The newspaper La Nazione publishes an article titled “The Impact of Plants in the City: With Green, Hope is Not Lost,” analyzing the benefits of integrating trees and plants into urban environments and citing the Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) in Milan, designed by Boeri Studio, as a virtuous example of this approach.
The first case of architecture integrating living nature as the basis of the project, built in Milan in the Porta Nuova area, consists of two towers 80 and 112 meters tall, which together house 800 trees (480 large and medium-sized trees, 300 smaller trees, 15,000 perennial and ground cover plants, and 5,000 shrubs). The vegetation is equivalent to that of a 30,000 square meter forest and undergrowth, concentrated on 3,000 square meters of urban surface.
This approach to design brings significant benefits, especially in addressing the longstanding problem of pollution, along with that of thermal regulation: in fact, plants allow for a decrease in temperature of about 10 degrees in the neighborhoods of major world metropolises, serving as natural air conditioners, with an impact on energy consumption. In the Bosco Verticale, irrigation is also centralized: the plants’ needs are monitored by a digitally controlled probe system remotely, while the necessary water is largely drawn from the filtration of the towers’ greywater. The combination of these solutions goes beyond the concept, still fundamentally anthropocentric and technocratic, of “sustainability” towards a new biological diversity. A few years after its construction, the Bosco Verticale has thus given life to a habitat colonized by numerous species of animals (including approximately 1,600 birds and butterflies), establishing an outpost for the spontaneous vegetal and faunal recolonization of the city.
To read the full article: https://www.lanazione.it/grosseto/cronaca/limpatto-delle-piante-nelle-citta-con-il-verde-la-speranza-non-si-perde-99d50cf5?live