Design with nature: Integrating green façades into sustainable buildings with reference to Abu Dhabi

Hot and arid climates, such as those in Al-Ain city in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, UAE, generate unique challenges to architects who are seeking for high energy performance approaches to design buildings that are energy efficient, environmentally friendly, and architecturally remarkable. This paper introduces an on-going research which investigates potential improvements in the building performance when integrating green wall design strategies into sustainable buildings in hot climate. The study examines the performance of green facades in Abu Dhabi in minimizing the extensive heat gain by keeping solar energy from entering the indoor space as a strategy to save cooling demand. Green facade is a type of green wall systems in which climbing the plants are trained to cover supporting structures. Liwa International School (LIS) was selected as a case study to investigate the performance of the integrated building façade with the application of green wall system in the hot climate of Al Ain city in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. A vegetated living wall was installed on the building façades end of 2010. The experimental results showed that the green facade can maintain on average 5°C lower temperature during day time for the month of July than the bare wall which has substantial impact on reducing building cooling load.