The Green Dip: Covering the City with a Forest

Green Planet

In order to critically look at greening solutions for cities, we want to approach the greening controversy by looking at the planet as a whole. Indeed, the different climates provide with some specific environmental conditions for native species to grow.

For this part of the workshop, we have selected 14 cities, covering a vast array of world climates. We will look at the density, climatic conditions and more specifically, at the native flora in those regions. In order to give an overview of those different climates, we will propose a common template for comparison.

Students will produce a catalogue of the representative native flora. For each species, students will gather data about their needs (dimensions, volume of soil needed, weight, water consumption, daylight hours, season, maintenance, estimation on investment and running costs) and environmental benefits (air pollution removal, air temperature reduction, ultraviolet radiation reduction, carbon storage, pollen, building energy conservation, wind reduction, stream flow reduction, evaporation, water storage, estimation on financial profits).

Green Buildings

What are the existing and future solutions for implementing vegetation in buildings? During this part, we will look at rooftops, facades, balconies, and the ground levels, as potential solutions. What is the impact of planting a specific species on those building parts? This exercise will systematically explore the implementation of precise species on different urban forms.

We’ll explore a collection of different urban forms. From blocks, towers, slabs, courtyards, urban villas, row houses, street, public space, we develop tools and methods to evaluate this impact.

This part of the workshop will be supported by a series of calculations aiming to measure the impact of covering cities with green in different climates. It aims to develop a method to calculate the environmental benefits and estimates the costs of ‘greening’ our cities. This exercise will be supported by a series of tools. Students will be introduced to Grasshopper and Rhinoceros 3D in order to develop a comparative model and catalogue of solutions.

Green Cities

Visions are not just mere collages. They require precision, critical and visionary thinking. They are a tool to illustrate the impact of different scenarios.

During the last part of the workshop, students will produce a series of Photoshop images exploring the greenification of 14 cities with different species. Each student will produce five beautiful images, testing the implementation of five different species on a specific city. This will lead to a collection of 70 beautiful images. Some support will be provided in order to introduce some specific Photoshop technics.

At the Why Factory, research and education are blended. Therefore, the studio or workshop is a place for the development of a collective research. Students work at the same time individually and collectively. Some collective template are provided in order to facilitate the collective and comparable production. Besides, some ‘experts’ will be named depending on the skills, curiosity, focus and interest of everyone. Ecological services expert, database expert, Photoshop expert, Grasshopper 3d expert, template and presentation expert, economic expert, etc…