built-up context of the city.

The exploration of the ‘Vertical Garden’ in Madrid and the green facades in the everyday landscape of Copenhagen (paper III) was an attempt to start such a discussion. It sought to expand perspectives on green facades by demonstrating that plants are living, changing, material and relational, and that these characteristics are defined and restricted by humans and the way they think about plants. Though the green facade is often referred to as a surface, it is not flat when plants grow on it. It can for instance have large branches and roots that create volumes, hang over sidewalks, etc.; the density of the green facade and its colors change with the seasons, producing leaves, flowers, etc. However, we need words and images to convey different types of green facades and to show how they can be part of specific contexts of cities and over time.

A few publications have already explored and directed such attention to green facades.

Architectural researcher Jens Hvass, for example, in ‘Nørre Kvarters Grønne Lunger’ (the Green Lungs of Nørre Quarter), published a systematic presentation of plants on facades in a historical district in Copenhagen (Hvass, 2005). However, this present study reveals that there is a great potential in putting more attention to the ordinary green facades and plants in the everyday landscape, and to develop a broader understanding of their potentials and characteristics.

Overall, this study demonstrates that ‘green’ is used reductively to describe plants today, and more specifically, that the ‘green’ in ‘green facade’ is often generalized as a static material. Little emphasis is put into exploring plants over time and in relation to buildings and urban spaces. Designing green facades requires more attention to temporal aspects to show that plants are not static architectural material or just technical installations on buildings, but living and changing, affecting buildings and urban spaces over time. Such discussion should be at the core of efforts to rework our cities in order to create new relationships with other forms of life.

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Green facades as building elements We must also understand the green facades in the urban landscape, and not just as separate building elements. However, this study indicates that in urban practice (paper I), research (paper II) and architectural publications (paper III) the contemporary green facade is particularly conceptualized as an architectural element or a technical building feature, and not for its relationship to the dynamics of the urban landscape. This was exemplified in the case of Odense (paper I), where the urban plan for the ‘Thomas B. Thrige’ district was particularly oriented towards the buildings, and where little attention was given to plants, green areas and their relation to the built space. Meanwhile, the same urban plan for the area was strongly motivated to transform the previous modernist car-oriented landscape into a new, green and pedestrian friendly landscape, and reaching this goal included putting vegetation on the buildings in the area. The ‘Vertical Garden’ in Madrid (paper III) was also presented as a generic and technical plant installation that could be placed into any built-up context in the city. Furthermore, across publications in research, the green facade was studied and presented as separate from the urban contexts in which they eventually will partake, and more conceptually as patches of ‘green’ in green infrastructures (paper II). As the green facade is in effect part of buildings situated within the urban landscape, it challenges the conception of those buildings and their relation to the urban environment. This may be since the green facade is now associated with functions that serve the urban environment, while at the same time being situated on the building and working together with the other aspects of a facade to regulate the building itself. To supplement present approaches, there is a great potential to expand the understanding of green facades as part of specific urban spaces, building, cultures, climatic contexts etc. Thus, also potentially being a way to bring together different interests and understandings across scales in the design and planning of cities.

Quantitative targets of greenness Across urban practices (paper I), research (paper II) and architectural publications (paper III), contemporary green facades are part of attempts to quantitatively measure

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‘green’. This was exemplified in the urban policies, planning and design practice in Odense (paper I), which had specific goals for achieving amounts of green facade area relative to building area. In research (paper II), green facades are conceptualized as measurable and strategic greening tools that enable cities to reach these greenery goals, and facades as surface areas to use for this purpose. In presentations of green facades in architectural publications (paper III), there is a strong orientation towards quantitative characteristics – the size of the area covered with plants and the amount of plants and species. As cities are searching for ways to respond to climate change and related issues, increasing the area of green, of different forms of vegetation, is a prevalent goal. Such efforts are often coupled with quantitative targets and often directed by various greenery metrics, strategic tools to measure land cover with various forms of vegetation in cities (Martens et al., 1993; Gower et al., 1999; Green et al., 2000; Karlik et al., 2001; Ong, 2003). Generally, such metrics impose that by including various forms of plants and vegetation on buildings, a city can increase its total green area and improve the ecological performance (Whitford et al., 2001; Ong, 2003). These measures are often used relative to the built-up areas in a city (Ong, 2003). Falling in line with these ideas, a green facade – designing and planning with plants on facades – is presented as having a great potential since the facade is a large amount of surface area in a contemporary city (ibid.). However, while increasing the total green area by adding green facades is a central aim across research and practice, this study shows that such goals have blind-spots and that they are not easily achieved, because of the competing interests that often remain unstated and thus unexplored in discussions on the design and planning of cities.

Creating dense, green cities Across urban practice (paper I) and research (paper II) green facades are presented as solutions that allow for the creation of dense cities without compromising the green areas, and as ways to integrate ‘unexpected’ nature elements into the existing city (e.g.

Taudte-Repp, 2010) (paper III). This demonstrate that the contemporary green facade is approached as a tool to mediate between making a dense city also a green city, two 97

forces that are often referred to as conflicting in contemporary green urban development (e.g. Balmori et al., 2011; Francis et al., 2011; Ignatieva et al., 2013). An underlying implication of this finding is the risk of misusing it as a way to simply maximize the built-up space without qualifying and questioning what types of green areas that exists and that are created in the city. This is particularly the case because of the strong economic interests in urban buildings and in increasing built-up areas. A strong motivation for using green facades is that they become seen as the salvation for a city striving to reach ideals of density and ‘greenness’ in the face of such economic interests.

However, in the case of Odense (paper I), a point of discussion is the difference between green spaces and green facades. Most important is that green facades are vertical surfaces that do not accommodate and gather different people and plants in the same way green spaces do – parks, green areas along streets etc. This fact is not necessarily taken into account in practices and studies that focus upon quantitative measurements of green areas in a city. Nevertheless, such measurements may eventually have implications for the types of green spaces created in cities, for supporting various plant-people relationships, and for designers, planners and policy-makers’ ability to prioritize and qualify the ‘green’. Thus, a key for reaching goals of bringing together humans and other co-habiting actors in cities is to acknowledge the role the green facade can play in all its richness of meaning. This calls for dialogue amongst actors in processes of green urban development. Furthermore, it requires more thorough investigations of plants and green spaces that look beyond quantitative measurements of green surface areas of cities, and instead directs more attention towards their spatial dimensions and characteristics.

Green facades – By whom? For whom?

A profound questions in contemporary green urban development concerns ownership: who owns the green facades, who takes responsibility for them, and also whom they are created for. Though not the main focus in this study, I found that these questions appear as inadequate in contemporary research on green facades (paper II), which

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tends to generalize the green facade as an inevitably good design and planning solution to any urban context. However, the case of Odense (paper I) demonstrates that these aspects are central to consider for contemporary design and planning practice. In the transformation of ‘Thomas B. Thrige Street’, the building owners were responsible for the establishment and maintenance of any green facades that were going to be built, a requirement set out by municipal urban regulation plans. This requirement was not popular, and the building owners made many requests to leave out the green facades in their buildings. However, their requests were rejected by the municipality, causing disaffection amongst the building owners. Thus, the conflicting agendas of the building owners and the policy-makers resulted in a negotiation about who was responsible for the green facade, because on the one hand it is part of a privately owned building, while on the other hand it is part of the public spaces in a city. While associated with an extra cost for the building owners, regulating the green facade through policies was a steering tool for the municipality to ensure a certain amount of vegetation in the new dense urban district.

These types of dynamics, and socio-political matters more broadly, are important to address, as green facades are increasingly adopted in urban plans, specified in urban policies, and as the success of city design and planning also depends on different stakeholders, such as building owners, urban planners, entrepreneurs, and their interests. Therefore, at an early stage in the process of including plants, specifically green facades, in the design and planning in a city, dialogue is necessary between different stakeholders and interests to identify shared or diverging agendas.

Creating plant-people partnerships in cities In a broader sense, the green facade can be understood as an object with the potential to facilitate partnerships, in sectors of thinking, between humans, plants and other species, and in practice and research. If the green facade is to be a basis for creating partnerships between plants and people, we need to expand our understanding of what it means to collaborate with plants. Particularly as Myers (2016, 2017) reminds us that 99

such relationships are often defined by humans. The studies of this thesis demonstrate that the symmetrical approach as requested by Myers (2017) is not prevalent (paper I; paper II; paper III). Rather, the studies show that researchers and practitioners tend to work from a premise where humans dominate and where the plants are present in order to service humans in different ways (paper I; paper II; paper III), to justify dense green urban development (paper I) and act as tools to express sustainability and greenness (paper I; paper III). In this regard, the plants were found to be conceptualized as tools to meet the interests of humans and particularly those interests and ideas related to environmental regulation in the city.

The photographic studies of green facades from the everyday landscape of Copenhagen (paper III) reveals that there is a greater variation, aesthetical expressions, plant characteristics and materialities than those typically presented in architectural publications. In this way the study sought to open up to new ways to understand potential plant-people partnerships, and provided insights that were missing across research, urban practice and architectural publications today.

More broadly, nuanced and critical discussions about plants-people relationships and of potential partnerships, today appear as underexplored. What does making a partnership between plants and people imply? And how do they or could they look?

There is a great opportunity for future architecture and urban development to expand the present understandings and values ascribed to green facades and plants in cities in order to reveal new potentials and ways of thinking about such potential plant-people relationships. Though not the main focus in this study, explorations concerned with power nexuses defined and created between people and plants appear as central to investigate further – and particularly examinations how values and interests materialize in different ways in the city.

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Theoretical and methodological reflection An interdisciplinary approach to the green facade This study was situated in the fields of spatial design and planning, and involved perspectives from many more fields. Hence, the approach of this study was an interdisciplinary one, motivated to look across different disciplines by the need to generate a multifaceted interpretation of the contemporary green facade, bringing together understandings from across different disciplines in research and practice to find new ways to analyze and identify tendencies in contemporary green urban development.

For instance, this interdisciplinary approach helped generate insights on how the green facade is studied across different research cultures today. By mapping out different approaches to the green facade and comparing them, it was possible to see the potentials of the green facade, shared interests in it, as well as the possible pitfalls and underexplored aspects of the contemporary green facade. Furthermore, arguments for why the green facade should be designed and planned as part of the contemporary city can be traced back to insights found in research publications, predominantly focusing upon aspects of environmental regulation and technical innovation, and the novelty focus in architectural publications seems shared across the many research publications and appear to be a central subject for discussion in design practice. In this way, ‘looking across’ disciplines revealed how the green facade as a concept and a phenomenon exists within and travels between disciplines and different contexts and scales.

The ‘looking across’ approach helped unpack the different values ascribed the green facade, from which new insights arose that expand our understanding of the green facade across disciplines in research and practice.

Examining the green facade through critiques This thesis used critique, critical evaluation, as a generating strategy to unfold the practice and thinking around the contemporary green facade in different contexts. I explored the possibilities of the critique as an academic activity, but expanded what can be considered objects of critique. Hence, I examined the green facade within

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diverse contexts and from different angles: as a material object in design drawings and images, urban policies, plans and visions; as a concept in research publications; as presented visual and textually in architectural publications; and as perceived through my own examinations of green facades in the everyday landscape of the city.

This approach enabled me to gain a multifaceted interpretation of the green facade that could not have been achieved by just examining built projects and designers’ intentions. Instead, I could relate it to a broader domain of urban discourses and processes. This approach was particularly valuable as the examinations of the green facade moved between different scales and enabled me to study larger tendencies in contemporary green urban development. However, this open-ended approach towards critique was also challenging as it made the very object of critique indefinable; any source and context could potentially bring new insights to the table, which made it hard to limit the study.

This approach and the use of diverse sources provided a more general examination of the green facade. Whereas the different contexts of investigations challenged the coherence of the study. However, the approach enabled investigations that gave width and reached the aim of unfolding knowledges and understanding, while providing critical perspectives upon the green facade as culturally produced across research and practice.

Texts and visual material, as well as oral presentations and interviews, were productive sources through which to gain a deeper understanding and to reveal information that would not be found elsewhere. For instance, by scrutinizing the urban plans, visions and policies in the case of Odense (paper I), I was able to point to links and conflicts between ideas and interests the design and planning process of Thomas B. Thrige Street that eventually affected the physical design of the green facade in Oluf Bager’s Plaza. And by analyzing and mapping how the green facade were conceptualized in research (paper II), I could identify patterns in the knowledge production and point to

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challenges and pitfalls, but also direct attention to potentials – insights that are all valuable for future design and planning practice and research. Furthermore, the examination of texts and images in architectural publications helped me understand that they provide reductive views in the discourse. This insight inspired me to explore what was not unfolded or presented – and lead me to study the green facade in the everyday landscape of Copenhagen.

The examinations of this research were based upon sources of different materiality; of presentations of green facades on paper, and of my own explorations of its physical and sensory properties. A question for reflection is what critique can potentially do in the presence (or absence) of different types of materials. In this thesis, it is clear that analysis of the green facade in text and images and as physical and perceived both were productive ways to gain a deeper understanding of the green facade as a cultural phenomenon, and of tendencies in green urban development more broadly. However, in interpretations of text and images, the focus was on how green facades are valued and understood by others, whereas in the studies of green facades as physically existing in the urban landscape, the focus was on my own, first-hand interpretations. The image-making process gave a deeper understanding of the plants as living and changing, whereas the analysis of documents and images were fruitful for seeing how the green facade is valued and understood by different actors. I could therefore move between investigating the ways that human ideas and interests are expressed and materialized into physical form and examining the green facade and its plants as material, living and changing in specific contexts of the urban landscape.

My position as a critic thus shifted in the different studies. I took an analytical and distant role, and then a more embedded role as I examined the green facade through situated investigations and photographic explorations. I translated information, I unfolded and linked different understandings and knowledge, I communicated through production of text and images, and I served the public by situating design and

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planning in the public domain. While I approached critique openly in the thesis, in an explorative and inductive manner, the roles I played were also structured according to an initial plan for how to conduct them. A key challenge, however, was to balance between the structured approach and the explorative: the insights gained through the process of doing a critique directed the critique towards new and unforeseen directions. This required a flexible structure of the studies, and an explorative approach that was continuously and critically assessed. These two requirements provided insights that enabled me to be self-reflective about both my process of critique and the findings of these critical examinations.

Given that urban landscapes are continuously in the process of being shaped, remade, re-thought and re-imagined, the possibilities for doing critiques are many. However, critique must also be approached more openly, acknowledging that the design and planning of the city takes place at many scales, over time and includes a wide range of activities. The outcome of this study shows that critique as an academic activity holds the potential to help the critic unlock, open up and reveal insights about the urban landscape and how it is shaped; aspects that would otherwise remain implicit, unclear, overlooked or underexplored.

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Implications for design and planning practice In design and planning practice, values ascribed green facades are more or less explicitly expressed and formulated through urban policies, plans, visions, legislations, design briefs, and drawings and eventually translated into physical form. In this complex process of defining and making designs with plants, specifically green facades, many factors come into play. Drawing upon the insights from this study, this chapter makes recommendations for urban policy-makers, spatial designers and planners, for how to contribute to the process of working with plants and green facades in cities, proposing aspects to consider in such actions and processes.

Setting the frame: green facades in urban policies and plans As cities are aiming to increase their vegetation, specifically through green facades, this thesis argues that a key to succeed is to give more attention to the qualities they are ascribed, or could be ascribed, in urban policies and plans. Urban steering tools need to move beyond quantitative measures of green facade areas, and seek to include other values and characteristics of green facades and their relation to specific urban environments. Particularly, historical, aesthetic, cultural and social dimensions should gain more attention. Such aspects could for instance be explored in various forms of architectural policies, and be included in visions for the development of specific physical environments and contexts of the city.

Furthermore, the implementation of green facades on buildings in cities may cross boundaries of ownership. Increasingly part of urban plans, the green facade is appearing as part of privately owned buildings, and therefore questions of responsibility for establishment and maintenance arise. This thesis therefore recommends more cross-disciplinary dialogue in the design and planning process of making green facades, so that different stakeholders can share their ideas, interests and concerns at an early stage.

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Another suggestion is to consider the potential for citizens to participate in making and maintaining green facades. This can contribute to engagements between plants and people that are more long-term and locally rooted, and that can also provide an aesthetic and ecologic richness that is often restricted and refined in contemporary design of green facades. There is thus a need for further exploration into new potential approaches that move beyond top-down and bottom-up dichotomies in urban plans and policies in order to meet requirements for climate change adaptation through design and planning, while also engaging citizens and potential interest groups in the city.

Defining the form and character of the green facade in the city through design In the process of designing the green facade, a key challenge is to balance the different values and agendas in the city, some of which are already defined through urban plans and policies. While climate change adaptation agendas and ideas strongly influence what and how to design the contemporary green facade, one finding of this study is that such approaches are at times reductive, tending to generalize the green as good.

As a result, little attention is given the material, spatial and temporal properties of plants in cities, and more specifically the plants growing on building facades. These overlooked and underexplored properties need to be investigated; this thesis thus suggests that design practitioners explore the richness of the green facades, for instance through studies of green facades that already exist within the everyday landscapes of cities and pay increasing attention to the living and changing properties of plants. This thesis suggest that contemporary designers seek to expand their repertoire of possibilities when designing with plants in cities. One way to do so, would be to look beyond just the examples that are presented in architectural publications and seek alternative sources of inspiration when designing with plants on facades in specific contexts of the city.

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Limitations of this thesis This thesis has revealed knowledge about contemporary green facades and of dynamics in contemporary city design and planning research and practice. However, a few delimitations, shortcomings and trade-offs in the presented studies must be acknowledged.

An interdisciplinary ambition and contributing to specific knowledge Responding to the research problem addressed by this thesis, the individual studies sought to move beyond just investigating specific strains of knowledge. One ambition was to contribute to interdisciplinary studies by bringing together various such strains of knowledge from across multiple contexts of research and practice, creating a larger picture (Repko et al., 2016) and thereby generate new understandings. However, studies that do so are not straightforward or without compromises. A key challenge, and a limitation of this thesis, was to balance specific strains of knowledge while at the same time generalizing that knowledge and bringing it into a different context. In particular, the examination of how green facades were conceptualized in research involved a large body of publications whose topics were much more specific, such as solving technical issues or providing measurable environmentally regulating services to the urban environment. While this thesis acknowledge such studies as important contributors to the present state of knowledge on green facades, the content of these studies was generalized in order to gain a wider understanding, more general and interdisciplinary, of green facades as a phenomenon in contemporary research.

Roaming over fields of spatial design and planning research and practice This thesis straddles the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning. Furthermore, this thesis looks across research and practice, where the frameworks and premises are different, and seeks to mediate between them. Thus, the starting point for the investigations of this thesis is broad, operating across fields that at

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times have been separated by disciplinary boundaries. This interdisciplinary examination may result in a simplistic approach to the objects of study. In the case of Odense, particularly the architectural competition of New Oluf Bager’s Plaza, the study did not take into consideration if the design teams included landscape architects, architects or people from other disciplines. Thus, a limitation with this approach is a generalization of the roles and knowledges of the designers, and is based upon an assumption that they were suited to solve the task given by the building owner. The design competition in Odense would have taken place regardless of whether it was subject to research or not, but taking into consideration the combination (or lack hereof) of the various design roles could have affected the final outcome of the study.

Examining green facades in publications of research and practice Some of the empirical studies of this thesis examined publications concerned with how green facades are conceptualized and understood through analysis of text and images. However, green facade – and the terms associated with this phenomenon – that is included in many publications does not always refer to the distinctive green facade. In addition, broader topics, such as ‘green infrastructure’, are umbrella terms that often, yet not always explicitly, include green facades (see e.g. Ahern, 2007). While this study included a wide range of these publications more or less concerning green facades and related topics, there are also publications that have not been included, texts and images that were not detected in searches in databases or in books at libraries.

Furthermore, this thesis has also been limited by language. It has primarily been concerned with publications on green facades written in English, but also includes contributions written in Scandinavian languages. However, a body of publications written in other languages, particularly German, exist that have also not been included in this thesis. Examining the green facade in publications written in other languages could have provided information’s and insights that contributed to a richer interpretation and understanding of the phenomenon.

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Conclusion This study contributes to new thinking of contemporary urban development by examining the green facade as culturally produced, within four contexts and through three studies. The overall aim was to unfold the values ascribed to green facades within practice and research, in order to present a clearer, more nuanced and critical understanding of the roles and potentials of green facades in contemporary urban development. Through an interdisciplinary and explorative approach this study brought together different perspectives and discussions from across various fields of research and practice concerned with the green facade. This was achieved by using qualitative methods, including document analysis, visual analysis, literature studies, interviews, on-site observations, participation in design presentations and citizen meetings, and situated studies and image-making through photography.

This thesis included the following theoretical and empirical work: -

Presenting the premises that affect the design and planning of the

contemporary green facade in urban practice, and revealing dynamics between

international and national trends in green urban development.

-

Unfolding the ways the green facade is conceptualized across research cultures

and their implications for city design and planning.

-

Examining visual and textual presentations of the green facade in architectural

publications and their impact on urban planning and design discourse.

-

Revealing characteristics of green facades in the everyday landscape of the

city, over time, through new visual and textual observations and represen-

tations that direct attention to plants as dynamic, changing and material

actors.

-

Generating interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary green urban

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development by bringing together different disciplinary approaches, and

enabling insights that reach beyond narrow scopes of understanding while also

illuminating the potentials, challenges and pitfalls about using green facades.

-

Contributing to critique as academic activity by expanding the object of

critique, opening it up and relating it to a broader domain of urban discourses

and processes.

-

Developing implications for spatial design and planning practice and research

as well as recommending how green cities can be developed at multiple scales,

particularly through the lens of the green facade.

This thesis studied the premises for the design of the green facade in a contemporary urban context (paper I). Particularly, it examined two interlinked urban development contexts of the green facade: the architectural competition ‘New Oluf Bager’s Plaza – Two Houses and a Plaza’, part of the larger urban transformation project, ‘Thomas B. Thrige Street’ in the city centre of Odense, Denmark. The premises for the design of the green facade in these contexts, the thesis found, were based upon preconceptions – ideas and interests in urban plans and visions defined ahead of the architectural competition, and oriented towards creating a green city image and to build densely without compromising the green – in other words, ensuring that nature was included in the competition proposals. The urban plans prescribed that the amount of greenery be maximized by designing plants on buildings in various ways. Further, the municipally approved physical development plan for that area of Odense defined specific quantitative measures, by which 30% of the facade length of each building in the area had to include the green of nature. These requirements were based upon vague and generic arguments about how green facades provided many benefits to the urban environment, which legitimized green facades as the ‘right type’ of greenery for the area.

However, the study found that green facades, and green roofs, primarily served as

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rhetorical devices to justify the dense building scheme, which served to minimize the conflict of maximizing the amount of built-up space while upholding a green city image. In response to these insights, the study identified key challenges for the designers who had to include the contemporary green facade in the city. One was to combine and balance the different agendas and values that existed in the city, such as responding to climate change adaption in innovative ways while also adapting to the historic buildings. As a result, the designers negotiated the values and requirements through the architectural form: making designs that prioritized the buildings over plants, and fitting plants into the form of the building. In this way, the plants were treated more as static architectural decoration and communicative elements, rather than as living material that possessed perceivable characteristics and was related to larger landscape processes. It is therefore challenging to make designs within existing and specific urban environments, while also responding to generic, global discussions and visions of making green cities. The study demonstrates that ideas and premises in green urban development cross disciplines and levels of interest, and affect the way that the city is shaped.

The thesis also unfolded conceptualizations of the green facade in research (paper II).

The findings show that the green facade is a travelling concept that today is defined in five ways across different research cultures: as an environmental solution to regulate the urban environment, as a technical feature to reduce the energy consumption in buildings, as a tool to reinforce biodiversity and ecology in the city, as an enhancer of ‘beauty’ and finally, as an actor in politics and economics. Contemporary research characterizes the green facade according to its measurable and positive effects, and the way it works as a tool to support and sometimes counteract human activity. The green facade is referred to as an object with predictable positive functions, and facades generally as surfaces to exploit for these purposes. In addition, the study shows that the green facade is often referred to as a new and innovative object in research that is strongly oriented towards novelty. Little attention is given to aspects of history. Finally, the study

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found that green facades were presented in physical and temporal isolation from the urban spaces and landscape processes in which they engage, and thus appear detached from the urban context. This analysis of the green facade across research revealed the different understandings and uses of the concept, and exposed various agendas and perception of value and context. These are today often separated by disciplinary boundaries. In this way the study generates a new understanding about the green facade – that it is laden with value, and that it travels across boundaries. These insights can act as a starting point for interdisciplinary discussion.

Moreover, this thesis examined representations and conceptualizations of the green facade in architectural publications (paper III). Through analyzing presentations of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum in different architectural publications, the study found that it was referred to as particularly positive and that focus was given to three aspects of the design. Firstly, the ‘Vertical Garden’ is presented as a spectacular and unexpected piece of nature within the city, and much attention was given its quantitative features, such as its size, number of plants and species. Secondly, much emphasis was put on the material meeting between the ‘Vertical Garden’ and the Caixa Forum museum, whereas little attention was given to the garden’s relationship to the surrounding urban context. Nevertheless, it was conceptualized as providing a wide range of benefits to its surroundings. Thirdly, it has gained a particular status in architectural publications due to its aesthetic aspects; the ‘Vertical Garden’ was referred to as a piece of art, a ‘living painting’, and presented using visual references to nature; it is harmonic and in balance with humans. In addition, the ‘Vertical Garden’ has also received critical attention as a highly political design used for branding purposes, and not serving ecological functions. Others have pointed to how the ‘Vertical Garden’ disrupts our understanding of ecology in the city and specifically the aesthetic expression of plants on building facades.

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A key finding of the study is therefore that architectural publications often present a narrow view of green facades, of what is presented and how it is presented, while in fact there is more to the realm of green facades than the literature reveals. To expand contemporary understandings, the study ‘looked away’ from published designs to examine plant-facade constellations that exist in the everyday landscape, specifically in the city of Copenhagen. By exploring the aesthetics of green facades, the study provided some key characteristics to consider for the thinking and practice of the green facade. The new textual and visual observations and representations, revealed the potential for gaining a deeper understanding of material, spatial, dynamic, temporal and other rich characteristics of green facades in the ordinary landscape of the city.

In conclusion, this thesis suggests that green facades in cities should not be thought of as simple, straight-forward and neutral design and planning solutions to regulate the environment or as technical tools to increase and express ‘green’ without further qualification of what green entails. The green facade is, like other forms of designed and planned vegetation in cities, multivalent: it is defined by different values, interpretations and applications, and is continuously shaped and affected by human conduct and meaning-making. More thought should be given this powerful production of culture and its implications to the design and planning of our cities. Furthermore, as cities are striving to re-establish relationships between ecology and humanity, nature and culture, we need new perspectives that helps us understand plants as living, dynamic, material and spatial co-habiting actors that contribute to the form of our buildings and cities. This, however, requires that we are critical towards our own practice and thinking, and that we bring more thought and nuance into questions of how to design and plan with plants in the city.

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Perspectives for future research Gaining deeper insights into the historical values of the green facade This study examined the green facade in contemporary conditions. While the designers in the case of Odense (paper I) expressed a strong interest in the historical context of the city, an overall outcome of this study shows that present research and practice into the green facade appear as a-historical and particularly oriented towards aspects of technology and novelty (paper I, paper II, paper III). This prevents a rich understanding of the green facade, and calls for in-depth investigations that examine the green facade from a historical perspective. Such investigations have the potential to contribute with knowledge on the green facade that may have implications for how it is approached and treated today. Furthermore, such studies may generate insights that can inspire contemporary city designers and planners, and help them qualify their work when interfering in the existing urban context.

Expanding the understanding of green facades aesthetic characteristics This study shows that the aesthetic richness and diversity of the green facade is not examined to any great extent today (paper I, paper II, paper III). This appears to be a barrier for contemporary design and planning practice, which struggle to qualify the material, spatial and temporal characteristics of the green facade (paper I). This was also prevalent the third study of this thesis, which showed that there is a great diversity in the aesthetic expression of the green facade, yet that there is a mismatch between what is presented in architectural publications and what actually exist in the everyday landscape of the city (paper III). As designers often intervene in the existing city, there is a need for more nuanced presentations of green facades that move beyond the iconic, spectacular and often commercial designs found in the present design discourse (paper III). However, this requires research studies that help expand this narrow approach in the discourse.

What are the green facades’ aesthetic and sensory properties? While there appears to be a well-established way of discussing green facades as environmental regulators and

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technical installations (paper II), the language for aesthetic, sensory and perceivable characteristics is clearly underexplored today. Such investigations could follow up on the efforts made in the third study of this thesis (paper III), and take place as situated explorations of the green facades in the everyday landscape of the city. There is a clear need for new modes of representation of green facades specifically, and plants more broadly. Hence, this thesis suggest further visual studies are needed; studies that can challenge present conceptions and expand our understandings of green facades as constellations of different living plants and building facades existing across various urban contexts. As there is only a handful of key references circulating in the discourse today (paper III), there is a great potential to expand the visual and textual presentations of the green facade and thereby also the span of possibilities for designers, planners and policy-makers.

Designing and planning for plant-people partnerships in cities How can we develop cities that support the creation of different plant-people partnerships? And what can we understand by such partnerships? While these questions seem underexplored in contemporary design and planning (paper I, paper II, paper III), they are important to ask in a time of immense focus on bringing plants into the city. In the design of green facades specifically, and for bringing plants into cities more broadly, different approaches and ways of defining plant-people relationships should be explored further, as they are at the core of the discussion on how designers and planners can re-establish relationships between plants and people, nature and culture.

However, this requires that we also discuss the roles of designers, planners and policy makers in establishing a framework for practices around using plants in cities (paper I). We must also have more nuanced discussions on the role of different publications, since images and texts have the ability to expand our understanding of plants as living, changing, highly diverse, material and spatial beings (paper II, paper III). These discussions would help move beyond the dominating key references and

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iconic design examples in the contemporary design discourse. This means seeing the green facade in a different way and presenting new types of images to present the green facade as a way to collaborate with plants, and not just as an installation to be placed in the city to simply service humans. Different engagement with plants and ways of making green facades could be explored, such as research-through-design approaches or by investigating the potential to involve citizens in the process of design and planning. Such approaches could supplement existing practices and increase the awareness around plants in cities more generally and of green facades specifically.

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Image from Hauxner, M. (2010). Supernatur: Europæisk Landskabsarkitektur 1967-

2007 set fra Danmark. Ikaros Press (p. 57).

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Image from Hindle, R. L. (2012) A vertical garden; origins of the Vegetation-Bearing

Architectonic Structure and System (1938). Studies in the History of Gardens &

Designed Landscapes, 32: 99-110 (p. 103)

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Image by Patrick Blanc, 1986. Retrieved from:

https://www.verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com/patrick-blanc/dates-clefs, June 21, 2019 18

Image from Coma, J., Pérez, G., Gracia, A., Burés, S., Urrestarazu, M.,

Cabeza, L.F. (2017). Vertical greenery systems for energy savings in buildings:

A comparative study between green walls and green facades. Building and Environment,

111: 228-237 (p. 233).

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Diagram by Ann-Charlott Eriksen

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Image by Entasis (2013) in Fra Gade til By: Omdannelse af Thomas B. Thrige Gade

(Masterplan for Thomas B. Thrige Street, final version) Odense, Denmark

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Diagram by Ann-Charlott Eriksen

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Diagram by Ann-Charlott Eriksen

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Diagram by Ann-Charlott Eriksen

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PAPER I

What the green city is up to: Two lenses of criticism for the green facades of Oluf Bager Plaza in Odense, Denmark

Ann-Charlott Eriksen and Svava Riesto SPOOL Landscape Metropolis Status: Published, Vol. 5, issue 1, 2017 https://doi.org/10.7480/spool.2018.1.1939

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What the ‘green city’ is up to Two lenses of criticism for the green facades of Oluf Bager Plaza in Odense, Denmark

Ann-Charlott Eriksen, Svava Riesto University of Copenhagen Landscape and Architecture Planning Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract Increasingly celebrated, often without questioning, “green architecture” calls for a substantiated discussion. This article explores how design critique can contribute to the thinking and practice around green architecture, particularly green facades, which are growing in number and significance. How can green facades be critically discussed, beyond the dominating glossy project presentations and quantitative measurements of technological and ecological aspects? This article studies the green facades in the architectural competition, Oluf Bager’s Plaza, 2016, in Odense, Denmark, using two traditions of critique: Noël Carroll’s art criticism, in which green facades are seen as part of a designed work that follows certain intentions, and Mary McLeod’s concept of architecture as public domain that requires critical attention towards broader cultural, social, and economic processes. The study shows that the projects for the new Oluf Bager’s Plaza strike a balance between different ambitions, mainly adjusting to the historical context, while also answering the paradoxical double aim of Odense to become a densely built yet green city. The assumption that green facades can bridge the gap between density and green-ness became an important premise for the project. Green architecture should therefore be critiqued from multiple angles, including the ideas, plans, politics, and economics that shape future cities.

Keywords Design Critique; Green facades; Green architecture; Green city development; Dense city; Urban transformation; Landscape Architecture; Thomas B. Thrige Street

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Introduction Being “green” is an increasingly popular ambition in contemporary architecture and urban design practice; in particular, using plants to make “green facades” in new and creative ways. Planting vegetation on or close to building facades is often perceived positively, as sustainable and forward-looking (Dunnett & Kingsburg, 2008; Kellert, Heerwagen, & Mador, 2008). Yet, very little critical debate has addressed green facades by questioning the thinking and designerly approaches to this celebrated architectural feature (see Gandy, 2010; Zaera-Polo, Koolhaas, & Boom, 2014). How can design critique contribute to the practice and thinking about green facades in contemporary spatial design? Using two different approaches to design critique, this article explores the genesis of the green facades in a design competition of 2016, called Oluf Bager’s Plaza, in Odense, Denmark. The current debate about contemporary uses of green facades requires more substance, to go beyond accepting the picture-perfect presentations in popular architectural publications (for example van Uffelen, 2017; archdaily.com, 2016). Sometimes such facades are simply promoted as “green architecture,” often based on the general perception that green equals good. Other discussion extolls the idea of green-ness and that communicating green is good, without further explication about the goals of going green.

The main bulk of critique about green facades today is technical and examines the extent to which they respond to major challenges such as climate change and loss of biodiversity and contribute to “liveable environments” (Köhler, 2008; Schmidt, 2009; Sheweka & Magdy, 2011; Ottelé, Perini, Fraaij, Haas, & Raiteri, 2011; Ignatieva & Ahrné, 2013). Important to this strain of critique is the examination of how green facades can contribute to the benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems based on scientific investigation in what is often referred to as “ecosystem services” (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005, p. 49). Other important themes in the technical strain of critique are how green facades can improve the ecological systems, and biodiversity of a city (Ignatieva & Ahrné, 2013), as well as the thermal performance of a building’s envelope (Wong et al., 2010; Perini, Ottele, Fraajj, Haas, & Raiteri, 2011; Hunter et al., 2014).

Examining these technical features is highly specialised and often relies on quantitative measurements.

If used in a reductive perspective, it involves risks of what architecture historian Antoine Picon has called the “pitfall of technological determinism” (Picon, 2015, pp. 24–25).

Green facades are part of our urban landscapes, not just domains of specialised knowledge. In recent decades agents from multiple fields have sought to reassemble the city and nature in ways that move beyond narrow disciplinary perspectives and dissolve modernist binaries of nature and culture. Urbanism is increasingly conceptualised from multiple perspectives that attempt to include ecological and cultural dimensions, by using notions such as ecological urbanism (Mostafavi & Doherty, 2010), metropolitan nature (Gandy, 2002) and urban nature (Spirn, 1984). Growing vegetation on facades is part of this new interest in the relationship between urbanism and ecology, and can be linked to ambitions where “buildings and landscapes perform as linked interactive systems” (Balmori & Sanders, 2011, p. 8). Yet, researchers have noted that there is a need for a critical cultural and political discussion of how various green facades work in specific urban spaces (Gandy, 2010, p. 22) and, as will be the focus in this article, of the forces that shape them, in particular how discussions on green facades are used to meet other ends. Because green architecture is accompanied by a powerful value-laden rhetoric, we need a nuanced debate on the aesthetic, cultural, and political thinking that is used in shaping our cities.

In this article we explore how two scopes of design critique can contribute to such a debate. Employing the scope of critique that emerges out of traditional art criticism can uncover how green facades are cultural products that are connected to certain intentions. An urban mode of critique, taking the wider political, economic, and urban context into account, can potentially address the ways in which design of green facades are shaped by other forces in the city.

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Art criticism Art criticism has a long tradition in the elucidation and interpretation of artistic products. The term does not refer to a homogeneous practice, but denotes various practices that have been questioned, declared in a crisis, recovered, changed, and theorised several times in recent scholarship (inter alia Elkins & Newman Eds, 2008). One of the influential art critics of the 20th and early 21st century, which is also cited in contemporary landscape architecture critique (inter alia van Dooren, 2017- this issue), is the American film, dance and theatre critic and philosopher Noël Carroll. His book, On Criticism. Thinking in Action, will be the starting point for the following examination of how art criticism can contribute to the discussion of green facades.

Carrol promotes the idea that the critic should not only elucidate artworks but also evaluate them (2009).

This evaluation, he argues, should not be generic, nor depend simply on the taste and preconceptions of the critic, but rather the critic should judge the artwork “on its own terms”. Carroll describes how such a ”grounded evaluation” (Carroll, 2009, p. 44) should be based on an understanding that artworks are inseparable from artistic styles, groups, and movements, which provide contexts for these works (Carroll, 2009, p. 27). Moreover, he sees work as an object that (more or less successfully) relies on an artist’s (identifiable) purpose in creating the work (Carroll, 2009, p. 50). To understand the intention, Carroll argues, the critic must connect an investigation of the artwork with a study of the artist’s intentions (Carroll, 2009, p. 66). Critics must focus on the “artistic acts performed in the work” so that “the object of criticism is what the artist performs, his or her artistic acts in terms of their achievement (or failure)” (Carroll, 2009, p. 52).

If Carroll’s thinking is transferred to architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, then the design project must be examined not only as physical artefact but also as cultural expression that is based on the intentions of its maker. Projects from the design competition for Oluf Bager’s Plaza were not realised at the time of writing, so the artistic objects of study in this article are the texts and visuals of the competition entries. These entries also provide knowledge about the designers’ intentions, which should be seen in relation to the competition aims, and which are further elucidated in the semi-structured interviews with the participants of the competition.1

FIGURE 1 Odense is the third largest city in Denmark.

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FIGURE 2 The area before the construction of Thomas B. Thrige Street. (Image by Odense Municipality and Realdania, 2011)

FIGURE 3 Thomas B. Thrige Street before the transformation into a new urban district, which began in the 1960s. (Image from Entasis, 2013)

FIGURE 4 Visualisation of the future conditions as pictured plan ‘From Street to City’ after the transformation of Thomas B. Thrige Street into a new, green, dense urban district. (Image by Entasis, 2013)

FIGURE 5 Plan for Thomas B. Thrige Street. Perspective of the new urban district at Thomas B. Thrige Street with the site of the architectural project new Oluf Bager Plaza centrally located. (Image

by Entasis, 2011)

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The design competition for the new Oluf Bager Plaza Oluf Bager Plaza in Odense, Denmark’s third largest city, is part of Thomas B. Thrige Street, an urban transformation project that has generated much discussion over the years (Fig.1). In the 1960s, a four-lane road called Thomas B. Thrige Street, was constructed, cutting directly through the town centre and requiring the demolition of a large part of the building mass dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century (Figs. 2–5). The new road bisected the old courtyard named Oluf Bager, which was left open facing the road (Fig. 6). The current idea for the street’s transformation is to create ”a new sustainable urban district” consisting of “housing, offices, cultural institutions, restaurants, cafes and a large parking cellar” (realdania. dk, 2017). The most recent urban project narrows the four-lane street into several sub-projects, and is realised through a collaboration of the City of Odense and one of the world’s largest charitable trusts within architecture and the built environment: Realdania.2 One of these sub-project sites is the Oluf Bager Plaza, where the intent, as described in the competition program, is to enclose the plaza with two new buildings and to make it into “a new spatial and mental connection between the old town and the new urban district” (Realdania By & Byg, 2016, p. 3).

FIGURE 6 Historical studies of the courtyard of Oluf Bager. Note how the courtyard was cut off with the street breakthrough of Thomas B. Thrige street in the ‘60s and left open. (Image by Claus Thøgersen, 2016. Retrieved from http://realdania.dk)

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FIGURE 7 The Oluf Bager courtyard. The existing environment in and around the courtyard of Oluf Bager with the buildings dating back to the 16th - 19th century. (Images by Praksis Architects, 2016)

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Realdania By & Byg commissioned the Oluf Bager Plaza competition, and is also the building owner of the project site. Realdania By & Byg is a daughter company of Realdania that builds experimental new buildings, preserves historic houses and partakes in urban development projects in Denmark. Their goal was “experimenting with innovative buildings, where new environmental techniques are included as integrated architectural elements in the design of the buildings and the plaza, while interacting with the new Thomas B. Thrige Street project and the historic buildings in the courtyard of Oluf Bager” (Realdania By & Byg, 2016, p. 7) (Figs. 7a–h). Realdania By & Byg conceptualised the project as an exemplary project where “the houses should be part of a climate change adaptation solution together with the plaza through local management of storm water and the establishment of green facades” (Realdania By & Byg, 2016, p.

8).3 The competition brief identified the site’s cultural historic qualities in the protected buildings dating back to medieval and Renaissance times,4 and asked the design teams to integrate the new buildings into the existing urban environment without compromising those historical qualities. Realdania By & Byg had commissioned a volume study by Praksis Architects prior to the competition, defining the heights, sizes, and placement of the new buildings in relation to the old ones (Fig. 8). When the design teams in the competition first presented their projects in 2016, they referred to the assignment as a “facade project,” due to the need to relate to the significant historical facades of the Oluf Bager Plaza (Entasis, 2016; LETH & GORI, 2016; Maali & Lalanda MLAS, 2016; Praksis Architects, 2016). However, the competition program did not stress that existing and new facades be treated in similar ways, leaving the problem open for interpretation by the designers.

Realdania By & Byg invited four well-known Danish architecture firms to participate: Entasis, LETH & GORI, Praksis Architects, and Frank Maali & Gemma Lalanda MLAS. LETH & GORI and Praksis Architects qualified for a second phase, and finally, in October 2016 Praksis Architects won the competition; their project is under construction, to be finished by 2018.

FIGURE 8 Volume studies. Model of the volume studies of new Oluf Bager Plaza, with the existing buildings in white and the new buildings in green. The plaza between the new buildings acts as a new entrance to the historical courtyard. The new buildings will contain housing, small shops, and a cafe. (Image by Realdania, 2016)

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FIGURE 9 LETH & GORI’s visualisation from the first design round with retracted facades openings, a solitary tree, and a seating element along the edge of the site. (Image by LETH & GORI, 2016)

FIGURE 10 Praksis Architects’ visualisation from the first design round with ornamental facades with bow-shaped facade openings and some green elements. (Image by Praksis Architects, 2016)

New Oluf Bager Plaza: works and intentions To study these competition entries in a Carrollesque way, we must see them as designed objects that are based on certain intentions. In the first competition entry, the four architecture firms interpreted and solved the task rather differently. Following the guides from the volume studies, the teams could not vary building height and size. However, all the architect teams employed different materials and details for both the buildings and the plaza: from dark grey concrete facades and minimalistic design of the plaza, to ornamental facades and a patterned plaza that looked like a carpet (Figs. 9–10).

A common feature among the designs was openness on the ground level of the buildings, which created a spatial connection between the interior and the plaza. With regard to the green elements, most of the design teams worked with simple solutions, such as a solitary tree on the plaza and a mirror basin for storm water management. The competition brief stated that the water should be managed locally; however, because of a high groundwater table under Oluf Bager Plaza, this request became difficult to comply with. Some of the architects proposed collecting the water in underground basins, intending to reuse the water locally, or to retain the water and lead it out to the sewer system. In the designs where the buildings and the ground plane of the plaza were given a lot of attention, the green facades were reduced to a minimum, while the plants were treated in a rudimentary way. In a drawing by LETH & GORI that shows many details in brick, handrails, and framing of windows, the facade vegetation is drawn as almost invisible lines on the facades, as if to simply decorate the already designed facade and to fit into its composition (Figs. 11a–c). The vegetation is not integrated in the plaza’s storm water mitigation system and seems to be added on to the facade after all other choices were made. The only design team that actually combined storm water management with green facades is Entasis, who treated green facades as an extension of a new element that they termed the “rain water garden,” where climbers and creepers formed the walls of the plaza (Figs. 12 and 13a–c). In contrast, the winner of the competition, Praksis Architects, did not include green facades in their design proposal for the first round of the competition (Figs. 14a–c). However, in the second round of the competition, they responded to comments from Realdania By & Byg: “The proposal with the houses and the urban plaza needs to be reworked in a more innovative manner, so that the green facades become central in the architectural expression”

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(Realdania By & Byg, personal communication, 2016). In Praksis’ second design proposal, they drew the plants in a way that adjusts to the architectural form and language: trimmed to follow the composition and facade openings of the building, rather than transgressing the building’s ground level (Figs. 15a–b).

FIGURE 11 LETH & GORI’s facade elevations from the first design round show how the buildings are detailed and how to the plants are drawn in a manner that suggests rather than clarifies. (Image by LETH & GORI, 2016)

FIGURE 12 Entasis turns the plaza into a large paved square framed by plant beds and water drainage systems, a “rain garden”, which continues towards the facades, where climbers and creepers grow on the grey facades. (Image by Entasis, 2016)

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FIGURE 13 Entasis’ green facades, where the plants cover large areas. (Images by Entasis, 2016)

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FIGURE 14 In the first proposal, Praksis Architects chose not to show vegetation on the facades. There are, however, as these visualisations show, small patches of vegetation in between the facade openings on the buildings’ ground level. (Images by Praksis Architects, 2016)

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FIGURE 15 In the second round of the design competition, at the request of the building owner, Praksis Architects chose to give the green facades a much more important role in the facade expression. (Images by Praksis Architects, 2016)

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FIGURE 16 Frank Maali & Gemma Lalanda MLAS’ project for the first round of the design competition, with facade vegetation suggested in grey. (Image by Frank Maali & Gemma Lalanda MLAS, 2016)

Another similarity across all entries was that the plants were in the same state in all the illustrations.

Vegetation changes more quickly than bricks, steel and other building materials, experiencing both growth and seasonal changes, but such changes were not reflected in the design entries. The drawings by Praksis Architects exemplify how vegetation is shown as a static ornamental feature (Figs. 15a–b) and Frank Maali & Gemma Lalanda MLAS’ proposal shows vegetation in grey along the red brick facades (Fig.16).

Given the importance of facade vegetation expressed in the brief, it is remarkable that the designers treated the plants mainly as static architectural decorative and communicative elements. Despite Realdania By & Byg’s ambition to showcase innovative green facade solutions, the competitors made little attempt to explore facade vegetation as a material or to relate it to larger urban landscape processes, and did not explore the potential of green facades in terms of colour, temporal variations and other perceivable characteristics that plants may provide in the city.

Following Carroll, it is necessary to find out what was the artistic premise of these projects in order to critique them: How do the architects themselves describe their intentions and how does the work fulfil them? In later interviews, the designers expressed that they had been concerned with what they considered a key challenge: balancing the potentially conflicting aims of adapting to the risk of storm water in innovative ways while adapting to, and preserving, the historic buildings. Some of the teams were reluctant to use vegetation at all; Frank Maali & Gemma Lalanda MLAS, for instance, stated that “in a project like this we can’t see the relevance of experimenting with climate change adaptation solutions; the context is too delicate and the architecture itself should be in focus” (Frank Maali & Gemma Lalanda MLAS, personal communication, June 23, 2016). Complying with the brief, they chose a compromise, in which they proposed roses and creepers on the lower parts of the facades, with reference to historical European cities (Frank Maali & Gemma Lalanda MLAS, personal communication, June 23, 2016). LETH & GORI also addressed the facade vegetation in relation to rainwater mitigation, by reflecting upon its role and relevance in the project (LETH & GORI, personal communication, July 05, 2016). They chose to use “low-tech solutions with plants that were easy to maintain and control, and that should cover large parts of the facade surfaces to contribute to climate change adaptation” (LETH & GORI, personal communication, July 05, 2016).

When asked to characterise their work and the role of the plantings in their competition proposals, the designers searched for words and narratives that were often stereotypical and coming from different realms than the “innovativeness” that the brief emphasised. Entasis, for instance, who combined dark grey facades and evergreen and flowering plant species, described this encounter as a meeting between “the masculine and heavy appearance of the building materials and the feminine, neat and lush expression of the plants” (2016).

Praksis Architects described their green facade design as a “three-dimensional and voluminous alternative to traditional facade materials, which appear almost as a hedge”. (Praksis Architects, personal communication, June 13, 2016). Praksis Architects saw the green facades as a contribution to the architectural form, where the plants were “framed by the lines on the ground level of the building” and offered a “tactile experience to the people using the plaza” (Praksis Architects, personal communication, June 13, 2016). As such, the architects described the plants metaphorically and as static entities in line with other architectural materials.

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All the design proposals for new Oluf Bager Plaza create a hierarchy between the plants and the buildings, reflecting their perception that the buildings had priority. Based on the initial requirements stated by the building owner, who intended to create an “example project with regards to climate change adaptation” (Realdania By & Byg, 2016, p. 8), the design projects worked only semantically with the issue; the green facades are reduced to a minimum in most of the design proposals, almost like afterthoughts. All the four design teams used rooted climbers and creepers, which, in literature about green facades, is often referred to as characteristic for “traditional green facade typologies”. Other possibilities would have been to use for example “high-tech and modern green facade typologies”, for example “living facades”, where plants are rooted in a growth medium placed as an external layer on the facade (Dunnett & Kingsburg, 2009, pp. 191-240) (Fig.17a–c).

Seen through the lens of Carroll’s art criticism, the proposals for Oluf Bager’s Plaza should be judged on their own merits; that is the critic should see “what the designers were up to” (Carroll, 2009, p. 66) and assess the projects as to how they “succeeded.” Apart from metaphorical one-liners, the architects did express a concern for preserving the aesthetic qualities of this urban space that is now changing radically, as it did when the Thomas B. Thrige street was built half a century ago. Countering the program by not introducing new architecture that communicates “innovation” and “sustainability” and by choosing to combine vegetation and facades in ways that resemble historical architecture (not necessarily from the time period or location of Oluf Bager’s Plaza), is thus a way to achieve the goal of historical preservation.

The facade materials and the building sizes and shapes are all intended to fulfil the same purpose and in many ways succeed in not taking focus away from the historical architecture. Yet, why do these design projects have green facades in the first place? While downplayed by the designers, the green facades are a major theme in the competition. What underlying agendas drive the use of green facades on this historical location and what purpose are they intended to serve? The designers responded to an ambitious brief that involved density, climate change adaptation, novelty, and adjusting to the character of the historical city.

With their intentions and projects, the designers commented on the brief and introduced hierarchies among its different agendas. To find out how the green facades came to be part of the original agenda, we must employ another kind of critique that can reveal more about the different elements that were at play and that entailed the introduction of hierarchies. We thus need to move beyond Carroll’s scope of art critique, to the architectural projects and the designer’s intentions. Paraphrasing Carroll’s question of “what the artist is up to” (Carroll, 2009, p. 66), it also becomes necessary to ask “what the city is up to” by focusing on the premises that were laid by other actors during the transformation of Thomas B. Thrige Street.

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FIGURE 17 Examples of different facade vegetation, showing different colours, shapes, and techniques. The green facades with climbers and creepers are located in Copenhagen (a-b) and the living facade in Aarhus (c). (Images a-b by Ann-Charlott Eriksen; image c retrieved from http://byggros.dk)

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Critique of architecture as public domain In her article ‘On Criticism’ (1987), architecture theorist Mary McLeod outlines the need for design critique to relate to a broader domain of urban discourses and processes. Architecture is often part of a public domain and its premises conveyed through planning and policies, which thus need to be critically interrogated, she says. The “general cultural, social and economic forces,” she writes “are central in determining the form of places and large-scale architecture” (McLeod, 1987, p. 5). Therefore, it is not enough to study architecture as designed objects based on the intentions of an architect. Rather, McLeod argues, the critic “must confront the broader range of issues (…)—building practices, zoning legislation, urban institutions—cultural and productive relations in their most encompassing sense” (McLeod, 1987, p. 6). To do so, the critic must be open to multiple perceptions of meanings and value, because “architectural form necessitates a conception of meaning that is highly ambivalent, continually changing and closely linked to context” (McLeod, 1987, p. 4). To better understand the public negotiation and meaning-making process that affected the design of green facades for the new Oluf Bager Plaza, then, we will now broaden the scope to investigate the competition’s relationship with the larger transformation of Thomas B. Thrige Street and Odense’s “green city” strategies. What role was vegetation ascribed at multiple planning and design levels in the transformation of Thomas B. Thrige Street, by whom and why? The following section scrutinizes the city’s strategic planning documents, official policies, legislative documents, etc. (from the time the project began in 2008 up to today) to find out how the idea of green facades came into play in the redevelopment of Thomas B. Thrige Street.

FIGURE 18 Plan showing the conditions before the transformation of Thomas B. Thrige Street. (Image

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FIGURE 19 Plan showing the planned conditions at Thomas B. Thrige Street, with the new urban blocks, more narrow streets, and urban spaces.

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FIGURE 20 Plan for green facades. The plan shows where the green facades in the new urban district could be placed. (Image by Entasis, 2013)

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Green facades as salvation in urban strategies In the strategies and visions of the city of Odense, two conflicting ideas appear as important for the future urban development of the Thomas B. Thrige Street district: improving the city’s green image and qualities while also increasing the density of the city centre. For decades, Odense has branded itself as a green city and worked strategically to improve the amount and quality of public parks; its official municipal documents express a self-understanding as a green city (Planstrategi, 2015; Municipal plan, 2016–2028).

Odense also has the ambition of becoming the “greenest city in Denmark” by 2025, explaining the city’s increased amount of vegetation (Municipal Plan, 2016–2028). The Thomas B. Thrige Street transformation into a “green urban district” plays a considerable role in realising this ambition (Planstrategi, 2015). At the same time, building densely is a target in the planning strategy: “70% of the urban development will happen through densification of the existing city centre” (Planstrategi, 2015, p. 40). In the 51,000m2 area of the Thomas B. Thrige Street district, a total amount of 53,000m2 floor area is planned (realdania.dk, 2017). The potential conflict of aiming for both density and greenery is recognised in the municipal plan: “the dense city should not develop at the cost of the city’s green values” (Planstrategi, 2015, p. 51). This inherent contradiction is then presented as a win-win situation; densification is seen “as an opportunity to create an even more green and blue city than today, that will benefit the citizens of Odense” (Planstrategi, 2015, p. 50). How is this to be realised? One central idea is to use the construction of new buildings to achieve a green city. Green facades are presented as central tools to green the city, as they can be implemented without compromising the desired density. The municipality further argues that green facades contribute to sustainability; they “have a strong visual effect, can be used for retention of storm water, reduce noise and air pollutants, reduce energy levels—and increase the lifetime of buildings” (Planstrategi, 2015, p. 55).

The municipal strategy relates back to an urban plan for the Thomas B. Thrige street transformation project from 2012, which Entasis had won after a competition. This urban plan divided the transformation area into four parts, each with their own characteristics (Helhedsplan, 2013, p. 8). It consists of nineteen new buildings, as well as urban spaces and pedestrian streets, a large underground parking garage and a new light rail passing through the area.

In the urban plan Entasis Architects turn the existing landscape into a densely built urban area with building blocks of between two and seventeen floors (Figs. 18–19). The new building blocks frame narrow streets, rectangular urban spaces and the new light rail course. The previously car-oriented modernist landscape is thus combated with urban spaces that are shaped by building blocks and that accommodate movement on foot, a car-free district oriented towards pedestrians, though paradoxically it includes parking garage space that encompasses the entire span of the site underground. Entasis proposed that the new district should be recognised by its “sustainability and a green and lush landscape—on buildings, roofs, balconies and in the urban spaces” (Entasis TBT5000c, 2012, p.4), that would “make Odense take the leap into the new (sustainable) millennium” (Entasis TBT5000c, 2012, p. 8). New trees would grow along central streets in the new district, though they are likely to be challenged by the large underground parking garage.

The most central locus for greenery appears to be the surface of buildings that create a narrative of the place as “green,” helped by pictures and words to describe the facade vegetation (Fig. 20). The “unused roof surfaces” should be “greened,” they say (Entasis TBT5000c, 2012, p. 13). This was translated into a specific quantitative requirement in the municipally approved physical development plans; green facades should “cover at least 30% of the facade length of each building site (…) as far as possible, with plants rooted at the foot of the building” (Lokalplan 0-732, 2012, p. 9). Many developers who owned the construction projects asked to reduce or drop the green façade requirement, but they were not allowed because green facades are “an important contribution to the area’s identity” (Lokalplan 0-770, 2014).

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FIGURE 21 The visualisation shows one example of the new street environment with green facades, as imagined in the plan from 2013.

(Image by Entasis, 2013)

The urban plan is highly ambitious in prescribing that up to 50% of the facade becomes green (Fig. 20–21).

In general, the urban plan has multiple requirements for the facades of building. The architects are given guidelines on colour, material, texture, detail, height, windows, doors, etc., for each area, while vegetation is only suggested. It discusses green facades in a way that focuses on building and planting techniques and quantity, not the specific site and its existing characteristics. The reference images (Figs. 22–24) continue a global architecture discussion of green facades as novelty features, with little concern for how it relates to the specificity of the historical urban fabric, landscape, cultural practices, and accumulated meanings of Thomas B. Thrige Street.

Critiquing the contemporary green city: conclusion and discussion This article explored two modes of design critique to discuss the proposed futures for new Oluf Bager’s Plaza. Starting with the art criticism approach of Noël Carroll, we studied the design projects and the intentions expressed by the designers. In words and images, the competition entries presented facade vegetation as rather static architectural decoration. The green facades, although playing an important role for the promotion of the urban project, appeared as insignificant add-ons in the competition projects, with little concern for the ecological processes connected to vegetation and little attention to the choice of species, composition, colour and more. Some of the designers characterised their facade plantings with vague metaphors such as male and female. Almost all of the teams worked with building details and expressed a strong concern for the historical architecture that already encloses the plaza. Most of the designers thought that the “innovative” green-facade architecture requested by the brief, as exemplified in the reference images of “best practice” in the urban plans, would obstruct the historical qualities of the plaza. The designers questioned the urban project’s premise that green facades could solve ecological issues and climate adaption on this site.

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e FIGURE 22 Excerpt of urban plan references. The majority of the reference images of green facades in the urban plan show widely published examples from all over the world focusing on “newness” and technological innovation. (Images by Entasis, 2013)

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The second mode of critique shifted the focus from the designers and their intentions to the urban plan and strategies that formed the premise of their work. Drawing from Mary McLeod, we conceptualised the new design for Oluf Bager’s Plaza as part of a public realm and examined the planning context of the design projects. Planning and policies created multiple premises for the competition. The new urban district at Thomas B. Thrige Street will be a dense city and the green facades and roofs are rhetorical devices that justify the dense building scheme, seemingly eroding the conflict between maximising the amount of built-up space and still upholding the narrative of Odense as a particularly green city. The attempt to build densely has been a dominant paradigm in many European cities in the last few decades and results in an often unspoken correlation of two strong forces. The economic interests of building densely in cities with promising property markets is often supported by certain strains of urbanism that promote dense cities as particularly sustainable, “classical”, and able to accommodate street life (Sieverts, 1997, pp. 41–45; Riesto, 2018, p. 173-181). Seen in this perspective, Odense’s new green facades are mainly a semiotic gesture that supports such economic agendas and urban ideals towards density.

There is clearly a need to discuss greening of cities critically, to look beyond the dominant assumption that green is inherently good. Rather, as in the case of Odense, green facades can be actors in larger urban development processes that can and should be discussed openly. Furthermore, the role of vegetation in the city is not simply a question of percentages of facades; the challenge is to comprehensively rework the way in which humans live in, and with, urban landscapes in ecologically, culturally, and economically sustainable ways, seen in both long-term and short-term perspectives. How can green spaces in the cities of the future accommodate different cultures and serve as common areas that can be used by, and potentially gather, different people and other species? As vertical surfaces, green facades do not offer the same space as parks and green streets, although their surface area may be the same.

FIGURE 23 The diagram from the urban plan shows how the green facades could be placed at various levels on the new buildings, which are composed as multiple cubes in a rectilinear pattern. (Image by Entasis, 2013)

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FIGURE 24 The diagrams from the urban plan show five different techniques for greening the facades, using different growth media and location of the plants’ roots. (Image by Entasis, 2013)

The competition for Oluf Bager’s Plaza reveals a tension between making green facades that could signal “innovation” and working with, rather than against, the qualities of an historical site. In a European context where most urban projects are transformations of already urbanized landscapes, the challenge in the coming decades will be how to adapt cities to such new agendas in a way that considers existing materialities, practices and accumulated—and often conflicting—meanings (see Braae & Riesto, 2017). While green architecture and green city debates are easily characterised by the desire for “newness,” the historical assumptions and the relationship of green-ness to the existing city needs to be addressed in substantial ways. Critics, planners, designers and citizens should engage in such debates and practices about urban transformation. Such a culturally oriented debate should not be detached from other critical points, such as the influence that design interventions have on existing ecosystems, which some of the participants in the Oluf Bager’s Plaza competition wondered about. Seen in this light, the design projects for Oluf Bager’s Plaza can be looked upon in two different ways. On the one hand they express a negotiation with the forces and agencies in the city and introduce hierarchies in a multi-facetted brief. On the other hand, the competition entries can be seen as an act of critique in themselves, directed towards the brief and the logic of density in the planning of this district. The mode of critique that the designers practised, however, was not explicit, only tacitly articulated in the proposals (and later in the interviews), but not actually discussed to any great degree.

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The architects in the Oluf Bager’s Plaza competition chose relatively similar design approaches, while the city’s urban plans and strategies were far more significant determinants in how Thomas B. Thrige Street was reconfigured. This demonstrates Mary McLeod’s point that architecture in the city is not an autonomous artistic activity, but is rather embedded in public processes of making and appropriation, negotiation, power and politics. Her critique is not purely a discussion of political governance that ignores the potential agency that designers and designed spaces can have (see e.g. Schneider & Till, 2009). Rather, to foster a nuanced debate about green architecture, exemplified here through green facades, criticism should explore multiple perspectives, including both “what the designer is up to” and “what the city is up to”—in the broadest sense, knowing that the “city” is a layered and dynamic public domain of negotiation and spatial transformation processes. To grasp such processes, it is necessary for the critic to use sources that are related to the designer’s intentions, and to the intentions underlying the direction a designer is allowed to go—planning documents, public debates, and other forces and agencies in the city. The critic must continuously question the underlying assumptions and the negotiation of values used to make design decisions in the urban landscape, just as the critic must reflect upon his or her own position – and make it transparent – in relation to examining those values. Only on the basis of such critical and informed debates can we substantiate the ground on which we stand when intervening in the existing urban landscapes in the context of design.

Notes [1]

The interviews were carried out by Ann-Charlott Eriksen in 2016, just after the competition. The interviews were semi-structured, recorded interviews with the project leaders, and situated in the designers’ studios.

[2]

More information can be found at realdaniabyogbyg.org

[3]

Initially Realdania By & Byg had the ambition of implementing green facades in the interior of the buildings as well as in the exterior, where the plants would contribute to a healthier indoor climate. However, in the final projects this idea was left out as it’s success depended on the future residents, their preferences and their will to maintain the green facades. Creating a healthy indoor climate was still a focus in the project, but it was based on the construction materials and their properties.

[4]

Many of the buildings and urban spaces around the old town of Odense are classified as having cultural historic value and the two buildings in the existing courtyard are classified as worthy of preservation see e.g. https://realdania.dk/projekter/oluf-bagers-moedrene-gaard

References Balmori, D., & Sanders, J. (2011). Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture. New York, NY: The Monacelli Press.

Braae, E. M., & Riesto, S. (2017). Designing Urban Natures: Ambiguities in urban space design on the threshold of climate disaster. Kritische Berichte, 45(2): 92-101.

Carroll, N. (2009). On Criticism, Thinking in Action. London and New York: Routledge Dunnett, N., & Kingsburg, N. (2009). Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls. Portland, OR: Timber Press Inc. Elkins, J.; & Newman, M., (Eds.) (2008). The State of Art Criticism. London and New York: Routledge.

Entasis. (2012). Helhedsplan: TBT5000c (Masterplan for Thomas B: Thrige street, second edition). Copenhagen, Denmark.

Entasis, Odense Municipality; Realdania. (2013). Fra Gade til By: Omdannelse af Thomas B. Thriges Gade (Masterplan for Thomas B. Thrige street, final version) Odense, Denmark.

Entasis; LETH & GORI; Maali & Lalanda MLAS; Praksis Architects. (2016, May). Project presentations. Realdania By & BYg in Odense, Denmark.

Gandy, M. (2002). Concrete and Clay: Re-working Nature in New York City. New York, NY: MIT Press.

Gandy, M. (2010). The ecological facades of Patrick Blanc. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Green Wall: ArchDaily. (2017, June 14). Retrieved from https://www.archdaily.com/tag/green-wall/ Hunter, A.M., Willams, S.G., Rayner, J.P., Aye, L., & Hes, D., Livesley, S.J. (2014). Quantifying the thermal performace of green facades: A critcal review. Ecological Engineering 63:102-113 Ignatieva, M., & Ahrné, K. (2013). Biodiverse green infrastructure for the 21stcentury: from “green desert” of lawns to biophilic cities. Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 37:1, 1-9. London, England: Routledge.

Kellert, S.R., Heerwagen, J.H., & Mador, M.L. (2008). Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Köhler, M. (2008). Green facades – a view back and some visions. Urban Ecosystems 11:423–436, Springer Science + Business Media.

McLeod, M. (1987). On Criticism [Criticism of Place: A Symposium], Places Journal 4 (1). Retrieved from https://placesjournal.org/assets/ legacy/pdfs/on-criticism-mcleod.pdf Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis. Washington DC: Island Press. Retrieved from http://www.millenniumassessment.org/documents/document.356.aspx.pdf Mostafavi, M., & Doherty, G. (2010). Ecological Urbanism. Zürich, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers.

Odense Municipality. (2012). Lokalplan 0-732: Omdannelse af Thomas B. Thriges Gade (district plan). Odense, Denmark.

Odense Municipality. (2014). Lokalplan 0-770: Thomas B. Thriges Gade omkring Skulkenborg (district plan). Odense, Denmark.

Odense Municipality. (2015). Ny Odense: Fra stor dansk by til dansk storby (Municipal Plan 2016-2028). Odense, Denmark.

Odense Municipality. (2015). Ny Odense: Fra Dansk Stor By til Dansk Storby (Plan strategy 2015). Odense, Denmark.

Ottelé, M., Perini, K., Fraaij, A.L.A., Haas, E.M., Raiteri, R. (2011). Comparative life cycle analysis for green facades and living wall systems.

Energy and Buildings 43: 3419-3429.

Perini, K., Ottelé, M., Fraaij, A.L.A., Haas, E.M., & Raiteri, R. (2011). Vertical greening systems and the effect on air flow and temperature on the building envelope. Building and Environment 46: 2287-2294.

Picon, A. (2015). Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Realdania (2017, June 14). Retrieved from www.realdania.dk/samlet-projektliste/thomas-b-thriges-gade Realdania By & Byg. (2016). Oluf Bagers Plads: 2 nye huse og en plads (Competition program). Odense, Denmark.

Realdania By & Byg. (2016). Kommentarer til viderebearbejdning af konkurrenceforslag i Fase 2 [Comments to second phase of competition].

Odense, Denmark.

Realdania By & Byg. (2016). Oluf Bagers Plads: 2 nye huse og en plads (Competition program). Odense, Denmark.

Riesto, S. (2018). Biography of an Industrial Landscape: Carlsberg’s urban spaces retold. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam Uiversity Press 2018.

Schmidt, M. (2009, June). Rainwater Harvesting for Mitigating Local and Global Warming. Fifth Urban Research Symposium: Cities and Climate Change: Responding to the Urgent Agenda. Marseille: SDG Knowledge Hub. Schneider, T., & Till, J. (2009). Beyond Discourse: Notes on Spatial Agency. FOOTPRINT (4). 97-112. doi:10.7480/footprint.3.1.702 Sheweka, S., & Magdy, N. (2001). The Living walls as an Approach for a Healthy Urban Environment, Energy Procedia 6 (2011) 592–599.

Sieverts, T. (1997). In M. Stadler (Ed.). Where We Live Now: An Annotated Reader. Portland, OR: Verse Chorus Press.

Spirn, A. (1984). Granite Garden. Urban Nature and Human Design. New York, NY: Basic Books. van Dooren, N. (2017). The landscape of critique: The state of critique in landscape architecture and its future challenges. SPOOL, 5(1).

Retrieved from https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/index.php/spool/article/view/1936 van Uffelen, C. (2017). Green, greener, greenest: Facades, Roofs, Indoors. Salenstein, Switserland: Braun Publishing AG. Wong, N.H., Tan, A.Y.K., Chen, Y., Sekar, K., Tan, P.Y., Chan, D., Chiang, K., & Wong, N.C. (2010). Thermal evaluation of vertical greenery systems for building walls. Building and Environment 45 (2010) 663–672.

Zaera-Polo, A., Koolhaas, R., & Boom, I. (2014). The Elements of Architecture #7: façade. Venezia,Italy: Marsilio.

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PAPER II

“Green Facades”: Uses of a Celebrated Concept in Research Across Disciplines

Ann-Charlott Eriksen and Svava Riesto Landscape Research Status: Manuscript, planned submission in 2019

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“Green Facades”: Uses of a Celebrated Concept in Research Across Disciplines

Abstract Urban challenges connected to the ecological crisis require more than knowledge from specialized perspectives. Yet many specialized research environments work in relative isolation, which can create barriers for dialogue among different scientific fields. This paper studies one concept—“green facades”—frequently used in the discourses and practices around sustainable urbanism, yet in fundamentally different ways across research. By studying scientific publications between 2000 and 2018 we identify five main research clusters that conceptualize “green facades” in different ways. We focus on the different agendas and values of these research clusters, and point to their similarities, differences and potential paths for future knowledge migration. The paper demonstrate that while green facades is not a stable concept, discourse around it suggests some general characteristics. It shows that the contemporary green facade is particularly conceptualized as a technical and environmental tool to resolve urban issues, whereas little emphasis is given the aesthetic, cultural and historical aspects of the green facade. The paper concludes that green facade is a concept that holds the potential to contribute to debates across different research cultures by travelling through disciplinary boundaries, and may eventually give substance to the knowledgebase of contemporary urbanism.

Keywords Green facades; Travelling concepts; Green architecture; Interdisciplinary; Research cultures

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Introduction Green facades, a concept here used to cover a broad range of intentional combinations of vegetation and building facades, have become popular in contemporary architecture and urban planning. They are often mentioned in discussions on ecological sustainability and considered to have a broad range of positive effects.

In tandem with the rising interest in creating green facades, a whole range of publications on green facades is rapidly growing into a multifaceted and diverse body of literature. These publications range from peer-reviewed papers to hands-on literature oriented towards practitioners and to books and magazines presenting colorful images of green facades, along with booklets on green facade products.

Peer-reviewed papers make important contributions to the understanding of- and thinking around- the green facade, which impact the way we plan and design our cities.

The peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals on green facades rely upon various disciplinary perspectives that are seemingly unaware of one another, and are rarely in dialogue across different viewpoints. This apparent separation is not only the result of boundaries around knowledge exchange but perpetuates and can even create more boundaries. This prevents rich and nuanced debates across disciplines that could otherwise be valuable for using green facades in particular and the debate about the role of ecology in the city more broadly.

To contribute to fueling such an interdisciplinary discussion this paper seeks to unveil how green facades are conceptualized and understood in different disciplinary cultures and what assumptions they rely upon, whether acknowledged or not. It presents differences and common themes within the various scientific discussions on green facades and points towards the blind angles that they share. By scrutinizing the scientific literature in the results from searching the keyword “green facades” in databases, we explore how these texts conceptualize “green facade”— how it is defined, what it does and what contexts the green facade operate within. The concept “green facade” is not a stable one, understood in a single way in the literature. Its definition is

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not self-evident to practitioners and researchers, but rather it is a concept that relates to multiple and sometimes even conflicting values and aims in different research fields.

Different types of knowledge and expertise, however, contribute to a critical reflection upon this rapidly developing discourse, and thus provide new paths for research and ultimately a critical practice in the urban landscape.

Green facades, a travelling concept Green facades are not fixed and isolated objects. They consist of living and changing plants and of building facades, and are in a dynamic relationship with human conduct and meaning-making, across contexts and scales in urban landscapes. In this way, the “green” in the city cannot be understood as separate from human values and interests (e.g. Hauser, 2018). Thus, research into green facades is never merely a matter of studying the green that exists in the city, but rather reflects human values and thoughts, including those of the researchers.

Green facades is a physical phenomenon, and terms such as “living walls” (e.g. Köhler, 2008), “vertical greenery systems” (e.g. Wong et al., 2009), “vertical gardens” (e.g.

Blanc, 2008) etc. are all terms used to describe variations of this physical phenomenon.

But because of the variety of types and different approaches that practitioners use to create such designs, it is clear that they are also concepts that practitioners and theorists discuss – they are “abstract representations” of the physical object, according to cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s definition of a concept (Bal, 2002, pp. 22).

In her book Travelling Concepts in the Humanities Bal refers to concepts as “tools of intersubjectivity” which “facilitate discussion on the basis of a common language” (2002, p. 22). Concepts operate as “condensed theories” that reach beyond the object that the concept denotes (ibid.). A particular research culture relies on a shared, or similar, definition of the same concept using an established and common language.

Looking across different research cultures, as this paper will do, shows that the same

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concept can be used in significantly different ways. Bal refers to this multiplicity and malleability of concepts as “travelling concepts” because they “ travel between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and geographically dispersed academic communities” (Bal, 2002, p. 24). This is what happens with the green facade: its meaning, reach and operational value differs among disciplines.

This paper explores the concept of “green facade” as a travelling one and unpacks its accumulation of meanings and understandings over the last two decades as it appear across different disciplines in research and practice. The concept is not innocent, but rather has a specific effect that can “distort, unfix and inflect the object” (Bal, 2002, p.

22). It is not interesting as a simple theoretical construction; it in fact has an influence on the object of study. Defining “green facades” in a specific way affects urban and architectural practice and thus can be used as a tool to direct the design, maintenance and transformation of the urban landscape.

The different understandings of the “green facade” are not necessarily divided along clear disciplinary boundaries; rather, overlaps exist. Bal points out that these overlaps tend to become muddled in a mixed setting (Bal, 2002, p. 25). To move from “muddled multi-disciplinary” to “productive and interdisciplinary” (Bal, 2002, p. 25) requires clarifying the concept “green facade” as it occurs in different disciplines. To do so, we unpack the literature that conceptualizes “green facade” in different ways and scrutinize them as part of the disciplinary cultures from which they emerged.

Based on literature searches in databases such as Scopus, Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar, we identified scientific literature in which “green facade” was a key element, mentioned explicitly. The search period was from January 2000 to January 2018, as the development of green facades has been particularly strong in the last two decades. We searched paper titles, keywords, abstracts and topics using the search terms “green facade”, “living facade”, “vertical greenery systems”, “green wall”,

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“living wall systems”, “living wall”, “facade plantings” and “vertical garden”. The search included only papers and books written in English, more than 60 in total. While the search did not cover every single publication on the topic, the collected material made it possible gain a sense of how green facades are conceptualized across different disciplines.

The “green facade” in five clusters of research Based on the retrieved literature, “green facade” can be conceptualized in five different ways, each of which we here refer to as a cluster of research. While all the five research clusters presented green facades as a solution to certain problems, these problems and their contexts were phrased in distinctly different ways. Also, the mode of investigating green facades is different to each theme.

I. Green facades as environmental solutions The largest cluster of research is occupied with revealing the positive impacts that green facades can have on the environment, where the majority of the research depart from environmental sciences. This literature emphasizes how green facades can address environmental issues in dense urban surroundings (e.g. Bohemen, van, H., 2005; Perini et al., 2011; Perini et al., 2012). Green facades are often referred to as a “creative way to create sustainable” (Hoffmann, 2000) or “biophilic” (Kellert et al., 1994; Kellert, 2005) “solutions in architecture” (Köhler, 2008; Almusaed, 2010), all viewing building facades as surfaces to use for the purpose of environmental regulation. Green facades, or “vertical gardens” as they are also referred to in these texts (Pandey et al., 2015; Davis et al., 2017), are shown to reduce air pollutants and CO2 in streets and urban environments, and contribute positively towards human health (e.g. Pandey et al., 2015; Marchi et al., 2015; Alexandri et al., 2008; Sternberg et al., 2010; Ottelé et al., 2010).

Green facades are further studied for their ability to cool urban environments and reduce urban heat island effects (see e.g. Wong et al., 2009; Sulkje et al., 2016). Other studies argue that green facades play a significant role in regulating acoustics in

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buildings and urban spaces and reducing noise pollution from traffic (e.g. Van Renterghem et al., 2013; Davis et al., 2017). The publications within this cluster of research apply quantitative methods and measure the effect of green facades on physical test modules and through computer simulations. Common for these publications is the idea of maximizing the area of green facades to reduce the adverse effects of human activities such as climate change and decreasing biodiversity, which is seen as a way to improve the urban environment.

II. Green facades as technical features of buildings The second largest cluster of research can be characterized as more applied, and deals with the green facade as a way to reduce the energy consumption in buildings (e.g.

Hunter et al., 2014; Pérez et al. 2014; Safikhani et al., 2014; Cameron et al., 2014; Cameron et al, 2015; Jim, 2015; Hoelscher et al., 2015; Coma et al., 2017; Tudiwer et al., 2017). The majority of these publications depart from building technologies and are published in journals concerned with similar topics. In this cluster, green facades are mainly referred to as “vertical greenery systems” (or “VGS”) or “green wall systems” (Manso et al., 2015; Cheng et al., 2010; Pérez et al., 2011). The studies are occupied with “optimizing” the “building envelope” and experiment with mounting or testing modules of vegetation or climbing plants in different ways and measuring temperature over time (e.g. Kontoleon et al., 2010; Wong et al., 2010; Jim et al., 2011; Pérez et al., 2011; Chen et al., 2013; Mazzali et al., 2013; Bolton et al. 2014; Cameron et al., 2014; Haggag et al., 2014; Koyama et al., 2013; Cameron et al., 2015). Other studies involve digital simulations to model green facades and test their performance (e.g. Alexandri et al., 2008; Wong et al., 2009; Scarpa et al., 2014; Malys et al., 2014).

This research is characterized by an interest in classifying different types of green facades based on structural systems and the growth medium applied for the plants (e.g.

Dunnett et al., 2008; Perini et al., 2013). Researchers divide VGS into two main categories. One is referred to as “green facades” with climbers or creepers rooted in the earth or in pots on the ground growing up the facades. The other category

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often uses the word “living”: “living walls”, “living facades”, “living wall systems” (e.g.

Dunnett et al., 2008; Jim, 2015; Manso et al., 2015; Köhler, 2008), in which plants are grown directly in a medium attached to the facade. A common characteristic of these publications is their focus the building, purely described in technical terms and referred to as VGS. III. Green facades as contributors to biodiversity and ecology The third research cluster focus more on the plants and studies how green facades can improve or reinforce biodiversity and ecology in cities. These publications are rather diverse, and published in journals concerned with biodiversity, ecology and related topics more broadly. Publications here point to the potential of improving ecology and biodiversity through the greening of building walls in cities (Madre et al., 2015).

Researchers within this cluster state that green facades can be designed and planted by humans intentionally, but may also be established as spontaneous or “wild” plantings on facades (e.g. Benvenuti et al., 2016). Green facades are here evaluated according to their potential to provide habitats for birds, insects and mammals (e.g. Madré et al., 2014), their value to urban biodiversity (Collins et al., 2017), and their role in a city’s “green infrastructure” that supports both humans and non-humans (Francis et al., 2011; Ignatieva et al., 2013). Additional research focuses more closely on such specifics as different plants used for green facades, and their requirements for different soil and hydrological conditions (e.g. Weinmaster, 2009; Jim, 2015; Benvenuti et al., 2016; López-Rodrígueza et al., 2016; Cakir et al., 2017). Green facades, or “living walls” as they are often referred to in this cluster, are argued to play an important role in the creation of “modern green infrastructure” together with lawns and green roofs (Ignatieva et al., 2013). Researchers point to the importance of supporting ecological processes and increasing biodiversity rather than using greenery solely for the purpose of “decoration” (ibid.). Other researchers point to how “living walls” can provide biodiversity without compromising human activities, referred to as “urban reconciliation ecology” (Francis et al., 2011). These “living walls” are described as “ the

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improvement of surfaces in the city”, such as pavements and walls, through ecological engineering techniques, such as the addition of plants (ibid.). This “habitat technique” uses all possible vertical building surfaces, which cover a substantial area in cities, and are described as having a great potential to “maximize” greenery in cities (ibid.).

Furthermore, researchers point out that green architecture depends largely on bottom-up reconciliation efforts instigated by citizens to be successful (ibid.). While the definition of the green facade, its ascribed features and contexts varies considerably across these publications, they all argue that green facades provide habitat for animals and physical connections between green areas in cities. And further, that they increase biodiversity and ecology without adversely affecting people’s conduct and practices in the city.

IV. Green facades as enhancers of “beauty” The aesthetic and sensory dimensions of urban vegetation are an inherent part of the practice, and discussion, of not just architecture, but also urban design, landscape architecture and related fields. Yet, in the search of scholarly publications that explicitly deal with green facades, a specific strain of publication comes up. This handful of publications are concerned with the potential of green facades to “improve” the aesthetics of cities (Pérez-Urrestarazu et al., 2015). The main bulk of research that talks about green facades in this way uses an environmental psychological approach, comparing how people perceive buildings with or without plantings, or “greenery” or “vertical greenery systems”, to use the terms in these publications (Wong et al., 2010; White et al., 2011). By showing respondents images of residential buildings with and without vegetation on the facade, and supported by surveys or interviews, the researchers conclude that green facades appeal pleasing to people and can thus improve aesthetics and human restoration (White et al., 2011). This research is oriented towards design practice and not surprisingly concludes that green facades are a valuable addition to urban environments (Wong et al., 2010). A common characteristic of these publications is to look at measurable and seemingly

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generalizable perceptions of “beauty” and its (desired) effects on human health and wellbeing. They do not take into account aspects such as cultural differences, individual preferences, potential conflicts, varying architectural and urban contexts, diversity of associative meanings etc., which are also important for the thinking and use of the city. This thus presents a particular strain of the design discourse that reduces aesthetic aspects to what is measurable and constructs an understanding of beauty as universal and “healthy”.

V. Green facades as political and economic actors A few publications consider the use of green facades in the city from various economic and political perspectives. These are published in journals concerned with diverse topics, a few of which is specifically oriented towards spatial designers and planners.

One of the most common themes is the mismatch between what green facades symbolically represent and what they do in terms of their ecological sustainability—they are not always as “green” as they seem. While often presented as sustainable across different research publications, many new buildings with facade plantings require large amounts of resources, such as water, energy and maintenance, to survive and stay lush and thus their ecological effect should be questioned (e.g. Ignatieva et al., 2013).

Green facades or “vertical gardens” as they are also referred to in this cluster of research, are critiqued for being “ecological simulacra” that present a paradox as “they are linked to advances in ecological science yet in themselves play no useful ecological role” (Gandy, 2010, p. 33). Green facades can be understood as not just neutral physical installations, but also part of corporate branding strategies of high-end firms and part of political and economic interests (Gandy, 2010, p. 33). Thus, green facades are here understood as contested concepts: while often promoted as contributors to ecological sustainability in research and practice, these publications criticize them for not achieving this goal, but rather serving other less visible agendas.

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This is supported by findings from our previous research, which points to that the green facade serves as “green” rhetorical devices to justify dense building schemes because employing them can apparently erode the conflict between maximizing the amount of built-up space and upholding a green image (Eriksen et al., 2017). Hence, a common characteristic for these publications is a discussion of how the contemporary design and planning of green facades relies on the semantic power of the idea that “green equals good”. In this way, it is also part of a larger discourse critically addressing ways in which our contemporary cities are being “greenwashed”, i.e. using the “green” in marketing on false premises (e.g. Zaera-Polo et al., 2014; Gandy, 2010; Hauser, 2018).

This cluster of research thus demonstrate that green facades are actually value-laden objects that are accompanied by rhetoric and interests and can play multiple roles within the contemporary city (Gandy, 2010; Eriksen et al., 2017).

What characterizes contemporary research on green facades?

While the five clusters of research defined here present different understandings of green facades, they also provide some common characteristics occurring across research cultures. Looking at these common characteristics, we now identify blind angles in contemporary research, show potential links between existing research, and point to directions for future knowledge migration.

Specialized research and other dimensions Most researchers work from the premise that green facades provide benefits and predictable positive functions, particularly to humans. This is reflected in studies about how green facades optimize the thermal performance of buildings, reduce urban heat islands, regulate air and noise pollution, improve the visual appearance of buildings and cities, and increase biodiversity without compromising human activities. Even though these publications come from different clusters of research, they share the

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common assumption that green facades are able to provide certain ‘services’ to humans. In most of the research presented here, green facades are understood as tools to both support and counteract human activities, particularly through environmental measures. Publications carrying this assumption are highly specialized and often situated within technically oriented discourses, applying quantitative methods to detect a problem and measure its solutions. They all argue in favor of increasing the amount of vegetation in cities, and they perceive buildings primarily as surfaces that can facilitate this aim. Thus, green facades act as tools to direct a desired future, particularly to reduce issues related to climate change and ecological crisis.

The multiple other dimensions that architecture can play in the city—historical, social, aesthetic, political, everyday—dissolve in this understanding of a building as a mere “surface” that can serve specific functions. While the highly specialized research papers apply technologically oriented perspectives about how to develop green facades, as shown in the first four clusters of research, the socio-political studies in the fifth cluster of research supplement, question and develop other nuances in practice, which are not necessarily measurable. A stronger link, dialogue and migration of knowledge is therefore necessary to join the research of highly specialized and technical oriented discourses to other perspectives and strains of research. A deeper understanding of green facades can thus develop new perspectives for the future.

Claims for novelty in research and practice Another characteristic of contemporary research into green facades is a strong orientation towards the new: green facades are mostly described as novel and innovative (e.g. Wong et al., 2009; Pérez-Urrestarazu et al., 2016). This is exemplified in the conceptualizations of the green facade as a technical feature of buildings, as a tool for making green connections in cities and improve the urban environment. Any discussion of green facades as part of architecture and urban history, however, is surprisingly absent: they appear as ahistorical objects, even though people have planted on buildings for centuries (e.g. Köhler, 2008).

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Some publications do specifically mention the historical lineage of green facades (e.g.

Köhler, 2008; Hindle, 2012). However, these only vaguely suggest links between contemporary green facades and the hanging gardens of Babylon or the first technological innovation of a green facade by landscape architect Stanley Hart White in 1938 (Hindle, 2012). The perception of green facades as a new beginning with few links to the past seems shared by researchers and practitioners, leading to the question of whether these tendencies are self-perpetuating, reflecting a battle for territory (and research funding?). Researchers seem eager to come up with new terms, products and ways to classify green facades to provide something “new” and innovative, to constantly improve green facade “solutions”, and finally to develop “new and better” green facades. The absence of historical insights and the battle for novelty reflects a rather flat understanding of time. If research were to contribute to a deeper historical understanding of green facades and to provide insight into the role that green facades have played in the history of architecture and related fields, more possibilities of green facades practice could unfold.

Green facades detached from urban contexts Green facades are more often than not studied in physical and temporal isolation from the urban spaces and landscape processes in which they engage. Instead, publications emphasize the potential “functions” of the plants alone, especially in terms of improving buildings and the environment through experiments and measurements. One example, a study of aesthetics, compares freestanding buildings that are “greened” with ones that are “not greened” (White et al., 2011). In this narrow understanding of context, the vegetation is reduced to “something green” rather than specific plants in a specific context, and the building to an isolated surface that can be used for the purpose of greening.

Green facades are also viewed as systems or part of systems of vegetation on different scales. In publications about building technologies and ecological engineering, green

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facades are investigated as constructed systems of plants and other materials and structures. The focus is on the relationship between plants and their supporting construction system. In other research, green facades are viewed as green patches that potentially act as stepping-stones or corridors in a larger network of greenery. These varying focuses in research reflect that the green facade is multi-scalar; in some strains of research it is conceptualized as a building element, while in others it is conceptualized as part of a larger network of greenery in the urban landscape.

However, the green facade also appear to be detached from specific urban landscape contexts, and are supplemented by another approach to context. Contemporary research would benefit from contributions that focus more explicitly on the relationship between green facades and the (multiple) contexts in which they take part.

Discussion and conclusion Green facades in contemporary research appear as a concept whose meaning cannot be determined once and for all. Rather, green facade is a value-laden concept that is tied to the assumptions and thought-frames of each researcher—and are subject to interpretation. Green facades should therefore not be understood as straightforward topics for research, but as concepts that collect and retain values, meanings and interests across disciplines, between individual researchers and clusters of research. Furthermore, discussing the concept “green facade” exposes different agendas, perceptions of value and contexts for the research. In this way, it reveals contested claims, such as whether green facades increase ecological sustainability, and if so, to what degree, or if they are simply “green tools” for the purpose of branding. Furthermore, as the concept green facade exist across disciplinary boundaries, it can potentially act as a starting-point for interdisciplinary discussions, which delve beyond the specific areas of research.

This paper presented five different clusters of research into green facades. While these clusters reveal diversity in the scientific literature, they are characterized by divergent

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definitions, values and contextual frameworks. Nevertheless, the studies all share certain characteristics: their main approach is highly measurable and positively oriented and based on the hypothesis that green facades can improve the urban climate and environment. This shared characteristic contributes to the general conception of green facades as good, possessed of benefits and further potential. However, these interpretations begin mainly from quantitative measurements and effectively detach the green facades not only from the physical spaces and context in which they operate, but also the human processes of making meaning. The dominating focus on creating new and better green facade “solutions� in research fails to acknowledge and thus completely avoids the role of history. While these clusters of research make important contributions in their own respective fields, studies are needed that combine different types of research, and that examine green facades as part of existing urban landscapes.

Research is also necessary that moves beyond the novelty focus, to situate green facades within studies of how cultural meaning is made and history understood.

Many research publications do not explicitly address the complex relationships that green facades participate in within the urban landscape, with the result that the basis of knowledge for discussing the role of green facades in our cities is quite limited. To understand the multiple contexts that green facades engage in requires a deeper understanding of time, within various contexts and across multiple scales. The specialized knowledge contributions answer some questions, but they represent only a narrow scope of the reality. Green facades are actually many things at the same time: physical objects that are part of our urban spaces and buildings, assemblages of living plants and building materials, cultural concepts with historical lineages, branding devices, etc., depending on the perspective from which the researcher addresses them.

To generate a more nuanced discussion on the green facade therefore requires a greater diversity and expanded perspectives than those in contemporary research.

There are more values at play than just environmental and technical ones, such as cultural, historical, political, social, aesthetic and commercial values, which are poorly represented in research on green facades. Exploring these and other aspects would 178

contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the spatial and material properties of green facades within specific contexts in our urban landscapes, and would also prove an important supplement to present research.

The lack of such discussions in the research is also a reflection of the very tools for research that we used in this study. The scholarly databases emphasized those strains of research and texts that used the term “green facadesâ€?, which primarily appeared in the natural sciences and the technologically oriented literature. For example, scholarly books, a medium employed much more in the humanities than in other fields, were underrepresented in the scholarly databases. While this lacuna reveals one limitation of our study, it also indicates that the very research tools contain blind-spots. Furthermore, researchers have pointed to that research publications about green facades exist in other languages, such as German (e.g. KĂśhler, 2008). This is a limitation of this study, which only included papers written in English.

While the number and type of publications differed across the clusters of research in this paper, it also demonstrated that the majority of them had coincident perspectives on green facades. These publications operate within, at times, narrow pre-conceptions that can and should be challenged and expanded, such as when studying the green facade as a pure technical installation. This calls for greater awareness towards knowledges that falls outside these databases, in order to maintain and expand nuanced, constructive and critical discussions on the ways that the green facade is understood.

Many of the studied publications focused on the ways in which green facades can improve ecological sustainability. However, as an architectural element, the green facade not only affects what an urban landscape looks like, it affects how that landscape is experienced by different people and how people use the various contexts of that landscape and at different periods of time. Unfolding the meanings of the concept green facade across different research cultures thus makes a valuable starting-point for further engagements with the urban landscape.

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PAPER III

Shifting the Gaze of Green: An iconic ‘Vertical Garden’ and green facades in everyday urban landscapes

Ann-Charlott Eriksen Journal of Landscape Architecture Status: Manuscript, planned submission 2019

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Shifting the gaze of green - An iconic ‘Vertical Garden’ and green facades in everyday urban landscapes

Abstract In light of the ecological crisis, green facades have become popular in architecture and urban design, inspired by a small number of international reference projects that serve as influential promoters of certain ways of greening cities. Little critical attention has been given to the cultural values associated with these reference projects and how they are presented in publications targeted to designers. By critically analysing one of these frequently cited references, the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum in Madrid, this article calls into question how contemporary green facades are presented and conceptualized within design publications, and explores how such understandings can be nuanced and expanded. The findings demonstrate that the ‘Vertical Garden’ is particularly promoted as a spectacular, ecological and artistic piece of work. In response, this article expands and nuance the understanding of the green facade by introducing examples from the everyday landscape of Copenhagen, and unfold their characteristics. In conclusion, this article points to the need for more critical attention be given to the design and representation of plants on facades in cities in order to improve present understanding and move beyond ‘feel good’ aesthetics in contemporary design.

Keywords Vertical garden, Green facade, Green architecture, Caixa Forum, Aesthetics, Ecology, Everyday landscape, Architectural publications

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Figure 1a-b The ‘Vertical Garden’ is placed on the end gable of a residential building facing the Caixa Forum museum in Madrid. (Images by Ann-Charlott Eriksen)

Introduction Strolling through Madrid in October 2017, I passed through the park Parque del Buen Retiro and the botanical garden Real Jardín Botanico before reaching my destination, the Caixa Forum, on opposite side of the busy street Paseo del Prado. I had noticed that the Caixa Forum, which is an art museum designed by Herzog & De Meuron and a ’Vertical Garden’ designed by the French botanist Patrick Blanc, both in 2007, frequently appear in architectural magazines and books. However, I had left the pages of literature on the ‘Vertical Garden’ to experience this key reference in international discussions on how to make green facades in cities. As I was standing by the Caixa Forum, I focused the lens of my camera on the green facade and the vibrant, urban space before me with its jumble of cars and people (fig. 1a-b). I noticed that it looked different from the images of the project; it appeared as messier, while my movements enabled me to explore it from angles that I had not seen before.

Lush and high-tech designs like the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum act as references for how to design with plants on building facades, and to reduce the effects of climate issues and decreasing biodiversity (e.g. Blanc, 2008; Blanc, 2012). ‘Vertical Gardens’, now found across a wide range of urban contexts (fig. 2a-c), are part of an architectural discourse where much attention is directed towards innovation and technologies (e.g. Guy et al., 2005). These international references circulate in publications on architecture and urban discussions. In particular, they have been referred to as a guide to developing cities through the lens of ecology (Mostafavi,

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Figure 2a-c Patrick Blanc’s ‘Vertical Gardens’ are installed across different cities worldwide, and are frequently found in contexts of strong commercial interest such as shopping malls and museums.

(Images 2a-b by Patrick Blanc, image 2c by Ann-Charlott Eriksen)

2016) and connecting buildings to the ‘natural world’ (Kellert et al., 2008). Design projects like the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum encourage an understanding of how plants act and appear, whereby their significance as ‘cultural signatures’ remains surprisingly unspoken (Gandy, 2010). In light of this, publications about architectural practice play a powerful role as they define the sources of inspiration for future designs, while proposing particular ways to look at them, illuminated through text and images.

This article calls into question how contemporary designs with plants on facades in cities, here referred to as green facades, are presented and conceptualised within publications about architectural practice in order to achieve an improved understanding from a cultural perspective. More specifically, I explore how the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum is presented in books and articles concerned with themes such as ‘sustainable architecture’, ‘greened architecture’, ‘garden city’, ‘vertical gardens’ and ‘vertical landscapes’ (Blanc, 2008; Kellert et al., 2008; Taudte-Repp, 2010; Balmori et al., 2011; Blanc, 2012; Jadido, 2013; Broto, 2016; Van Uffelen, 2016; Yudina, 2017; Jadido, 2018). Designs that combine plants and building facades are often accompanied by value-laden rhetoric. The assumption that underpins this article is that green facades, as ideas and physical designs, should not merely be considered as technological solutions to certain problems, but as part of human meaning-making as cultural signifiers. Different visual and textual representations of green facades, such as those of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum, shape how we think about and

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imagine them, thereby shaping future practice. Questioning and critically analysing such representations and their associated understandings is a prerequisite for having reflective and critical debates, eventually enabling designers and planners to make qualified choices when intervening in the city.

Why publications on green facades matter Publications on green facade designs act as powerful channels for communicating and constructing meaning within the discourse. Text and images are ‘abstract representations’ of physical objects, which contribute to our understanding of them (Bal, 2002, p.22). Thus, the presentations in these publications are not neutral as they affect our understanding of the green facade, its cultural significance in the design and planning practice and, thereby, our urban landscapes.

Architects and designers often use images of design works as sources of inspiration in design processes (e.g. Higgott et al., 2012), with depictions and presentations of green facade designs being no exception. Images, ‘like words, contribute to the production of meaning’ (Bal, 2002, p. 26). A critical analysis of the content and composition of text and images thus provides insight into the understanding and formal strategies at stake in the discourse (Rose, 2001).

In the following, I analyse the content and composition of textual and visual presentations of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum in order to reveal their expressed understandings. Revealing and reflecting on these, I examine what is presented in architecture books, i.e. what aspects of the facade is given attention, such as its relation to the urban context, its aesthetics and ecological functions, and how it is presented, i.e. how this attention is given. Further, I discuss the potential effects that these presentations may have on the discourse. I add to these presentations through observations made from situated studies of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum in 2017.

This frequently presented iconic design represents just one example of a green facade,

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while there exists a wide range of diverse green facades across different contexts in contemporary cities. However, these are not presented in publications on green facades. Therefore, with the aim of expanding the discussion, I examine green facades from my hometown, Copenhagen. By doing so, I aim to add new perspectives to contemporary green facade design practice and its associated publications. Although this paper focuses on just one case out of the many that are presented in architecture publications, it still makes it possible to gain a sense of how green facades appear in writings and images today.

Patrick Blanc’s ‘Vertical Gardens’ and the Caixa Forum in Madrid The French botanist, Patrick Blanc, is a leading figure in green facade design. Blanc is famous for his patented and increasingly popular design concept ‘Mur Végétal’ or ‘Vertical Gardens’, which have been installed in many big cities across Europe, Australia, America and Asia, and which are frequently constructed in collaboration with renowned architecture studios (e.g. fig. 2a-c). The ‘Vertical Garden’ is a technical concept that comprises a combination of a metal frame, PVC layer and polyamide felt, within which plants are placed, and an integrated watering system with automated fertilisation (Blanc, 2008; Blanc, 2012). This technical solution allows a large number of small plants to grow directly in an artificial growth medium and being attached to vertical building surfaces (e.g. Blanc, 2012). According to Blanc, plants do not need soil as it is ‘nothing more than mechanical support’ (Blanc, 2012, p.1). What is essential to plants, he says, is water containing dissolved minerals, light and carbon dioxide (ibid.).

The ‘Vertical Garden’ was developed and created in the 1980s and 1990s, during an era of exploration into green technologies and the greening of architecture, which has since expanded and taken new forms (e.g. Zaera-Polo et al., 2014). Blanc’s ‘Vertical Gardens’ have become particularly popular as a design that brings ‘nature’ into cities in new and creative ways (e.g. Mostafavi, 2016). Blanc himself asserts that his designs are a way of bringing ‘nature’ back into the city in order to reconcile humans and plants (Blanc, 2012, p.12).

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Figure 3, left Parts of the former power station was reused in the transformation of the Caixa Forum. The facade was lifted off the ground to create a museum entrance.

(Image by Patrick Blanc) Figure 4, right The plants in the ‘Vertical Garden’ were placed into the felt layer using a crane on-site.

(Image by Patrick Blanc)

The ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum in Madrid, Spain, is one of Blanc’s most famous designs. It has received much attention and frequently appears in publications targeted at designers and planners (Taudte-Repp, 2010; Jadido, 2013; Broto, 2016; Mostafavi, 2016; Jadido, 2018). The ‘Vertical Garden’, which was completed in 2007, was designed by Blanc and constructed in collaboration with the Swiss architecture studio, Herzog & De Meuron. The ‘Vertical Garden’ was installed on the end gable of a residential building facing a small square next to the Caixa Forum, a red brick building that today houses a museum and functions as a sociocultural center. The museum used to house the Mediodía Power Station, which was built in 1899. In the early 2000s, it was redesigned by Herzog & De Meuron, who reused the red brick facade from the previous power station. The new structure of the museum was lifted off the ground, creating an entrance towards the small square in front of it (fig. 3).

The ‘Vertical Garden’ was created just after construction of the museum, and installed on site by crane (fig. 4). The metal frame was attached to the wall followed by the PVC and polyamide felt layers, and finally the plants were placed inside the felt based on a pre-defined pattern. The design of the building and the ‘Vertical Garden’ was commissioned by the ‘Fundació la Caixa’, owned by Spain’s largest savings bank (e.g.

Taudte-Repp, 2010). Located in the city of Madrid, the Caixa Forum museum and the ‘Vertical Garden’ face one of the main traffic arteries of the city with the botanical gardens on one side, and the city centre on the other (fig. 5). Today, the museum and the ‘Vertical Garden’ are recognised globally and attract thousands of visitors.

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Caixa Forum, Madrid

Figure 5 The ‘Vertical Garden’ and the Caixa Forum museum are located centrally in the city of Madrid and close to the city’s large parks. (Image retreived from google maps, edited)

Caixa Forum ‘Vertical Garden’: design presentations The ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum is just one of Blanc’s many designs that can be characterised as technically challenging to construct, as it involves a high-tech design, which is centrally situated in a large city. The majority of the articles about the project present it in a positive light and assert that it provides many ‘benefits’ to its surroundings (Taudte-Repp, 2010; Jadido, 2013; Broto, 2016; Jadido, 2018). When analysing textual and visual presentations of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum, it becomes apparent that it is conceptualised in three distinctive ways. These are discussed in the following section, where the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum provides the starting point for an exploration of the wider discourse on green facades.

The wow-effect In architectural publications, the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum is usually discussed in terms of its spatial characteristics, i.e. size, number of plants and plant species. We are told that this installation is the largest of its kind to date (Broto, 2016, p.32) with an area of 600 m2, a height of 24 m, 15,000 plants and over 250 different species (Taudte-Repp, 2010; Broto, 2016). Significantly, these facts position the ‘Vertical Garden’ within a broader discourse on green architecture. This discourse tends to focus on the creation of novel, high-tech, spectacular designs, which often include a large number of plants in different ways and contexts (Wines, 2000; Balmori et al., 2011; Jadido, 2013; van Uffelen, 2016; Jadido, 2018), thereby claiming relevance, gaining attention and helping to define what constitutes green architecture. Further197

Figure 6 Images of the ‘Vertical Garden’ are often composed so that they enhance its size, and the ‘wow-effect’ of the design (Image from Broto, 2016)

Figure 7 Images showing the material meeting between the facade of the museum and the ‘Vertical Garden’ appear frequently in contemporary architectural publications (Image from Balmori, 2011)

more, the heavy emphasis on the size of this ‘Vertical Garden’ is reflected in visual representations. Many images focus solely on the surface of the ‘Vertical Garden’. One image presents the large and lushly planted surface with a woman sitting in front of it. Effectively, the composition of this image directs attention to the difference in scale between the small person and the huge lush surface of the ‘Vertical Garden’ behind, thereby enhancing its size and appearance (fig. 6).

Another central focus of the presentations of the ‘Vertical Garden’ is its woweffect: texts and images often accentuate the ‘Vertical Garden’ as an ‘unexpected’ and ‘eye-catching’ encounter with ‘nature’ in the city of Madrid (Taudte-Repp, 2010, p.24).

Paying particular attention to the facades of the museum and the ‘Vertical Garden’, ‘architect Jaques Herzog has referred to the project as ‘a very unusual encounter between the rough and the natural, the smooth and the artificial’ (Jadido, 2013, p.112).

This encounter is particularly emphasised by visual representations that draw attention to the meeting between the facade of the museum and the ‘Vertical Garden’. The same image of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum often appears in different architecture magazines and books (fig. 7). In this image, the viewer is looking up at the ‘Vertical Garden’, the facade of the art museum and the sky. Its composition draws particular attention to the contrast between the red-orange bricks, the corten steel facade of the museum and the dense, lush plants of the ‘Vertical 198

Garden’, which represents an ‘unexpected’ meeting between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ in the city (Taude-Repp, 2010; Jadido, 2013; Jadido, 2018). It is striking that in images of the ‘Vertical Garden’, little attention is given to the activities and events taking place in and around the buildings (or their location and relation to other buildings besides the museum), the surrounding green spaces and elements in the city, or the flow of people and cars, etc. Furthermore, the presentation of the ‘Vertical Garden’ as ‘unexpected confrontation with nature’ (Taude-Repp, 2010, p.24) in the city is interesting given its location - next to the botanical garden and Parque del Buen Retiro, one of Madrid’s largest parks covering over 125 hectares. The narrow focus on the facade of the ‘Vertical Garden’ and its meeting with the museum is a limited representation of the design, and shows instead an idealised image that reinforces the understanding of it as particularly spectacular and unique. In this way, the design presentations also allows for the project to reach beyond its physical location and situates Madrid within a global discussion on green architecture.

An ecological design Blanc has been referred to as one of the pioneers who paved the way for new forms of designs labelled ‘ecological designs’ (Balmori et al., 2011, p.109). Such designs are frequently coupled with different strands of ‘ecological urbanism’ in an attempt to balance the innate conflict between ecology and urbanism, while proposing new ethics and aesthetics for the urban (Mostafavi & Doherty, 2010; Mostafavi, 2016). Blanc’s association with various strands of ‘ecological urbanism’ stems in part from his work as a scientist, his interest in urban design and the aesthetic characteristics of the projects themselves (Gandy, 2010, p.30). In light of this, Blanc’s designs have been presented as being able to transform building surfaces into aromatic and tactile living walls that engage the senses while performing ecological functions (Balmori et al., 2011, p.109).

Taudte-Repp (2010) asserts that Blanc’s ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum is an ecological design that ‘reintroduces living, complex and above all stimulating biodiversity back into the city’ (Taudte-Repp, 2010, p.28). According to Broto (2016) 199

and Jadido (2018), the large number of plants and plant species act as a prevailing argument for increasing and improving ecological functions in cities. Blanc himself refers to the ‘Vertical Garden’ as a ‘shelter for biodiversity and a cleaning system for cities’, where pollutants from the air attach to the felt, decompose and turn into plant fertilisers (Blanc, 2012, p.9). Additional arguments direct attention to how these designs provide numerous benefits to humans, such as insulating against noise, helping to preserve the facade, reducing the energy consumption of the building, reducing the ecological footprint of the building and generally having a positive effect on the environment (Blanc, 2008; Blanc, 2012; Jadido, 2013; Broto, 2016; Jadido, 2018).

Hence, architectural publications presents it as an inevitably positive design concept that is full of potential; it is capable of enhancing the ecology in the city while also improving the environment.

A piece of living art The visual effect of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum, its aesthetic aspects and Blanc’s artistic approach are presented as central features in architectural publications (Taudte-Repp, 2010; Jadido, 2013; Broto, 2016; Jadido, 2018). The ‘Vertical Garden’ is frequently referred to as ‘eco-art’ (Broto, 2016, p.32). Blanc himself, however, prefers to call the ‘Vertical Garden’ a ‘living painting’ (ibid.), thus referring to himself as an artist who composes images and creates works of art using living material; plants. These ‘living artworks’ or ‘paintings’, like the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum, are densely planted surfaces, which consist of shrubs and small woody plants, ground cover and cliff cover that grow very quickly and dynamically and cascade over one another.

In turn, the ‘Vertical Garden’ is characteristically presented as a flexible design: by dividing different plants into perfectly shaped forms based on hand-drawn plant schemes, Blanc is able to create distinct ‘Vertical Garden’ patterns in order to deliver the desired visual effect (Taudte-Repp, 2010) (fig. 8). The result is a design solution that, through regular maintenance and a continuous flow of water and fertiliser, remains diverse, lush and densely planted throughout the year. The flexibility in the way that

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Figure 8 Figure 9 The plant scheme for the ‘Vertical Garden’ The Caixa-Bank logo designed by Miró. at Caixa Forum Patrick Blanc.

(Image retreived at University caixabank.com) Broughtby to you by | The Royal Library (Det Kongelige Bibliotek) - National Library of Denmark / Copenhagen Library Authenticated (Image from Taudte-Repp, 2010) Download Date | 4/5/18 10:38 AM

Patrick Blanc, Caixa Forum, Madrid, Spanien, 2007 – Gesamtansicht des vertikalen Gartens [ Patrick Blanc, Caixa Forum, Madrid, Spain, 2007 – General view of the vertical garden Bepflanzungsplan, Skizze [ Planting plan, sketch Detailansicht [ Detail view

the plants can be arranged has even made it possible for Blanc to ‘paint’ a star-shaped symbol in the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum. By using a combination of rockrose, sage, lavender and ragwort, he has made a literal reference to the Caixa-Bank’s logo, which was originally designed by the famous Spanish artist, Joan Miró (TaudeRepp, 2010) (fig. 9).

Blanc’s ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum has been linked to various visual references (Taudte-Repp, 2010; Broto, 2016). Central is the ‘Vertical Garden’ as ‘a modern version of the mythical hanging gardens of Babylon’ (Taudte-Repp, 2010, p.25); referring to a myth about a spectacular palace covered in lush vegetation, dating back to around 600 BC. Continuing with biblical references, the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum has also been described as ‘a carpet of plants, a lush green garden of Eden turned on its side’ and stretching up into the air (Taudte-Repp, 2010, p.24). Such references suggest a state of harmony, perfection and innocence with humans living peacefully alongside other animals (e.g. Spirn, 2001). In this way, architectural publications draw upon references from the arts, different types of symbolism and myths to promote the ‘Vertical Garden’ as a unique design.

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Critiques of the ‘Vertical Garden’ While the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum is presented in a positive light in books on architecture, it has also received critical attention (Girot, 2010; Gandy, 2010; Ignatieva et al., 2013; Zaera-Polo et al., 2014).

For example, landscape architecture theorist, Christophe Girot, argues that the ‘Vertical Garden’ is a ‘showy’ and ‘extraordinary horticultural innovation’ that responds to a broader trend in that contemporary cities are increasingly focusing on the ability of plants to deliver instant ‘visual displays of nature’ (Girot, 2010, p. 220).

According to Girot, the careful selection of plants for the ‘Vertical Garden’, replicates the ‘from above’ aesthetic of nature found in aerial landscape photography, which displays tropical rainforest canopies from above (Girot, 2010, p. 220). Girot (2010) argues that it does not matter that the plants have been suspended on sheets of PVC and placed on a steel frame attached to a building instead of being rooted in the soil.

What matters is the appeal and power of the visual effect of the plants. In this way, Girot voices concern with designs such as the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum due to their effect on our understanding and appreciation of nature in cities. This is because they relegate the rougher aesthetics of other forms of vegetation, such as ‘lowtech’ green facades and spontaneous and scruffy biotopes, and raise profound questions about our understanding of ecology in cities (Girot, 2010, p. 220).

While architectural publications presents the ‘Vertical Garden’ as contributing positively to the ecological processes in the city, critics have remarked that such designs are not ‘serving actual ecological functions’ as they ‘lack a clear set of ecological objectives’ in the first place (Gandy, 2010, p. 33). Instead the designs use plants for branding purposes: they remain ostensibly non-political beyond a vague attachment to their multiple benefits, yet are installed within and affected by strong commercial interests (Girot, 2010; Gandy, 2010). Thus, presentations of the ‘Vertical Garden’ as an ecological design and its associations with various strands of ecology is under scrutiny – particularly taking into consideration the creation of the Caixa bank logo with plants.

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The ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum has a certain ‘feel-good’ sensibility; it is a highly controlled and maintained design that intentionally provides a ‘eco-shine’ where beauty, harmony and enjoyment are key to the aesthetic experience (e.g. Girot, 2010, p.221). These characteristics are emphasised or even enhanced in visual and textual presentations of the ‘Vertical Garden’ in architecture publications, which present us with an idealised version of the design from which distracting elements have been removed. However, as pointed out by its critics, there is a profound confusion between the appearance of the ‘Vertical Garden’ and its proposed ecological functions. The aesthetics of designs like the ‘Vertical Garden’ are problematic when coupled with ecology; it presents an idealised and picture-perfect version of plants that may have severe consequences for how we understand them, how they are shaped and their associated functions (Girot, 2010; Gandy, 2010).

The confusion around designs like the ‘Vertical Garden’ echoes broader discussions on aesthetic approaches in contemporary design, which have been particularly pronounced in landscape architecture theory in recent years (Meyer, 2008; Reimer, 2010). In discussions on sustainable and ecological design, aesthetics are rarely articulated. Researchers have pointed out that aesthetics is often considered superfluous in these discussions; reduced to something that is simply consoling and beautiful (Meyer, 2008; Reimer, 2010). However, as pointed out by design theorist, Maria Hellström Reimer, any aesthetic practice is also a social and spatial intervention and, therefore, always constitutes an exercise of power (Reimer, 2010). Practices associated with the design of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum, and the related visual and textual presentations, can be said to represent such an exercise of power: they play an important role in defining and directing our understanding of designs with plants as being aesthetically pleasing (e.g. Girot, 2010). In light of this, Reimer calls for a shift in focus in order to move beyond the understanding of aesthetics as something that is simply consoling, beautiful and related to experiences of logical fulfilment, to something that can also be transformative and unsettling (Reimer, 2010). Plants are 203

constantly changing and are part of larger processes and do not necessarily respond to the ‘feel-good’ sensibilities and the aesthetic that the presentations of the ‘Vertical Garden’ so neatly articulates. Reimer points out that aesthetics should not be reduced to spheres where we simply feel ‘at ease’, but should include the imperfect, raw, less spectacular, changing, discomforting or even confusing (Reimer, 2010, p. 11). As if echoing the critics of the ‘Vertical Garden’, she points out that sustainable and ecologically sound ‘futures do not automatically come through aesthetic perfection’ (Reimer, 2010, p. 11). In this regard, what is presented to us in the architectural publications provides a narrow and reductionist view of green facades. Designs and their presentation should move beyond consoling aesthetics and vague arguments of ecology and provide a nuanced perspective on the aesthetic and ecological opportunities within the discourse. In this way, we can expand our understanding of green facades and their role in cities.

Looking away from the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum While the ‘Vertical Garden’ and other high-tech and spectacular designs have received much attention in architecture publications, little attention has been given to the less spectacular, ordinary, low-tech and at times scruffy and imperfect green facades – plant-facade constellations that often already exist in various forms in our cities. These have different yet rich aesthetics that are not necessarily as instant or ‘visually pleasing’ as the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum. And unlike the ‘Vertical Gardens’, they require little input in the form of water or energy to survive, while they potentially can be a haven for insects, birds and other forms of life in the heart of the city (Gandy, 2010; Ignatieva, 2013).

How can we move beyond presentations of spectacular designs like the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum, and generate a more nuanced understanding of green facades in our cities? Inspired by the visual cultural theorist, Irit Rogoff, I now ‘look away’ from presentations of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum – texts and images that exalt spectacular examples that vaguely constitute ecological urban design

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– and instead focus on other green facades. According to Rogoff, by looking away from the object in focus and shifting the modality of attention that we pay it, we can potentially re-articulate our understanding of a phenomenon (Rogoff, 2005, p. 119), such as green facades. Instead of being an act of resistance, it is an alternative way of taking part in culture (ibid.), which can generate new perspectives on the cultural production of green facades as concepts that have a physical reality.

Between 2015 and 2019, I observed and photographed green facades in the everyday landscape of my hometown of Copenhagen. Over time, I explored green facades in different urban spaces, e.g. social housing areas, schools, residential blocks where daily life takes place. I examined how plants on facades exist within such everyday landscapes, approaching them at eye height.

Green facades in the everyday landscape of Copenhagen Examining green facades in the everyday landscape of Copenhagen, we see that they exist in a myriad of contexts and forms on buildings from different times; in the dense city centre, the outskirts of the city, situated in along busy streets and urban spaces and in parks (fig. 10a-e). The green facades observed in Copenhagen differs considerably in terms of size from just a small solitary plant on a building to plants covering the entire facade of a building. Such low-tech green facades are typically not given names based on their funder, designer or the building’s function. Instead they are often described in terms of the plant species that are present (Hvass, 2005; Dunnett et al., 2008), which typically amounts to just one or two different types in contrast to the hundreds of plants in the ‘Vertical Garden’. Furthermore, while Blanc’s ‘Vertical Gardens’ are often located in commercial buildings with limited public access, many of the green facades found in Copenhagen are part of contexts where everyday life unfolds, such as social housing (e.g. fig. 10b-c), schools (e.g. fig. 10e), along busy streets (e.g. fig. 10d) etc. These urban spaces and buildings are often utilised by a large number of people.

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Figure10a-e In Copenhagen green facades can be found in many forms and contexts. They differ in size and show that green facades can have rather varied aesthetical expressions. The images show a green facades along a street in Nørrebro (top, left), a plant growing on a social housing block in Bellahøj (top, middle and right), a green facade along a central road in the city center of Copenhagen (bottom, left) and a green facade at the technical school of Copenhagen (bottom, right) (Images by Ann-Charlott Eriksen, 2016-2018).

Throughout the year, the appearance of the green facades in Copenhagen change; some more drastically than others. Plants that lose their foliage for instance exhibit a great variation throughout a year. This is apparent at a school in central Copenhagen, where a large old Parthenocissus triscuspidata has been growing on the brick facade for many years (fig. 11a-f). In the spring the plants erupt into shades of bright green and through summer, its leaves form a lush, thick, dense layer that covers large parts of the facade. In the course of a year, the plant transforms and show us the passing seasons. It drops its leaves onto the ground where we walk, and changes dramatically. What is now apparent is the plant’s large and complex network of roots on the facade and small clusters of dark purple berries. Its physical appearance changes over time; the size, colors, textures, leaves, flowers, roots and berries. In this way, we are confronted with the life of the plant, which follows its own rhythm.

The photographs show how the plants are always in a state of change; they grow and decay. The time aspect can therefore be considered key in discussions on green facade aesthetics. However, this is not articulated in the design of the ‘Vertical Garden’, which remains similar throughout the year; it is lush no matter the season and only small

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Figure 11a-f The old Parthenocissus triscuspidata on the brick facade of the Technical School in Copenhagen changes drastically with different seasons throughout a year, demonstrating that a green facade can be much more than just ‘green’ and lush.

(Images by Ann-Charlott Eriksen, 2015-2018)

changes in the shade of the green occur along with the appearance of a few flowers from the flowering species. Furthermore, the ‘Vertical Garden’ was intentionally planted with specially selected species so that it quickly reaches a lush state. Therefore, the ‘Vertical Garden’ appears to reach a preferred state shortly after it has been installed on buildings. This is apparent in images of the ‘Vertical Garden’, which reveal a year-round dense, lush, yet uniform appearance. Plants that climb on facades, such as shown in the examples from Copenhagen, need time to develop, which can be seen across different contexts of the city, and do not necessarily reach the same state of ‘completeness’ as the ‘Vertical Garden’. Depending on their features and the growing conditions, they instead develop and change, spread out on the facade, covering ever-larger areas, growing outwards and putting down larger roots. Such unchecked growth would continue if the plants are not trimmed by humans.

Furthermore, as some plants grow massive tree-like roots and branches when they mature, they also illustrate that facades with plants are not necessarily just lush and green. On a social housing block along a small street in the urban district of Nørrebro in Copenhagen, a Wisteria climbs on a structure attached to the facade. It has grown

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massive roots that twirls around the metal frame, and shows an example of how green facades can provide a wide range of different aesthetical experiences in the city (fig.

12a-d).

Comparing the green facade examples from Copenhagen with the ‘Vertical Garden’, it is clear that the way humans facilitate the relationship between plants and facades in cities, through design and maintenance, differs drastically. The ‘Vertical Garden’ can be characterised as a highly controlled and technically advanced way of designing with plants where the composition and placement of the plants happen in precisely defined patches, almost like painting-by-numbers. In this way, the ‘Vertical Garden’ facilitates a view of plants as being less dynamic than for instance what is shown in the images of plants climbing on the facades in Copenhagen. The plants in the ‘Vertical Garden’ are arranged in a photo-friendly design, where the dynamic expression is created through the shapes of the plant patterns on the surface and not primarily through the plants’ own growth patterns. Furthermore, the patches on the ‘Vertical Garden’ encourage plants to grow outwards on the facade. Green facades with climbing plants can in comparison have an aesthetic expression that appear as less restricted, where the plants grow upwards and spread on facades in different ways. Due to this growth, the plants often also interfere and interact with other building elements, such as the windows and doors.

Examining green facades in the urban landscape of Copenhagen through imagemaking, as alternatives to presentations of the ‘Vertical Garden’, shows that there are many possibilities for understanding and making green facades. While this study only deals with a handful of green facades, the presented characteristics may act as a starting-point for further investigations, and enable reflective and critical discussions about present approaches towards the greening of cities.

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Figure 12a-d The Wisteria on the social housing block in Nørrebro has grown characteristic thick roots. The aesthetical expression of this green facade changes greatly over time and with the different seasons, as well as with the shifting character of its surrounding urban context (Images by Ann-Charlott Eriksen, 2015-2018)

Conclusion Texts and images of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at the Caixa Forum were found to provide unclear yet value-laden narratives about the design in that they inevitably promoted the design as a blueprint for how to incorporate plants into cities today. The architectural publications presented the ‘Vertical Garden’ as a particularly spectacular and ecological ‘living painting’, while promoting a certain understanding of green facade aesthetics as pictorial and strongly associated with different visual references.

Images of the ‘Vertical Garden’ accentuated these aspects, and highlighted the installation as an exceptional and isolated piece of artistic work. Thus, as well as only presenting a handful of examples of green facades, the architecture publications also adopt a narrow perspective on these examples. From a critical perspective on the ‘Vertical Garden’ was found to respond to commercial interests instead of specific ecological objectives (Gandy, 2010). In combination with the feel-good aesthetics of designs like the ‘Vertical Garden’ this may have severe implications for our conception of ecology in cities (Girot, 2010, p. 220). The discussion around the ‘Vertical Garden’, its role and function in terms of its aesthetic appropriations and ecology, or lack hereof, shows that there is a need for critical debate about such designs and their associated understandings in contemporary urban development.

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Shifting the focus towards low-tech green facades that exists in the everyday landscape of Copenhagen allowed the identification of some central characteristics of plants that grow on facades. Such green facades are rooted and in specific urban contexts. While the ‘Vertical Garden’ consists of a large number of smaller plant species with restricted growth, plants rooted in the ground grow and climb on facades and spread out, often changing more drastically. In this way, plants are dynamic, living actors, for which time is a central aspect of the aesthetic expression. They are not necessarily as lush, green or aesthetically pleasing as the ‘Vertical Garden,’ although they may be rich due to changing colors, textures, growth, and the various built contexts and urban situations.

In order to expand and nuance present approaches and focuses in architectural publications, such explorations of green facades and their characteristics should gain more attention.

This study sought to expand the present understandings of the green facade through image-making. While image-making can help construct meanings, illuminate particular aspects and provide new ways to represent green facades, it also has its limitations. The depictions of green facades in this study showed a two-dimensional projection of reality in a moment of time, through the frame of the camera lens (e.g.

Nielsen, 2007). Hence, the images only showed an excerpt of reality, which also appear as more static than the continuously changing contexts and situations in the city and of the plants. Further, the images do not just represent something that exists ‘out there’, but are the result of my engagements and interactions with the physical environment. In this way, they are also limited by my approach towards green facades, as alternatives to images of the ‘Vertical Garden’ at Caixa Forum.

The way that designs are presented in publications plays an important role in defining what matters and how particular designs in our cities should be understood. If the standard for designing with plants on facades is purely associated with iconic examples, such as the ‘Vertical Garden’, the possibilities for design and planning actions are rather limited. Therefore, researchers and practitioners need to move

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beyond the picture-perfect green facades that dominate the discourse and look into the ecological and aesthetic potential of the at times scruffy yet rich, dynamic, ever changing and ordinary green facades that are present in the everyday city. Design publications promote ways of being green and, therefore, they have the potential to influence, e.g. architects through the images they publish and the designs they decide to focus on. In this way, they are in a position to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of green facades, which may in turn result in increased thoughtfulness when it comes to the design of contemporary green facades in our cities.

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PhD Thesis Ann-Charlott Eriksen

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN DEPARTMENT OF GEOSCIENCES AND NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ROLIGHEDSVEJ 23 DK - 1958 FREDERIKSBERG TEL +45 35 33 15 00 IGN@IGN.KU.DK WWW.IGN.KU.DK

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