Architect Stefano Boeri’s Vertical Forest Buildings Turn 10

The Milanese architect and urban planner Stefano Boeri is the father of the concept of vertical forests, or skyscrapers covered with the leaves of thousands of plants and trees of different species, the first of which saw the light a decade ago. Milan's Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest), consisting of two residential towers covered with plants, formed the equivalent of three hectares of forest and undergrowth concentrated in just 3,000 square meters of space, and came to symbolize urban reforestation by advocating the close coexistence of architecture and nature. . Boeri remembers his mother Cini Boeri, an important figure in Italian design and architecture, and her award-winning Vertical Forests.

Your mother, Cini Boeri, was one of the great pioneer women of Italian design and architecture. Did you visit many different buildings with her as a child?

My relationship with my mother was open and broad, in many different fields, that we were not connected specifically through architecture. I traveled a lot with her, and I remember in 1979 we went to China together because she had a job in Japan, and then from Tokyo we flew to Shanghai and then to Beijing. It was the first time for me in China and I have a memory of those years, which were basically a completely different world. I am very grateful to him for what he made me live.

Climate change is the most pressing issue facing the architectural profession today, and what can architects do to combat it?

Yes, it is one of them. I would have to say climate change on the one hand, poverty on the other hand, and everything related to automation and the robotization process, so I think these three topics are the most relevant when it comes to anticipating the future of space, which is something that is part of my profession as an architect and as a designer. The three spheres are strictly interconnected with each other. Without a doubt, climate change conditions the migration process. At the same time, the use of technology could help a part of the population to try to reduce the disadvantages of climate change, but at the same time, climate change is accelerating inequalities, differences between social groups, social populations. Again, I believe that the process of automation will change our lives, it will dramatically change the way we work. I think we have to take into account this strong interaction between the fields when we have to study the future of our cities, never forgetting that basically 33% of the population of contemporary cities are slums, favelas, informal settlements, for which extreme poverty is here. And then if you look at what is urban, cities occupy no more than 3% of the surface of the main lands of the planet, but this 3% produces basically 70% of the CO₂, which is bad for the environment. It consumes more than 45% of resources, so we have to be aware of it, and that's why I think we can't forget the relationship between the three elements.

Is your goal to have a vertical forest in every city?

No, I don't think the Vertical Forest is the only way to approach the idea of ​​afforestation. We need to multiply the number of plants, also in terms of creating orbital parks, orbital forests around our cities. We must work on the possibility of multiplying the number of green roofs. So I think the concept of demineralization and afforestation can be carried out in many different ways.

What makes a vertical forest such a fascinating proposition?

What makes a vertical forest so interesting is that we can concentrate a large amount of plants in a very small area that the contribution in terms of CO absorption capacity₂ and produce oxygen, absorb pollution particles, it's amazing. Normally, when we build a Vertical Forest, let's say 100 or 120 meters high, we are creating in a very small area the equivalent of two or three hectares of a real forest in number of plants. Also, what we could do in terms of plant biodiversity is very interesting, so I think it's a way to introduce a graft into a dense and polluted urban environment, which is, at the same time, a living ecosystem with an amazing biodiversity. of living species, and that is why we are investing so much in the multiplication of vertical forests around the world. Also, what we do is not simply a replication or repetition because many times, I start in relation to the climatic condition, in relation to the selection of plant and tree species. There is a specific biodiversity that we find in each place, and since we treat trees as tenants, our activity as architects in the design of the facade is strictly related to the character and evolutionary trajectory of each plant. If you see what we have done in Utrecht, Nanjing or Cairo, it is totally different because the character, the evolutionary trajectory and the three-dimensional shape that can affect each plant, when it grows, are a basic reference for our design attitude, the our approach to design. What makes our profession so passionate and intriguing is that it's never just repetition.

Tell me about your forest cities.

In Mexico, we are designing a Forest City in the south, in Cancun. It's basically a city of 130,000 inhabitants with 7 million plants, and it's kind of a step further in terms of the evolution of the Vertical Forest concept. We have three such projects. One is in Mexico, one in China and one in Egypt. Basically, all three are a demonstration that it is possible to make new cities where buildings and plants coexist everywhere, and it is such an important new perspective, a new horizon of the future for the places in the world where we still have to build new cities. In Europe, it is probably not reasonable to imagine yourself designing and building new cities. We must reuse, regenerate existing cities, but in other parts of the world like China or North Africa, where the process of internal migration is still so strong, we cannot avoid building new urban environments. Instead of creating new peripheral settlements that mean a large dimension of our city by consuming agricultural fields and then natural fields, I think it is absolutely more important to develop the concept of a new type of city like the one we propose in Cancun, that is , at the same time, intelligent and wild, which is why I think we should try to combine many different types of content in the same type of proposal.