I walk a lot, three or four miles a day, aimlessly around the city, shorts exposing blinding thighs, sweating through makeup. Headphones on, the beats of songs sometimes matching perfectly with the steps of strangers around me, watching from behind sunglasses as a rad older woman passes me on a bicycle with her groceries in the front basket or a group of bros head into a designer store. When you live a solitary life, such things become your connections to humanity – telling a woman on the street that you like her shirt or giving directions to a “struggling actor who just arrived from the East Coast” (his words). Instead of stability or health insurance, these become the perks of having a non-traditional job – the opportunity to walk for hours on a Tuesday afternoon with no real destination, until you decide to stop and get some juice and type some shit into your phone.
A vertical forest is expected to be completed this year in Milan. There are two tower apartment complexes which contain a total of 400 residential units. The facade of the buildings will be covered with 730 trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 perennial plants. It is expected to have the same ecological impact as 10,000 square meters of forest.
Aside from fighting smog and producing oxygen, the foliage is expected to provide insulation to the residential units.
It’ll be really cool to see how these trees grow in order to maximize access to sun, water, and nutrients. Also, a step towards a sci-fi solar punk future – I’m in.
I sure hope the structural engineers planned for the buildings to increase in mass as the trees grow.
Well, or else for maintenance labor to keep the trees rigorously trimmed to prevent too much increase in mass. Or both? (The wikipedia article says the engineering team consulted botanists and horticulturists in planning how much weight the buildings could bear, so it seems likely that the fact that trees grow would have come up.)
This is a pretty cool idea regardless and I hope they get it right. I wonder if anyone will do anything like this in New York.
This falls in the “I really hope they do it but I’ll believe it when I see it” category for me.
It’s been up for 2 years, inaugurated in October 2014, and still going strong. It’s won multiple awards.
Here they are building it.
Bosco Gardeners hang around outside the building.
Change of Seasons…
And a view from the place itself.
Just look at this whenever you need a break from hopelessness.
“I drew a picture of a cat with wings, and I thought “Oh, what fun! Why shouldn’t a cat have wings!?” and then, “What would happen if they did?” and so there goes the book.
