The idea of building a tower completely surrounded by trees came to me in early 2007 in Dubai \u2013 one of the cradles of the new oil and \ufb01nancial capitalism \u2013 when as editor-in-chief of \u201cDomus\u201d I was following the frantic construction of a city in the desert consisting of dozens of new towers and skyscrapers. All clad in glass or ceramic or metal. All re\ufb02ecting the sunlight and therefore heat generators: in the air and especially on the ground, the area inhabited by pedestrians.
\nAt that time I was teaching at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and the School magazine (\u201cHarvard Design Magazine\u201d 1) had published a piece of research by Alehandro Zaera Polo which explained that 94% of the tall buildings in the world built after 2000 were covered in glass. Glass and mineral skins in an increasingly arti\ufb01cial and mineral city.
\nAt that time I was starting the design of two towers in the centre of Milan and suddenly \u2013 the most radical and bizarre ideas come without warning \u2013 it occurred\u00a0to me to create two eco-friendly towers; two towers covered not in glass but in leaves \u2013 leaves of plants, shrubs, but especially the leaves of trees.
\nTwo towers covered in life.
\nTo convince my clients \u2013 the Italian branch of a multinational American real estate company \u2013 I asked a journalist friend to publish a picture in an Italian newspaper showing the two towers covered with trees and a compelling title: \u201cthe \ufb01rst ecological\u00a0and sustainable tower is going to be created in Milan\u201d. In fact, the promise and the intention of these two buildings, 111 and 78 metres high respectively, was to noticeably reduce energy consumption thanks to the \ufb01lter that\u00a0a fa\u00e7ade of leaves exerts on the sunlight plus the microclimate that is created on the
\nbalconies, which reduces the di\ufb00erence in temperature between the inside and the outside of the apartments by about 3 degrees.
\nI added in that article \u2013 which was so successful as to push my clients to take this little \u201cquirk\u201d seriously \u2013 that in addition to carbon dioxide, the leaves of the trees would also absorb the pollutant micro-particles created as a result of urban tra\ufb03c and so would help clean the air in Milan, as well as producing oxygen in turn.
\nIn the following months, together with the architects in my studio 2 we wrote a \u201cManifesto for the Vertical Forest\u201d which promoted the idea of a living and sustainable architecture that would reduce fuel consumption and therefore the human impact on the environment.
\nThe truly revolutionary aspect of the project was not of course the presence of trees\u00a0\u00a0and shrubs on the balconies; but the idea of hosting nearly 700 trees from 3 to 9\u00a0meters tall along the kilometer and 700 metres of pots that lined the perimeter of the balconies of the two towers.
\nThe idea was to have two trees for every inhabitant of the two towers, leading to a total of 20,000 plants (5,000 shrubs and 15,000 perennials and climbers).
\nE\ufb00ectively, it was the idea of building a Tower for trees \u2013 which incidentally housed human beings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The idea of building a tower completely surrounded by trees came to me in early 2007 in Dubai \u2013 one of the cradles of the new oil and \ufb01nancial capitalism \u2013 when as editor-in-chief of \u201cDomus\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":26385,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222],"tags":[],"tag-2":[],"class_list":["post-26396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vertical-forest-en"],"yoast_head":"\n