Now at the London Design Festival, a nifty piece of “street furniture” allows for rapid urban greening with little effort and maximum impact.
“Vert” is a simple polygonal assembly of boards, nets, and ropes that will allow climbing plants to scale quickly and easily, bathing an area of exposed concrete in shade and moisture.
The idea behind Vert is to provide cities with solutions to combat the Urban Heat Island effect, a thermodynamic phenomenon in which cities heat up and retain heat faster and longer than more natural environments.
“This structure is, in a way, constructed like a street furniture,” Stefen Diez, Vert’s lead designer, told Reuters. “It’s like a shelf that you put onto a place or on the street so the cars can still pass underneath, the bicycle can go underneath and the people can still walk, but they can also sit and rest.”
One of the main drivers of the heat island phenomenon is that flat-faced buildings which easily absorb heat radiate it out onto other, flat, heat-intolerant buildings or black asphalt. In this way, the radiation from the Sun has no place to go, and continues to bounce around all day.
Go touch the side of a tree on a hot summer’s day and see how warm it is compared to sun-bathed concrete, or street paving compared to the soil in an open field. Vert’s plant arrangement helps combat this by adding moisture, shade, and uneven green surfaces for radiative heat to bounce onto.
Devised in a three-way collaboration between Stefan Diez’s industrial design studio Diez Office, the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), and urban greening specialists OMCºC, Vert was unveiled at the Chelsea College of Arts at the London Design Festival.
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The AHEC recommended Diez use boards of American red oak, as it grows fast, absorbs a lot of carbon throughout its lifetime, and has the appropriate mechanical properties for the structure.
Vert’s triangular shape is fundamental to the structure’s performance, allowing for a robust construction that uses minimal materials while being capable of resisting wind from all angles and absorbing the weight of the plants.
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The triangle also lends itself to modularity, allowing for the system to be extended or to change in direction to suit different settings, without affecting the resistance of the structure. It also provides the perfect scaffolding to hang these nifty benches of netting.
WATCH the story below from Reuters…
SHARE This Good-Looking Piece Of Street Furniture With Your Urbanite Friends…
That’s all good but… Why don’t they just plant trees?
Here’s what I know as someone who is on the Environmental Committee for My community:
Trees require significantly more:
~ time to grow;
~ higher levels of degrees of maintenance (including personnel education) and costs; and
~ plants are easier to maintain (with less horticultural knowledge); grow fast to provide food (if edible) and oxygen;
~ the Vert structure can quickly and easily be fixed if damaged where trees often destroy concrete structures as their roots grow and too often, the only solution is to destroy the tree if its roots invade the space needed for public works (pipes, cables, etc.); and
~ the weight of trees can cause damage to people and properties.
These are just a few reasons that the Vert concept is better for the purpose of preventing the thermal detriments of “Heat Islands.” Hopefully, designs will improve for attractiveness as well as functionality.
Hope that helps. The research on such designs and concepts for global wellness is fascinating! Check it out!