Botanist's green walls take plants to new level

[BTinSF]

Botanist's green walls take plants to new level
John King
Tuesday, October 27, 2009

The new wing for San Francisco's Drew School looks routine on paper, a 40-foot-high box arranged to suggest a pair of structures side by side.

But in real life it's sure to turn heads, what with the vegetated wall that will fill a 50-foot-wide stretch of Broderick Street near Pacific Heights - fashioned by a French designer who favors all manners of green, including a bright green dye for his hair.

"California - so many native plants!" marveled Patrick Blanc as the botanist-turned-urban stylist passed through San Francisco last week. "For this project I want to use only native plants. Not Australian or South African or Mediterranean."

Blanc, 56, is the latest in a long procession of foreign designers brought here to nudge our well-established landscape. He calls himself "a botanist who thought of a new way to grow plants" - vertically and at architectural scale, the roots weaving through perpetually moist felt attached to a layer of plastic stapled to a wall-size metal frame.

Green walls are nothing new, as any graduate of an Ivy League school can attest. Blanc's innovation is the lightweight system that keeps roots away from the structure, and the way he uses a wall as canvas, splashing it with plantings that can pack 30 plants into a square yard.

There's a theatrical aspect in such presentations, and in Blanc's fashioned persona as well. The verdure glaze in his thinning brown hair is just a start; his first day in San Francisco Blanc wore green shoes, green jeans, patterned green glasses and a shirt with green leaves in a field of white.

Blanc has honed his craft for more than 20 years in projects ranging from private homes to highway overpasses, boutiques to tower walls. His best-known work is at the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, where a three-story curving wall in the complex designed by Jean Nouvel was likened to a "furry animal" by Architectural Record magazine.

The Drew School expansion will be Blanc's fifth and largest American creation, covering the streetside wall of a 14,500-square-foot assembly hall for the small high school campus at California and Broderick streets. Blanc was added to the design team by architects Bonnie Fisher and Boris Dramov of San Francisco's Roma Design Group. The pair visit Paris often and saw Blanc as a natural for a building intended to embody sustainability and green design.

"This being a highly urban site, there's not a lot of space in which to show those values at work," Fisher said. "Patrick creates mind-blowing, complex landscapes - we thought, 'how perfect would that be?' It can contribute to the neighborhood and also help students develop a deeper understanding of environmental systems."

The plan approved in August by the Planning Commission shows vegetation confined to the side of the building facing Broderick (there also will be a landscaped roof by Rana Creek of Carmel Valley). But on the first day of his visit, Blanc went through the plans with emphatic strokes of his hand, showing how plantings could turn the corner and make their presence known from the north - "so kids in the (school) courtyard can see. So parents arriving by car can see."

"We're going to incorporate that," Fisher said later. "We love his input. ... The best collaborations are when you learn from each other."

Construction on the $14 million project should begin by the end of the year, with a target opening date of next fall. The seedlings would go in shortly before that, following patterns that Blanc evolves in pencil sketches where he traces blobs and swirls across a blueprint, scribbling in names of the chosen plants.

"The first important thing is, which plants can be available," said Blanc, who spent one day of his trip visiting nurseries on the Monterey Peninsula. "What is exposed to the sun, what is protected from the wind. Ferns low, perhaps penstemons high."

It's hard to imagine a day when such walls are commonplace in cities; their romance comes as a counterpoint, a surprising and evocative fusion of the built and natural terrains.

Or perhaps not.

"More and more people live in dense areas," Blanc said. "This brings them color and life."


The Musee du Quai Branly in Paris, above, features one of the best known "vertical gardens" of botanist Patrick Blanc, left. It was likened to a "furry animal" by Architectural Record.

Place appears on Tuesdays. E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.

Source: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...DDSI1A84SE.DTL