Renowned architect Stefano Boeri is known for Bosco Verticale, a vertical forest skyscraper complex in Milan. He recently unveiled plans to make his Asian debut with a set of vertical forest towers in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing. But the Italian building designer has even bigger plans for China. According to the Guardian, Boeri plans to construct an entire forest city.
China’s pollution problems have been around since the 1970s. In 1990, the capital city of Beijing was declared on the most polluted cities in the world. Today, the state of China’s air is largely sugar-coated by the government who routinely snuffs out even the mildest protests with heavy police presence. According to Al Jazeera, China is not the only country dealing with smog – India and Iran have similar problems – but it is far more intolerant of civil action.
Boeri’s ambitious plans will see an entire city replace its poisonous smokestacks with carbon dioxide sucking trees and shrubs. “We have been asked to design an entire city where you don’t only have one tall building but you have 100 or 200 buildings of different sizes, all with trees and plants on the facades,” Boeri told the Guardian. “We are working very seriously on designing all the different buildings. I think they will start to build at the end of this year. By 2020 we could imagine having the first forest city in China.”
In 2015, Boeri released these pictures as a master plan for what a forest city in China could look like. According to the architect these blueprints represent “something more serious in terms of a contribution to changing the environmental urban conditions in China.
