Dome

Vertical garden on wall adjacent to the museum; Blanc is the modern innovator of the green wall, yet recent scholarship on the subject suggest that the vertical garden (aka. Green Wall, Botanical Brick) was invented by Professor Stanley Hart White at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1938. Although Blanc did not invent the vertical garden, he is responsible for modernizing and popularizing the garden type. The large walls use a metal frame on a load-bearing wall, which is covered with PVC plates and polyamide felt and served by a drip irrigation system with water and nutrients. At CaixaForum Madrid, the wall is actually that of a neighboring apartment building, abutting the Herzog & de Meuron building. The variety of plants is chosen by the location; Madrid’s vertical garden is made up of more than 15,000 plants, from 250 different species. Source: Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (accessed 6/23/2013)