News: Jean Nouvel's One Central Park residential tower in Sydney will feature the world's tallest vertical garden by botanist Patrick Blanc.

Blanc, who has been designing living walls for over 30 years, has been working with Nouvel to install plants and vines up the 166-metre facade of Sydney's One Central Park tower - which when completed later this year will become the tallest living wall in the world.

"The building, together with my vertical garden, will be an architectural work floating in the air, with plants growing on the walls – it will create a very special result that will be very new to Sydney," said Blanc.

The vertical garden consists of 190 native Australian and 160 exotic plant species. The shrubbery covers 50 percent of the building's facade and according to the designers intends to extend the greenery from the adjacent park onto the building.

The Central Park project by Ateliers Jean Nouvel consists of two adjoining residential towers that house 624 apartments. Nouvel's towers are 116 metres and 64.5 metres in height and are part of a larger mixed-use development that includes apartments, shops, cafes, restaurants and office units.

The tallest tower features a large cantilever that contains 38 luxury penthouse apartments. On the underneath, there is a heliostat of motorised mirrors that direct sunlight down onto the surrounding gardens. After nightfall the cantilever is used as a canvas for a LED light installation by artist Yann Kersalé.

Public tours of Central Park project were held in June and the development is due for completion by January 2014.

Blanc has also created a new living wall that features waves of 7600 plants for Paris Design Week which will be officially inaugurated tomorrow.

Other living walls we've featured recently include London's largest green wall in Victoria that the designers said will combat flooding and a family house that conceals a wall of plants behind its slate-clad facade.

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Images courtesy Atelier Jean Nouvel.