Milan's greenest building is powered by renewables and covered in trees.
SOURCE:Green Builder Media
DESCRIPTION:
The 2015 Milan Expo will be coming to a close at the end of October, and very little of the marvelous pavilions and buildings millions of people have been visiting will stay up after the final day. However, because of the huge scope and resonance of the event, the city had been going through a makeover to prepare for the beginning of Expo this May. In 2014, Milan’s skyline was permanently changed with the introduction of futuristic towers made of glass, iron, and most interestingly, trees. One of these new buildings was in fact the so called Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest), designed by architecture firm Studio Boeri. The project was one of six ideas developed by the studio to turn Milan into a model city for sustainability and biodiversity, and it recently won the 2015 CTBUH Award, thus becoming the best tall building of the year.
A Splash of Green The building’s name surely sounds interesting, but how exactly does a vertical forest look like? The two residential skyscrapers, built by the edge of the once unpopular Isola neighborhood, look very much like huge green Jenga towers. Each floor is adorned by large irregular balconies that host more than 900 trees and 14 thousand plants. Integrating all of this lush green into a luxurious apartment complex has an endless list of benefits for the lucky ones who can afford to live there. Trees filter the light during the summer and let it in in the winter, act as a shield from wind, absorb fine dusts, release oxygen and humidity. The main difference between Bosco Verticale and a city park is space: highly urbanized cities that simply don’t have the free land to build new parks may have a new way to inject some well needed nature into hyper polluted environments.
KEYWORDS: Energy, Geothermal, sustainability, Bosco Verticale, Studio Boeri, vertical forest, Green Builder Media, Rosa Tortorella, Solar Energy
