Vertical gardens, organic wallpaper, robe végétale… Intrigued? You should be! As a botanist, Patrick Blanc is at home in the jungles from Bali to the Amazon. As a landscape artist, he has brought breathing walls and biodiversity to the grandest hotels, restaurants, and stores of Le Tout-Paris and worked with French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier on the catwalk. But what the man with green hair is best known for is the “vertical garden,” an idea seeded in the heart of Paris on rue d’Alsace that spread to Jean Nouvel’s Quai Branly Museum before being exported all over the world. Come and join us for the greening of the Alliance with Patrick Blanc!

This is a Jean Bodfish Brown lecture made possible by the support of the Cultural Service of the French Consulate in Chicago, the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and the college of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Recorded Thursday, September 8, 2011 at Alliance Française de Chicago.