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Or this one here?
Both are located in the Porto Nuova district of Milan.
And from what I could tell when I walked by them yesterday, they’re pretty comparable. They have similarly deep balconies. And they even appear to have the exact same exterior cladding.
Of course, the big difference is that the former — the celebrated Bosco Verticale — has about 800 trees, 4,500 shrubs, and 15,000 plants sitting on its 3.3m cantilevered balcony slabs. It also has an elaborate irrigation system that services said greenery.
Okay, so which is more “sustainable”?
First impressions would suggest that it’s the former. Trees and green things are good for the environment. So putting trees on a tall residential building must also be good, right? Maybe.
The main counterargument is that it requires a lot of additional work to get trees, shrubs, and plants onto a tall building. You need more concrete, more structural reinforcing, an irrigation system (maybe not always?), and a way to maintain everything going forward.
In this case, all of the greenery is a common element, and so it’s maintained by the building and not by any of the individual residents. Among other things, this preserves a uniform aesthetic.
But all of these additional materials increase the building’s embodied carbon. And so there’s an important question to consider: Do the benefits of putting trees up in the sky outweigh the impacts of actually doing it?
This is one of the great debates surrounding this project, and it’s a good reminder that being more sustainable isn’t so simple. There’s a lot to balance, and there are countless details to figure out.
However, innovation does require iteration. And already there are new iterations of the Bosco Verticale, such as this one in Paris, that plan to swap concrete for mass timber construction.
So even more trees in the sky. That’s probably a good thing.
At the end of 2015, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat awarded Bosco Verticale in Milan the “2015 Best Tall Building Europe” and the “2015 Best Tall Building Worldwide.” It was the 14th Annual of these awards.
What makes Bosco Verticale (or Vertical Forest) special is its integration of landscape into the tower building typology. In fact, the architect, Stefano Boeri, describes the project as a “skyscraper for trees that also takes humans.”
Here is a photo of the two towers via Wikipedia:
And here is description of the plantings via Houzz:
“The more than 17,000 plantings include 780 full-size trees of 60 species on all sides of both towers for a suspended-garden visual effect. Among the plantings are holly oak, ornamental apple and beech trees, as well as a great mass of smaller plants, such as lavender, azaleas and camellias, positioned among the trees with taller crowns. The plantings provide shade in summer and help filter the air. The number of trees in each building is the equivalent of 1.7 acres of forestland and 18.5 acres of an urban area with single-family dwellings. The vegetation is watered with a greywater filtration system.”
This idea is something that has appeared a lot in theoretical projects. But it is still in its infancy in terms of realized projects. So the architect has also published a book explaining – using drawings and photos – how the project works and how it could be reproduced in other cities. It’s in both Italian and English.
With so many cities trying to build up, as opposed to out, it makes a lot of sense for us to figure out how to make up as livable, enjoyable, and sustainable as possible.
Photo by Luca Nebuloni from Milan, Italy - Milan_7899, CC BY 2.0, Wikipedia
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