Growing Up: The Vertical Landscaping System That Defines Optima Kierland

Look at Optima Kierland from the street and the first thing you notice is not the architecture. It is the green. Cascading plants at the edge of every floor, on every terrace, climbing the facades of all five towers across 9.5 acres of lushly landscaped North Scottsdale. It looks extraordinary. It is also, beneath the beauty, a sophisticated building system, one that Optima developed over years of testing and refinement, and that does more for the performance and sustainability of these buildings than almost any other single design decision.

How the System Works

The Optima vertical landscaping system is a self-containing irrigation and drainage technology built into the edge of every floor. Each planter is engineered to hold its own water supply and manage its own drainage, enabling a varied palette of plants to grow at the building’s perimeter, up and over the edge of every terrace, creating the cascading green effect that has become one of Optima’s most recognizable design signatures.

The system was developed in direct response to a challenge that is specific to building in the desert: how to create a living landscape on a multi-story building in a climate that is hostile to conventional landscaping. David Hovey Jr. has described the development process, working with ASU to study desert plants in terrace and roof-like beds, evaluating approximately 150 kinds of plants and trees to learn which survived in extreme sun or shaded spots, testing and refining over years before deploying the system at scale. The result is a landscape that is genuinely suited to the Sonoran Desert, not imposed upon it.

What It Does

The vertical landscaping system at Optima Kierland is not decorative in the casual sense of the word. It performs. The plants provide natural shading for the terrace and the residence behind it, reducing the heat absorbed by each residence on some of the hottest days of the Arizona year. They promote evaporative cooling, lowering ambient temperatures in the immediate vicinity of each building. They filter air pollutants, re-oxygenate the surrounding environment, and reduce the urban heat island effect that makes densely built areas significantly hotter than their surroundings.

The 9.5 acres of landscaped courtyards that connect the five towers extend the same logic at grade level, creating shaded walking paths, cooling the outdoor environment through plantings and irrigation, and giving the community a quality of outdoor life that is unusual for an urban residential development in the Sonoran Desert. At Optima Kierland, 75% of the site is open and landscaped space. That figure is not incidental. It is the result of a deliberate decision to build vertically so that the ground can breathe.

A System That Keeps Growing

One of the most remarkable things about the Optima vertical landscaping system is that it improves with time. The plants mature. The coverage deepens. The thermal and ecological performance of the facade increases as the green layer thickens and matures. A building that looked extraordinary on the day it opened looks better five years later, not because anything has been added or maintained, but because the living system built into its design is doing what living systems do: growing.

That quality, of a building that rewards time, that deepens rather than dates, that becomes more itself with each passing season, is what Optima means by Forever Modern. The vertical landscaping system at Optima Kierland is one of the clearest expressions of that idea. It is also a daily reminder, for every resident who steps onto their terrace or walks through the courtyards below, that the building they live in was designed to take its place in the natural world rather than impose itself upon it.

See the green for yourself. Schedule a tour at Optima Kierland today.