Many buildings in the Netherlands are ventilated directly with outdoor air. But outdoor air isn’t always as clean as we think. Traffic, industry, and urban density mean that what we breathe inside often carries pollution from outside.
GreenBreathe Facade is a Bucky Lab project that tackles this issue head-on. The team designed a modular façade system that uses vertical greenery to purify and cool incoming air, while integrating seamlessly into a conventional façade build-up.
The system combines structure, ventilation ducts, curtain wall framing, fan-assisted panels, and planted green modules into a layered, replaceable façade element. Plants play a central role: filtering polluted air, improving microclimate conditions, and passively irrigating themselves as part of the system. Rather than treating greenery as decoration, GreenBreathe makes it an active environmental component.
What we particularly like about this project is its constructive clarity. The modular logic is clearly developed, technically detailed, and tested through 1:1 prototyping and 1:10 models in the Bucky Lab. The poster shows not just an idea, but a buildable system—complete with mullions, irrigation, maintenance access, and realistic integration into an urban building façade.
GreenBreathe Facade was developed by:
Julia van Beek, Bram van den Berg, Jasper Cluistra, Christine van Engelen, and Matthijs van der Klooster
Supervised by:
Dr.-Ing. Marcel Bilow, Ir. Nadia Remmerswaal, and Ir. Hugo Nagtzaam
Project Partner Aldowa – supervised by Daniella Hesterman and Rick van Horssen
Projects like GreenBreathe remind us that façades can actively contribute to healthier indoor environments, not only through technology, but by intelligently combining plants, air, and construction. Exactly the kind of applied, hands-on thinking we love to share on FacadeWorld.
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