Office building with a facade covered with hanging plants
The company Vo Trong Nghia Architects is Ho Chi Min City based architectural studio by architect Vo Trong Nghia and designed an office building in Vietnam with a facade covered entirely with hanging planters containing a variety of local flora, vegetables, fruits and herbs.
A facade is generally the front part or exterior of a building. It’s a loan word from the French facade, which means face or frontage. In architecture, the facade of a building is often the most important aspect from a design standpoint, as it sets the tone for the rest of the whole building.
Vo Trong Nghia architects constructed a lush Urban Farming Office in response to Vietnam’s fast urbanisation that aims to reestablish a connection with the site’s natural roots in a newly developed neighbourhood of Ho Chi Min City, Danang, Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc, etc.
The company uses 42,000 pieces of bamboo to create the complex, sculptural form of the entrance building for resort building and warps the building in perforated ceramic brick facade designing a series of elevated gardens that function as a natural cooling system.
By having a facade covered with plants, the building encourages the production of safe food while reintroducing green space to the metropolis. As a result, the facade resembles a series of hanging pots with diverse local plants within that face the sun.
The facade of plants, divided by a layer of windows, filters direct sunlight and purifies the air while serving as a shade device. The planters themselves are supported by an exterior thin steel shelf structure, allowing them to be freely rearranged according to plant growth or fully changed.
The natural shaded wall of plants has effective irrigated plants and passive cooling tactics
The heart of the office buildings is really made with an exposed concrete framework. The wall of plants completely encircles the glassed south side of the structure, avoiding overheating and generating a microclimate of shade of the interior of the offices.
The irrigated hanging plants automatically cools the air through evaporation thanks to a rainwater gathering system. On the other side, the north- facing walls opposite the green facade are solid, with tiny apertures added to facilitate cross ventilation, another tactic for passive cooling.
A rooftop garden offers additional room for growing plants, and within, work spaces are arranged around a central atrium. Full-height sliding glass doors also enable access to balcony area for moving or harvesting plants.
To contrast with the vivid green fo the planted exterior, the inside of the concrete building has been left entirely exposed. Dark wood furnishing and simple lighting fixtures have been added.
Source: Domus, Dezeen
