ON SOME LEVEL, THERE’S nothing really revolutionary about green walls. Any city worth its salt has a smattering of old architecture in its downtown core with leafy green vines climbing up its Corinthian facade. We call these buildings part of our collective heritage, and we protect them from market forces, making sure they stay where they are, despite the real estate race going on around them. And the older the better! In the most exaggerated examples, we call them wonders of the world and make pilgrimages to these places of beauty, as in the Angkor Temples of Cambodia, pictured below. There’s something primal about vines intertwining that touches an emotional chord for most humans — probably something to do with our simian ancestry. But climbing vines are just one vertical possiiblity — there’s no reason to stop there, at the monocultural option.
IS THERE SUCH A THING as objective beauty? Can beauty be quantified as well as qualified? I’m not speaking here about human beauty, or which people we are more attracted to. Naomi Wolf tackled that topic back in 1991, demonstrating that a single impossible standard of beauty is promulgated by advertising agencies to make us feel inadequate enough to purchase the products they’re huckstering. But although beauty is in the eye of the multi-cultural beholder, science says that there are some measurements that are universally held to be desirable, across cultures. Could the same thing be true for the rest of creation? Is there a secret mathematical formula for the perfect landscape?
IT’S BEEN SIX WEEKS since we brought up the topic of green walls. Back in July, we introduced you to Patrick Blanc’s marvelous vertical gardens. Contrary to what one might expect, his three-dimensional vegetal sculptures bloom beautifully, indoors as well as out. In Beautiful Blanc Walls, we saw a hotel and a shopping mall in Thailand, and an opera house in Taiwan with gorgeous greenery crawling up vertical surfaces. So it begs the question: would it work in a residential setting in Toronto? Could Green Apple build green walls in your home?
