PNC Achieves New Green Milestone: The Largest Living Wall in North America

Photo courtesy of Living Green Technologies.

The word ‘green’ when associated with the banking industry has always meant money. While that will always be true, we can now add eco-conscious and energy efficient to the word association.

PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. has just completed the installation of a six story living green wall, which the company claims is largest such structure in North America.

“The PNC wall is a living, breathing wall of plants spanning 2,380 square feet on the south side of the bank’s Pittsburgh headquarters. The wall is made up of 602 two-foot square panels, each containing 24 evergreen plants,” according to Green Living Technologies, which built the living structure. The company is a privately owned international provider of living green walls and roofs.

There are two types of green walls, with one called a green façade, composed of climbing plants, such as ivy, adhering to a building. The other type, which PNC has, is a living wall that is separated from the actual building structure by anywhere from a few inches to a foot, and is composed of modular panels of vegetation with irrigation systems.

The PNC wall will weigh approximately 24 tons when fully saturated through an internally controlled irrigation system, according to the bank, adding that it’s estimated that the wall will require just 15 minutes of watering once a week.

Gary Saulson, PNC director or corporate of real estate, elaborated on the bank’s design selection saying, “When we decided to build a green wall, we were really looking at building greenery through an area of Pittsburgh that didn’t have any at the corner of Fifth (Avenue) and Wood (Street).

“We really wanted to do something to bring a greener identity to our corporate headquarters and our campus. We really decided that a green wall was the best application where we could actually use the bones of the building to hold that wall.”

Mr. Saulson went on to say, “The plans that we picked for the wall are evergreen, however they’re a variety of different plant species, which really adds to the beauty of the design.”

The PNC wall is shades of green with darker plants used to frame the bank’s logo, and in the spring some of the evergreen will bloom, creating more color and changing the design.

Living green walls are becoming more prominent in urban areas because studies have shown that such plant structures reduce the overall temperatures of their buildings, which in turn lowers energy consumption.

Randy Sharp, a principal at Sharp & Diamond Landscape Architecture Inc, wrote in an article for Building Design + Construction, that “the reintroduction of vegetation into cities has been correlated with the reduction of the urban heat island effect, and therefore will reduce energy consumption. Cities are cooler and quieter through shading, evaporative transpiration, and the absorption of sound by green walls.”

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