Today, greenery is taking on a new perspective. It grows upward, climbs, and covers walls, balconies, fences, and facades. Greenery becomes architecture and urban design, entering cities in a new way and transforming walls, roofs, and vertical spaces into living landscapes. This is the trend of vertical greenery, a movement born from the convergence of design, architecture, and the need for nature.
One of the most famous examples in Italy is Milan’s Bosco Verticale, designed by Studio Boeri: a veritable living forest, with 800 trees, 4,500 shrubs, and 15,000 plants. In Madrid, however, greenery has enveloped the city’s cultural heart with over 15,000 plants covering the 460 m² wall alongside the CaixaForum building. In Paris, the Musée du quai Branly, designed by Jean Nouvel, is another iconic example: a green façade covers the building like a hanging garden that includes hundreds of species from different parts of the world. Patrick Blanc also designed One Central Park in Sydney, where the park “climbs” up the towers: the vegetation covers about 50% of the facade and transforms the building into a green icon of the city skyline.
Buildings as landscapes—an architectural concept that has now spread worldwide and is no longer just the trademark of a few big names in contemporary architecture. Take, for example, the Oasia Hotel Downtown in Singapore, whose tower is clad in a perforated red façade that supports 21 species of climbing plants designed to keep it lush and resilient to various climatic conditions. Or the 1000 Trees complex in Shanghai, which has transformed the building into a sort of inhabited urban mountain. The same evolution can be seen in rooftop gardens, where the roof ceases to be a mere technical covering and becomes a living space: one example is the Sky Garden of the 20 Fenchurch Street skyscraper in London, also known as the “Walkie Talkie,” which features a public rooftop garden with 360-degree views of the city, terraces, restaurants, and indoor green spaces. In Copenhagen, on the roof of CopenHill, the rooftop landscape even includes a ski slope, hiking trails, viewing areas, climbing walls, shrubs, and trees.
But vertical greenery isn’t just for large-scale international architecture. The same principle is increasingly gaining traction in domestic spaces as well: a balcony, an exterior wall, a fence, a small patio, or a terrace can all become green surfaces capable of completely transforming the atmosphere of a space. To achieve this in a simple and modular way, Tenax offers various solutions designed to bring vertical greenery to both indoor and outdoor spaces: from modular panels with artificial leaves made of polyethylene—ideal for creating decorative green walls with a strong visual impact—to extendable trellises made of natural wood or PVC with ornamental foliage, perfect for screening and enhancing balconies and terraces, to decorative spheres with synthetic leaves, designed to enhance pots, entryways, and outdoor spaces with details inspired by natural greenery. In short, with Tenax, the vertical green trend becomes an accessible solution for everyday life, ideal for transforming a plain wall into a small garden.