Student architecture competition: 'Stattwerk' green facade student competition

Location: Belgrade_Serbia

 Author: Fedor Jurić

The proposal transforms the structure into a piece of landscape inside the city, a living mountain. Rather than resorting to a ‘green’ cosmetic treatment of the facade, the proposal challenges the established  instruments and concepts of gardening, architecture and ecology living.
I propose to totally cover the ‘fragmented’ volumes with a membrane of vines and flowers. The new skin wraps and adapts to the building at different heights , unifying them with a silhouette and a single common material. The membrane creeps above the highest part and transforms the building into a vertical garden. The effect of a gradually growing vertical greenery emphasizes the initiative as a beacon of hope, for a forward thing and ‘green’ Belgrade. Embracing its position in the cities silhouette, with a never dying and growing ‘potential’.
The vegetation corresponds to the surrounding environment. Condensing on the street level, filtering the noise and air pollution of heavy traffic, and thinning towards the top, gradually and gently rising from the surrounding buildings shadows and opening the glass facade beneath to direct sunlight. The garden is knit trough a modular mural of thin wire mesh, generated by context conditions, whose different densities directly reflect the multiplicity of vegetation in the endless horizontal pots.

At times, the ‘Living Mountain’ can be turned into an open reception, where an enormous variety of bird species can nest, attracted by the water tanks and the abundant insect life in the vertical garden. The building provides an alternative habitat as well as a living laboratory where university can test new varieties of species adapted to this ever changing climate.

It  becomes a vertical landscape, tangible at its ‘roots’ but incomprehensible in its never ending horizon towards the sky. Architecture and energy are converted into a living system that is subjective to human interaction. This is a ‘Living Mountain’: a natural ecosystem that is generated artificially. The proposal does not completely envelope the ‘independent’ building in the Zeleni Venac street, conserving its already established identity, but it provides a continuity of the street facade line, blurring the line between organic and artificial materials.

2017