Urban jungle to vertical forest

Stefano Boeri at his Shanghai workshop. [Photo provided to Shanghai Star]

Innovative architects want to turn skyscrapers into towers of green and get the inner city back to nature. Matt Hodges reports.

Italian architect Stefano Boeri wants to turn Shanghai into a "vertical forest" by transforming its skyscrapers into foliage-draped columns that suck up pollution.

This picks up on ideas of urban sustainability that were explored during the Shanghai 2010 World Expo, particularly the expo's newly inaugurated Urban Best Practices Area.

Eco-friendly buildings have subsequently become something of a fad.

"There is a necessity to rebalance the relationship between city, nature and agriculture," Boeri said last week during the launch of his new Shanghai workshop near Zhongshan Park.

"We have to imagine how to regenerate our cities from within their own borders."

The workshop, located on top of an inner-city high-rise, is aimed at studying ways of facilitating this and the effects that such eco-friendly buildings have on the urban environment. Boeri has similar 'offices' in Florence, Doha and several other world cities.

"The original concept of the vertical forest was to have a richness of different species in one high-rise," he said. To hammer home the point, the lawn beside the workshop served as the playground for several white rabbits during its inauguration Tuesday.

According to the concept, all of the tenants would be required to have various shrubs and perennial plants overflowing from their balconies. The temperature and other factors would, ideally, be centrally controlled for maximum impact, he added.

The Italian job

Boeri recently completed a similar project in his native Milan - host of the next World Expo in 2015 - by building two "green towers" close to the Corso Como fashion street in the city's main business district. Architects including Cesar Pelli, Cino Zucchi and Kohn Pederson Fox Associates have recently redesigned a considerable part of the area.

The project, which spans 1,500 square meters and provides different exposure to sunlight, uses 800 big and medium trees, 14,500 groundcover plants and 5,000 shrubs - equivalent to two hectares of a real forest.

"It was a bit of a controversial project in Milan, because it is in a very established quarter full of four- or five-storey buildings, and that area was partially abandoned for several years," said Italy's Davide Fassi, an associate professor at Tongji University’s College of Design and Innovation in Shanghai.

"Milan in the last few years has fortunately been at the center of a new wave of innovative architecture and is redefining the skyline by adding new landmarks," he said.

"I went back in August and they had almost finished it. The view was really nice. You can now see a 'real' green tower with branches, in the very center of the town. It is innovative even in terms of the maintenance it will require as a vertically developed park."

But how many of these buildings would be needed in a metropolis like Shanghai, a city of over 20 million people, to significantly mitigate the effects of the dust and pollution from neighboring factories, coal-burning, and the fumes of more than one million cars?

"I don't have a definite answer. That's why we need the workshop," said Boeri. "Success would be related to the creation of horizontal spaces."

"What is important is that there is a connection of green spaces in a big polluted city," he added. "The longer that corridor, the greater the duplication of different species of plant and animal life you will get."