Stefano Boeri has been invited as a guest critic to the International workshop at the Segovia IE School of Architecture and Design in Spain.
On this occasion he has been asked the same question that the participants of the workshop tried to answer – what are the biggest challenges that Architecture has to face nowadays? Which are the collateral fields future architects should take into account?
“I think we’ve done a lot in terms of the use of renewable energies within our profession. What we’ve missed, what we didn’t do enough is to imagine how the living nature could become part of our urban planning proposals. Along with the use of renewable energies there’s another issue which is very important, the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Because that presence, produced by 75% by the cities causes the global heating of the planet, the rise of the sea level and all the other tragical phenomena happening nowadays. This is why we, as the builders of the cities must consider that if we were able to move more forests, trees and plants inside the cities, they would be capable of absorbing 40% of those 75% of polluting emissions produced by the cities, we could really stop and even reverse climate change. So, we kind of decide to fight the enemy on its own field, moving the forests to the cities, because the enemy is in the cities. This would be a super-efficient strategy. This is a reason of creation of the series of Vertical Forests that we are designing all over the world, that’s the reason of the idea of Forest Cities we are developing in China, for instance. This is a reason of a plenty of projects, developed not only by our studio but by the other architects – to create inside the cities sort of linear system integrating at the same time green and blue infrastructure, so these are energetical systems, public transportation system and green systems.
An architect nowadays cannot avoid facing the climate change as a reason of developing a different attitude to the construction. And the way to put together the living nature and architecture, as we do, is one of the best answers, I think”.
