Story at a glance:
- Large-scale living walls provide visual appeal and help with indoor air quality.
- Ambius’ massive living wall installation at Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center’s SoundWaves water park breaks up space, adds privacy, and acts as a work of art.
- Installing a large living wall involves collaboration with the architect, significant lead time and planning, careful installation, and continued maintenance.
By now most people understand the health benefits of adding living walls to projects, but what I’m seeing more is interest in large-scale green walls for their visual appeal. When you see a green wall you’re immediately drawn to it. It’s alive, it’s interesting, and it fulfills our biophilic needs. Plants make places nicer to hang out in, and they also help clean the air.
Ambius installed more than 3,000 square feet of large-scale living walls in 2018 at the SoundWaves waterpark at Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. The team behind the new water park with indoor/outdoor waterslides wanted living walls to help break up the space, add privacy, and also act as works of art. We designed and built many double-sided green walls you can see from any direction.
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- For interior walls Ambius often uses tray-based systems, allowing plants to stay in their nursery pods, sitting in trays at an angle attached to the wall. Photo courtesy of Ambius
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- You can have thousands of plants attached to a wall, but you can’t tell they’re individual plants. The tray system gets them water, and plants can be removed easily. Photo courtesy of Ambius
When you’re incorporating a large-scale green wall, you want to build in proper lead time—six months for big projects—to work through the design as a team. At Ambius we work with the architect from the beginning; we review a requirements sheet with everything we need for lighting, plumbing, and electrical with the team. We want to ensure that when the plants arrive you’re ready for them.
We installed the Opryland project in two to three mobilizations, and it took a month or so to complete. On big projects I work with six to eight people. We develop and design large projects like Opryland, and when it’s time to install, I send my foreman or construction manager (or both) to manage the project onsite. Then we bring in Ambius’ local installers, who work all over, to install and maintain the project.
We also recently started offering CEU courses, educating around best practices for green wall design and construction, as well as plant selection and maintenance. These also explain how living green walls contribute to certifications like WELL and LEED.
