Green Architectural Branding

PNC came up with probably the most innovative architectural branding idea I have tumbled on during the last year. Please welcome the largest living wall in North America, as posted on Jetson Green.

In a recent press release, PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE: PNC) announced plans to install a 2,380 square-foot, soil-based living wall on the southerly exterior of the company's Pittsburgh headquarters building, One PNC Plaza.

The living wall, pending municipal approval and installation in September 2009, will be the largest green living wall in North America. Produced by Green Living Technologies and designed by Mingo Design, a careful arrangement of locally-sourced plants will brand the building with PNC's logo.

PNC will have the 24-ton wall mounted directly onto One PNC Plaza with a panel system and stainless steel bracketing. The irrigation system -- which is estimated to require only 15 minutes of watering per week -- is built into 602 panels of soil-based growth medium.

A new architecture award for Manitoba Hydro Place

is isn’t the first time the Manitoba Hydro Place, the 23-storey, energy-efficient building on Winnipeg, gets awarded, this time it was the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's 2009 award for the best tall building in the Americas.Designed by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects of Toronto and Winnipeg's Smith Carter Architects and Engineers Inc., the 690,000 square foot corporate headquarters of Manitoba Hydro Place, took 3½ years to complete at a cost of $300 million.Today Manitoba Hydro Place is one of the smartest structures in North America and one of the most energy-efficient office towers in the world with a plethora of automated and integrated building management systems coupled with innovative geothermal heating and radiant cooling systems.Ultimately, Manitoba Hydro Place sets a precedent for the seamless integration of architectural excellence and climate responsive, energy efficient and sustainable design while enhancing and improving the quality and comfort of the human experience and the civility of urban life.We are happy to discover that the next generation of sustainable buildings is already here, integrating time-tested environmental concepts and advanced technologies to achieve living buildings that dynamically respond to local climate.

Big Dig House - A testament of recycling

Today we will take you on a unique house tour, where future architecture is literally created with materials from the past.If you don’t already know the story behind the Big Dig House, the living proof that infrastructure materials can be salvaged and reused to create amazing structures, here is a short summary of its unique history.The house was designed by Cambridge architects Single Speed Design and was built using over 600,000 lbs of construction materials recycled from the Big Dig highway project in Boston. Steel columns, beams, concrete roadway etc from the demolished I-93 off-ramps were the primary materials of construction of this amazing house the cost of which did not exceed 150$ per square foot, since in most cases the owners only had to pay only for the shipping of the materials on site.A testament of recycling this 3,400 square foot house opens up a whole new chapter in eco living and future architecture techniques and as stated in the Single Speed Design website, "Most importantly, the house demonstrates an untapped potential for the public realm: with strategic front-end planning, much needed community programs including schools, libraries, and housing could be constructed whenever infrastructure is deconstructed, saving valuable resources, embodied energy, and taxpayer dollars."

Arbera Park, from garbage dump to community center

Arberia Park is a masterplan proposal for the redevelopment of a former brick factory and garbage dump into a park and community center near the center of Priština. Designed by Ljubljana-based architectural firm Sadar Vuga Arhitekti.

The construction of a new inner ring boulevard has acted as a catalyst for the reuse of the Arberia site. Due to the city’s often unregulated development, few areas suitable for pedestrian and public use exist - parks are located sparsely throughout the city and often at distances inconvenient for walking on foot.
Arberia Park is envisioned as a new green area for the city, comprised of diverse programmatic uses and activities that add to the quality of life of the area and broader context. The master plan consists of two terraced building complexes, a leisure park, and a sports and recreational area in-between.
The northern building complex is defined as a community center with a school and medical clinic, and the southern complex contains retail, office, and apartments that offer panoramic views of the city. Together, they define the primary urban plaza and act as a gateway to the rest of the site.
The site’s topography naturally separates and organizes the three zones into individually defined spatial densities: urban, park, and a hybrid event space. A continuous green element binds all aspects of the project together, and manifests itself architecturally as a terraced topography. Natural and artificial topographies merge to create new surfaces for inhabitation and public use.