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Architects: Diez Office, OMC°C
- Area: 140 m²
- Year: 2024
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Photographs:Petr Krejci
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Manufacturers: American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC)
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Lead Architects: Stefan Diez
Text description provided by the architects. With temperatures rising and heatwaves set to intensify, coupled with dwindling biodiversity in cities across the world, there is an urgent need for a rethink in urban development. Devised in a three-way collaboration between the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC), Stefan Diez's industrial design studio Diez Office, and urban greening specialists OMCºC, Vert is an experimental proposition for a modular structure that can address both issues. Unveiled at Chelsea School of Art during the London Design Festival, the project proposes a timber structure that helps to cool the city while integrating easily into its existing infrastructure. Tall sails covered in climbing plants work to fix carbon dioxide in the air while creating areas of cooling shade – sheltered spaces for people to pause. Built from sustainable materials, Vert combines aesthetic appeal with tangible environmental benefits and represents a transformative approach to urban development.
As well as offering a potential urban-cooling solution and acting as visually enriching street furniture, Vert makes a compelling case for the use of alternative wood materials to the limited library of species typically used in design and construction, encouraging greater diversity and resilience in the world's forests. Constructed from an engineered hardwood, red oak glulam, the structure consists of a series of timber triangles holding suspended biodegradable nets. These provide a framework for climbing plants, rooted in textile planters at the base of each net. The sails are greened with around 20 different plant species, creating a living ecosystem that enriches local biodiversity, serves as a habitat for essential insect populations, aesthetically enriches the urban landscape, and provides a sheltered space where visitors can gather and relax. Because red oak is denser and more stable than the standard construction timbers, less material is required, minimizing the visual prominence and footprint of the structure while maintaining high structural performance. The use of red oak also allows for more precise and long-lasting joints that enable the structure to be disassembled, moved, repaired, and/or reassembled many more times than standard construction materials, supporting the longevity of the piece.
Despite red oak being sustainable and constituting a sizable 18% of North American hardwood forests, it is underutilized in Europe. Increased use of red oak would reduce the stress on more widely used species and provide designers and customers with an enriched palette of timber materials to choose from. The triangular design of the structure not only allows for a robust construction that minimizes material use but also adapts to various urban environments. This modular approach facilitates its expansion or reconfiguration without compromising structural integrity. Additionally, the construction techniques employed, such as the use of glued laminated timber (glulam) and American red oak, provide high structural performance while promoting sustainability. This choice of materials, combined with OMCºC's technical solutions for irrigation and planting, reinforces the system's capacity to be replicated in other cities, thus efficiently addressing the challenges of urban heating and biodiversity loss.
Vert is projected to cool the surrounding airspace by as much as 8ºC, cast four times more shade than a 20-year-old tree, and produce as much biomass as an 80-year-old lime tree – all through the use of climbing plants grown throughout a single summer. This project aligns with London's ambitious climate goals, including the Mayor's directives to increase tree cover by 10% by 2050. Vert presents a blueprint for sustainable urban development in the age of climate crisis, blending innovative design with environmental stewardship to create liveable, resilient, and biodiverse urban spaces. For AHEC, Diez Office, and OMCºC, Vert is the rarest of things: an original creation that the designers want others to copy.
