Sustainable Design Practice and Greenwash Effect: The Case of Vegetated Architecture

In the last few years the attention towards the environment seems to have become one of the primary objectives to follow. Nowadays the number of products, qualified as “sustainable”, is ever more growing; but in some cases the sustainability aspects regard only the adjective used for the title, as highlighted by several authors. Following this trend, architectural design may exploit the use of (eco) materials and components to promote a project as sustainable even without considering its impact on the environment; this can be defined as architectural greenwash. This paper considers the case of vegetated architecture, which provides environmental advantages together with the suggestion to a green aesthetics par excellence. In fact, the integration of vegetation in urban fabric – with vertical greening systems and green roofs – plays an important role in improving ecological and environmental conditions of (and in) cities; however systems can have a high environmental burden and examples show the use of vegetation to cover up the same overuse of concrete that it is supposed to fight.