The Living Envelope
Throughout the 19th and into the 20th century the urban environment was consumed by a blanket of smoke that belched out from chimneys, factories, mills and homes. As a result of our gluttonous consumption of natural resources it has only taken 150 years to pollute the earth’s atmosphere to a perhaps irreparable point where we experience dramatic changes in weather patterns, air quality and temperature.
This study investigates a technology that is seldom used within architecture but is becoming increasingly more popular, the living envelope. Green walls and roof offer a soft and natural facade to any building my question and reason for this study is:
Do living envelopes have the potential to affect the performance of buildings and contribute to the mitigation of carbon output from the built environment?
Throughout the world people suffer from food poverty, The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012 and a Church Action on Poverty report (May 2013) estimated that over 500,000 people in the UK were reliant on food aid.
This study aims to investigate the measures that cities and communities around the world have implemented in order to fight hunger as well as looking at contemporary concepts and developing a possible solution for urban micro-farming using hydroponic technology