A steel-framed vertical garden cuts through the centre of a brick warehouse-style block in Oberhausen, Germany, topped by a translucent urban greenhouse for agricultural research with a zigzagging roofline.
Designed by Berlin-based practice Kuehn Malvezzi, the building combines a five-storey job centre at its lower levels with a greenhouse and spaces for the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental Safety and Technology (UMSICHT) above.
The combination of greenhouse and office has been used to create a circular system of services, where warm air extracted from the workspaces is fed into the greenhouse and wastewater collected from the building's sinks and toilets is used in the vertical garden.
