Designers and environmental firms based in Germany have teamed up on a architectural creation called "the Vert." On display at the London Design Festival, the vertical garden structure serves as a habitat for plants and a place for hot city dwellers to cool off.
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00:00This wooden structure might be the best new hideout from a scorching hot day in the city.
00:06The display at the London Design Festival is called the Wirt.
00:10It uses 25 species of annual climbing plants that provide shelter and a cooling effect.
00:15Stefan Diez, a designer based in Munich, Germany, is behind this creation.
00:20In Wirt we are growing yearly plants, yearly fast-growing plants like morning glory,
00:26some kind of beans and hops, for instance.
00:29They grow up to 10 meters in one year, providing shadow, evaporation, a cool breeze.
00:36Rapid urbanization and climate change has turned some parts of the cities
00:40into what climatologists call heat islands,
00:43densely populated concrete jungles that easily trap heat.
00:47For the London Design Festival, Diez teamed up with the Office of Microclimate Cultivation
00:53based in Frankfurt, Germany, which specializes in developing greening solutions for urban areas.
00:59Its co-founder explained another sustainable use for the vegetation in the structure as an energy source.
01:05As these climbing plants are based on a seasonal cycle,
01:08what we do in autumn is that we harvest the whole biomass and then,
01:12depending on the local infrastructure, we can, for example,
01:16turn them into compost, energy or even biochar.
01:20And by that, return the whole harvested biomass into the economic cycle.
01:26Beyond the hard science and activism,
01:28Diez says the structure easily integrates itself into people's daily lives.
01:33This structure is, in a way, constructed like a street furniture.
01:38It's like a shelf that you put onto a place or on the street so the cars can still pass underneath,
01:44the bicycle can go underneath, people can still walk, but they can also sit and rest.
01:49And we want to offer a lot of things that people can do without,
01:52that they have to immediately change their habits.
01:55The team says the structure can help create a symbiotic relationship
01:59between humans and the environment in an urban space,
02:02and show people how saving the planet can be done with little disturbance
02:06and also with comfort and taste.
02:08Alex Chen and Irene Lin for Taiwan Plus.