Back in the 1970s, the architect and “Play Spacenet Inventor” Conrad Roland was working on spacenets and spatial structures for greening. However, his ideas were forgotten for a long time. Our aim is to breathe new life into them for the design in public spaces.
The combination of artistic public design and ecological concerns is becoming increasingly important, not least due to the cooling effect of plants.
With this project we have reinterpreted spatial structures in a creative process. The different elements offer an innovative way of integrating more vibrant greenery into the urban environment. The system is particularly suitable where street trees take a long time to provide shade and contribute to an improved microclimate due to a lack of space, sealed surfaces, underground car parks or parking spaces.
The goal of this project is to motivate as many planners, students, and architects as possible to be part of a movement.
Traditionally, such structures are used to shade paths and thus serve a clear functional purpose. These are the overgrown park paths and facades where individual plant strands climb up steel cables instead of growing wildly in three-dimensional directions.
In the LIANAS TRELLIS structures, plants can grow in all directions. In nature, trees and climbing plants compete with each other, with the climbing plant overgrowing the tree in the long term. The advantage of faster growth is clearly visible to the plants in our structures: a dense, lush green volume is created after just two to three years. Flowering, evergreen, and colourful foliage plants can be combined.
Three-dimensional structures can form chaotically through ropes or rods intersecting in space. Polyhedron structures are used when systematically filling space. The most well-known of these are the five platonic elements: tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron.
Only the last three elements can be stacked seamlessly in space and fulfil another criterion for fully filled spaces. The choice of material is not limited. Both rigid materials like wood, steel or plastics and flexible materials like rope, chains or straps can be used for this purpose.