Stacking green house.

This is the HA house (or Stacking Green) by Vo Tronga Nghia, Daisuke Sanuki and Shunri Nishizawa in Saigon (Vietnam). This is a typical tube house in a plot of 4m wide and 20m deep. The two open façades are made by concrete planters. The distance between the planters is from 25 to 40cm depending on the height of the plants.

There are few partition walls in the house, to make sure there is fluency and views of the green façades all over the different spaces. There is also a skylight at the center of the house, and the sunlight gets into the house from morning to afternoon through the plants, creating beautiful shadows on the walls.

This house recreates the typical building in Saigon: narrow and tall houses full of flowerpots. These plants protect people from the sunlight, street noise and polution.

Simply clever!

Images via Arch daily.

The High Line.

"Parks in large cities are usually thought of as refuges, as islands of green amid seas of concrete and steel. When you approach the High Line in the Chelsea neighborhood on the lower west side of Manhattan, what you see first is the kind of thing urban parks were created to get away from—a harsh, heavy, black steel structure supporting an elevated rail line that once brought freight cars right into factories and warehouses and that looks, at least from a distance, more like an abandoned relic than an urban oasis."

This is the beginning of the great article by Paul Goldberger that you can read here.

And you can also "visit" the High Line thanks to this time-lapse video by photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, and senior producer Hans Weise.

Images and text from National Geographic.

Lots of information, images, videos... at the High Line official web site.

Inspirational plants and pots.

There are plenty of beautiful succulent plants and air plants, so they need gorgeous pots.

Hanging pots, terrariums, wooden crates, even magnetic pots (with an amazing DIY!).

Image credits: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Blue.

I'm posting the three pictures I sent to the photography competition of the "Girona Temps de Flors" exhibition. I like them, although I didn't win  :)

Here you can see the "balloon forest" we made for the exhibition.

Images by Muffins in my backpack.

Succulent plants.

These are some photos I took at the succulent plants garden in Barcelona. The garden is called "Mossèn Costa i Llobera" and is located in Montjuïc. It's like a museum of this type of vegetation and it also has beautiful views of the city and the sea.

Images by Muffins in my backpack.

DIY: Big yellow flowers.

Last weekend started the 56th "Temps de flors" (Flower season) exhibition in Girona. The whole city center gets full of flowers; public buildings and private patios fill up with people taking pictures to these ephemeral artworks.

One friend of mine, from university, who lives in this gorgeous house, decided to take part in this event. Our group of friends made a "balloon forest".

We needed:

- big yellow balloons

- white funnels

- tie wraps

- insulating tape

- corrugated steel bars

- fast-dry cement

- landscaping bark

- flowerpots

To make the flower: we blew up the balloon and sticked it to an end of a corrugated steel bar with insulating tape. To hide the union we put a white funnel and fixed it with some tie wraps.

We "planted" the flower with fast-dry cement into the flowerpot. It's possible to use sand, gravel...instead of cement (you just need to make sure the flower won't fall). Then, we covered it up with some landscaping bark in order to have a nicer finish.

Images by Muffins in my backpack.

Roses are red.

My rose of yesterday's Saint George Day.

Image by Muffins in my backpack.