GREENskin – mass-market suitable innovative façade-construction integrated living wall systems

The fundamental approach and strategy of the GREENskin project is to establish an interdisciplinary team comprising of experts in all relevant fields for the product development. This approach follows a core principle of innovative processes stated by Joseph Schumpeter already in 1911 that innovation primarily results from rearranging production factors in a new way. The interdisciplinary team will identify interfaces of the respective disciplines, rethink the inter-linkage and set up function-principles for innovative new GREENskin living walls. The main interfaces are: • Building envelope and GREENskin living wall with respect to building physical, statical and fire-protection aspects • Irrigation and vegetation carrier system with focus on easy maintainable construction, homogeneous water dispersion and intelligent control system • Plants and vegetation carrier system (selection of species and greening methods) • GREENskin living Wall and adjacent surrounding conditions • Stakeholders and living wall systems with focus on expectations, requirements and legal framework The function principles will serve as basis for the development of design principles, which will be elaborated to concrete design plans for first preprototypes or functional elements of the new GREENskin technology. Preprototypes or functional elements will be constructed in the next step to allow for laboratory tests. The aim is to examine the functionality of the designs and identify the best design and material components for the realization of the design plans. The investigations will analyse the feasibility in terms of construction, function and cost cover vegetability tests, soil moisture measurments. The communication experts will conduct a survey to identify the needs, expectations, requirements and barriers of stakeholders concerning the implementation of living walls. The results of the laboratory tests and stakeholder survey will be taken up by the GREENskin team to improve the design plans and select the best function principles, construction plans and materials in accordance with the survey results. The next phase of the GREENskin development project will focus on open space tests of GREENskin prototypes in different climatic zones and expositions. The aim is to investigate the functionality, performance and resilience of the different prototypes under various microclimatic conditions.