Ideo Morph 38: Thailand

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Gardens are no longer meant to be just a plot in your backyard. Green walls, also known as "living walls," are the latest trend in sustainable housing designs.

Plant walls do more than add a splash of color. They can lower your heating and cooling bills, absorb and recycle rainwater and even pump oxygen into the air. These next few pages highlight some of the coolest building designs that are the wave of the future.

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We begin with Ideo Morph 38 in Thailand. Somdoon Architects, the firm behind the project, says the development "takes on a symbiotic relationship with the environment."

A series of green installments brings unexpected nature to this city-bound complex. A bark-like structure wraps from the west side of the larger Ashton tower to the east side of the smaller Skyle tower. The green wall not only acts as a natural shade to keep out the tropical sun, but it also adds a layer of privacy for residents inside.

Outdoor sky gardens are installed at different intervals on both towers, which the architects says creates a vertical landscape.

NEXT: The Wave House

La Maison Vague: France

Patrick Nadeau's "La Maison Vague" translates to "Wave House." Built just outside Reims, France, the Wave House is a prime example of a modern earth-sheltered home, which is designed to save money by using vegetation to regulate temperature.

Soil covers the sloping wood roof. The plants on top range from grasses to thyme to perennials like lavender. Those plants work as a natural barrier, keeping extreme heat out during the summer and insulating against extreme cold in the winter.

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"The house is alive. She changes her appearance, color and odor with the seasons," Nadeau says. "New plants can be brought by the wind, insects or birds giving the building a character or fallow ground-wave, hence the name House Vague."

NEXT: Farmscapes

Asian Cairns: Shenzhen, China

Asian Cairns, by Vincent Callebaut Architectures, is a conceptual "farmscraper" design – basically skyscrapers infused with gardens.

Callebaut, known for incorporating plants into his designs, says farmscrapers help reverse a pattern of pollution by giving a city "green lungs" through vegetation and farming, while relying on solar and wind power.

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"The aim is to repatriate the countryside in the city and to reintegrate the food production modes," the architects explain. "It recycles everything."

NEXT: The Country and City Collide

Dragonfly: New York City

Dragonfly, another conceptual design from Vincent Callebaut Architectures, gives us a glimpse of what urban farming could look like in the future.

This design of the future would be a place where people live as well as a place where people farm. We're talking about more than gardens and flowers: The architects envision growing oranges, apples, spinach, cherries, mushrooms and more.

"The ecologic city aims at reintegrating the farming function on the urban scale by emphasizing the role of the urban agriculture in the use and the reuse of natural resources," Callebaut said. "The Dragonfly project challenges the city of New York to rethink its food production."

NEXT: Heartbeat of a City

Gardens of Anfa: Morocco

Welcome to the Gardens of Anfa, a vertical garden residential complex that's set to be "the landscaped heartbeat" in Casablanca, Morocco.

The designs are the brain child of Paris-based architects at Maison Edouard François, a studio know for its sustainable, ecological designs.

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At the center of the complex stand four towers with vegetative walls, made of flowering, colorful vines called bougainvilleas. A series of smaller residential buildings, all which will have vertical gardens, will line the outer row of the neighborhood. Trees and bushes planted around the entire perimeter will add even more color to the community.

Gardens of Anfa is set to be finished in 2017.

NEXT: Built On Old Railyard

Tower Flower: Paris

The Tower Flower was part of the 2004 redevelopment of a former railway site in Paris. Because there wasn't a lot of existing nature, project managers came up with this design to infuse plants back into the neighborhood.

The architects on the project came from Paris-based studio Maison Edouard François, the same group responsible for the Gardens of Anfa (Page 5). They also worked with famous landscape architect Patrick Blanc, a man who has built dozens of show-stopping vertical gardens around the world. In fact, we tell you all about the godfather of vertical gardens on the next page.

NEXT: He Invented Vertical Gardens

Oasis d'Aboukir: Paris

Patrick Blanc has been perfecting his vertical garden concept since he was a teenager. He earned his PhD in 1978, won the French Academy of Sciences Botany Prize in 1993, and then patented his vertical garden concept in both 1988 and then 1996. He has built vertical gardens in countries across the world.

These gardens are as much about science as they are about art. Blanc explains soil is merely a "mechanical support" and that plants grow on a variety of surfaces in the wild: You see them sprout on everything from tree trunks to limestone cliffs to waterfalls.

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"It is possible for plants to grow on nearly soil-less vertical surfaces, as long as there is no permanent water shortage," Blanc explains. Another trick to his art is choosing plant species that thrive in specific climates where he's working.

One problem that can happen when wild roots start growing on man-made structures is the roots can latch inside the walls, damaging the integrity of the building. Blanc's vertical gardens are engineered as a type of "second skin," so that the plants spread out along the wall – not inside it. He constructs the vertical gardens using three main pieces: a metal frame, a PVC layer to lend strength and a layer of felt to evenly distribute water to the roots.

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You can learn more about the science behind the art on Blanc's website.

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