bounty of planted walls refreshing cities around the worldowe their design or inspiration to Blanc’s eco-pageants, and lure birds, butterflies, and hummingbirds while they mutate with the seasons.
One of Blanc’s personal favorites, a green city icon, is the magnificent Quai Branly Museum in Paris, which opened in 2006 and was greeted by many as a botanical epiphany. Multitextured meadows climb the thirteen-thousand-square-foot facade of the building, more than half of which is alive. The rest is windows, creating a giant plaid of thick-leafed, mossy, breathing wall, touchably soft, rich with scent, atwitch with birds.
Cloaking the facade in great variety to reflect the cultural diversity of the world’s artists, Blanc chose a pastiche of species from temperate zones in North America, Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa. He would have included Oceania, but tropical plants can’t survive the Paris winters, and the facade—which is part botanical tapestry, part hidden lagoon, and entirely soil-free—is intended to endure for many years, filling the senses of Parisians, and building a 40-foot-tall, 650-foot-wide ecosystem amid the hard premises of city life, while also helping to purify the air and eliminate carbon dioxide. In warm weather, flowers bloom, butterflies nectar, and birds perch and nest in the dense thickets. One half-expects to find miniature deer browsing on its mossy hillocks. The museum director plans on adding frogs and tree lizards. Because our horizontal indoor life can flatten the mind, some of the administrative offices also have smaller vertical gardens, which are visible through the windows, blurring the line between outside and inside even more.
How can a towering garden with a northern exposure survive the icy winds sweeping across the Seine? That’s where Blanc’s education and research as a botanist come in. The living wall is hardy because he’s chosen hundreds of understory species that he’s discovered can nonetheless tolerate slathers of direct light and wind.
“When I think of Heuchera ,” he says, referring to a family of plants that includes coral bells and alumroot, which produce small delicate flowers, and whose leaves are like hands with the fingers extended,“I always think of their leaves emerging intact from the melting snow in April, along the steep slopes in the shade of giant sequoias in California.”
Blanc works with a palette of deep rich greens in dozens of subtle shades and intensities, from asparagus and fern green to forest or praying mantis green, and textures that run the gamut from matte to hairy, spongy to sheen. All vary with time of day, age, season, clouds eclipsing the sun, fog rolling off the river, rush-hour traffic, aberrations of twilight. Seen through our rods and cones, the colors remix and evolve perpetually as they would if we encountered them in a forest. He prefers leaves to flowers, doesn’t care for trailing vines, and is sensitive to the architecture of leaves. The thousands of individual plants he quilts together grow leaves that are bristled, pointed, star-shaped, notched, oval, sickle-shaped, circular, teardrop, blunt, heart-shaped, arrow-headed, and more. Some climb while others descend, some mound or bloom daintily, others sprout or cantilever. Knowing the habit of each, he draws a multicelled planting map that looks like swirling fingerprints or a paint-by-number guide, with each segment a plant species referred to by Latin name.
“They begin like paintings,” he explains. “Then they develop texture and depth.”
As a science-based art form, it’s a fusion inspired by many muses. The plants are drawn on flat paper, so each design does indeed begin like a painting. Then the artwork morphs into a sensuous sculpture of touchable, biological, prunable shapes and colors. Leaves, flowers, stems dance in the air, a slow-motion ballet. He may try to choreograph them to some degree, but the ensemble will succumb to wild swings of
One of Blanc’s personal favorites, a green city icon, is the magnificent Quai Branly Museum in Paris, which opened in 2006 and was greeted by many as a botanical epiphany. Multitextured meadows climb the thirteen-thousand-square-foot facade of the building, more than half of which is alive. The rest is windows, creating a giant plaid of thick-leafed, mossy, breathing wall, touchably soft, rich with scent, atwitch with birds.
Cloaking the facade in great variety to reflect the cultural diversity of the world’s artists, Blanc chose a pastiche of species from temperate zones in North America, Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa. He would have included Oceania, but tropical plants can’t survive the Paris winters, and the facade—which is part botanical tapestry, part hidden lagoon, and entirely soil-free—is intended to endure for many years, filling the senses of Parisians, and building a 40-foot-tall, 650-foot-wide ecosystem amid the hard premises of city life, while also helping to purify the air and eliminate carbon dioxide. In warm weather, flowers bloom, butterflies nectar, and birds perch and nest in the dense thickets. One half-expects to find miniature deer browsing on its mossy hillocks. The museum director plans on adding frogs and tree lizards. Because our horizontal indoor life can flatten the mind, some of the administrative offices also have smaller vertical gardens, which are visible through the windows, blurring the line between outside and inside even more.
How can a towering garden with a northern exposure survive the icy winds sweeping across the Seine? That’s where Blanc’s education and research as a botanist come in. The living wall is hardy because he’s chosen hundreds of understory species that he’s discovered can nonetheless tolerate slathers of direct light and wind.
“When I think of Heuchera ,” he says, referring to a family of plants that includes coral bells and alumroot, which produce small delicate flowers, and whose leaves are like hands with the fingers extended,“I always think of their leaves emerging intact from the melting snow in April, along the steep slopes in the shade of giant sequoias in California.”
Blanc works with a palette of deep rich greens in dozens of subtle shades and intensities, from asparagus and fern green to forest or praying mantis green, and textures that run the gamut from matte to hairy, spongy to sheen. All vary with time of day, age, season, clouds eclipsing the sun, fog rolling off the river, rush-hour traffic, aberrations of twilight. Seen through our rods and cones, the colors remix and evolve perpetually as they would if we encountered them in a forest. He prefers leaves to flowers, doesn’t care for trailing vines, and is sensitive to the architecture of leaves. The thousands of individual plants he quilts together grow leaves that are bristled, pointed, star-shaped, notched, oval, sickle-shaped, circular, teardrop, blunt, heart-shaped, arrow-headed, and more. Some climb while others descend, some mound or bloom daintily, others sprout or cantilever. Knowing the habit of each, he draws a multicelled planting map that looks like swirling fingerprints or a paint-by-number guide, with each segment a plant species referred to by Latin name.
“They begin like paintings,” he explains. “Then they develop texture and depth.”
As a science-based art form, it’s a fusion inspired by many muses. The plants are drawn on flat paper, so each design does indeed begin like a painting. Then the artwork morphs into a sensuous sculpture of touchable, biological, prunable shapes and colors. Leaves, flowers, stems dance in the air, a slow-motion ballet. He may try to choreograph them to some degree, but the ensemble will succumb to wild swings of
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