With the opening of Sweet Tea in the Beirut Souks, the city is taking on a green tint. Green Studios’s Jamil Corbani welcomes TOB to the jungle.

What is Green Studios?
We’re a landscape architecture firm, but our founders aren’t just landscape architects. We have an architect, a landscape architect, an engineer in botanics, and me, an economist. Our first focus and investment was in hydroponic technology, which is the most advanced technology in landscape today. It’s applied in green walls [vertical gardens] and roof gardens.

What’s the concept behind Sweet Tea?
It takes you automatically from an urban environment free of vegetation to a kind of jungle. Solidere teamed with an architectural firm based in Paris, Moatti-Riviere, who did the design development and specified a green wall. That’s where we came in.

Will the concept change with the seasons?
All the plants are perennial and they live throughout the year. But it’s dynamic. Some plants flower three months a year, others flourish at different times, so it’s like a living painting that changes.

How does hydroponic technology work?
It functions exactly like the human body. You have the heart, which is the technical room. From there, nutrients and water are pumped to either the green wall or the roof garden. Excess water and nutrients are drawn back to the technical room, filtered and sent back to the component, like blood drawn back to the heart. It’s not like irrigating a normal garden where water is drained; it’s a circuit.

Why did you get into hydroponics?
There are four companies in the world that are inventing different hydroponic technology for green walls, and the others are in North America, Northern Europe and Japan. So we’re a little firm but the first one to venture into an invention for hot weather. The climate in North America, for example, is much different to that in the Gulf, so our breakthrough was inventing a system that functions in this environment.

You won an award at the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Pan Arab Region in 2011. What was that like?
It was beautiful! When I first briefed the team about the competition, they didn’t take it seriously because there were 605 applicants. But our field is a new trend: going green with an aesthetic side.

So is ‘going green’ just a trend?
It’s a mentality that’s being built by every architect and designer because resources are scarce and expensive. Sure, sustainability is a trend used in marketing, but these problems will affect us all at a certain point.

Is hydroponic technology realistic for the average home?
How do you define realistic? If you look at current real estate prices, it’s definitely realistic. From an investment perspective, this can elevate an entire project. And like any technology, the more you advance, the more its price will drop.

Leave us with three words to summarise Green Studios.
Hungry, artistic and foolish!
 
Green Studios (71 411331) Antelias First National Bank Rd, Tefal Workshop, Antelias www.greenstudios.net