2014 · Stefano Boeri · Europe
The chamber score
Le Loriot, from Catalogue d'oiseaux
Olivier Messiaen · 1956–58
A forest paying rent in the air should be scored with birds, not with traffic.
An original chamber arrangement in the climate of the work. The recording is not a copy. It is the room answering.
You already feel this
You want to live in a city and not pretend the forest is elsewhere. Sustainability that is only a slogan on a brochure will not save a summer. These towers make the trees the elevation. If you have ever tried to grow something on a balcony as if it were a politics, you already live here.
The original
Completed in 2014 in Milan's Porta Nuova. Two towers, roughly 900 trees, thousands of shrubs, designed with botanists so the facades would change with the seasons. A model copied, argued with, and still standing as proof of concept.
The rebuild · A forest that pays rent
We rebuilt the towers as a vertical woodland at dusk, balconies as terraces of a city that chose leaves over more glass. Sustainability here is not a rating. It is a habitat.
01
The trees have a better view
That is the joke that is also a design brief. Humans get apartments. The trees get the wind. The rebuild lets the canopy dominate the photograph, because that is the honest hierarchy.
02
Maintenance is the ethics
A green facade that dies is a lie. Gardeners, irrigation, soil, weight. Sustainability is labour. Anyone who has kept a plant alive through a heatwave already knows the bill.
03
Copy, carefully
Cities want a Bosco of their own. Some will get a sticker. The rebuild is a warning and an invitation: if you plant a forest in the air, you have to mean the forest.
Shift the feeling
What if Bosco Verticale was rebuilt as something else?
Ask the architect
