800 trees and 4500 shrubs: this is what living in the tree houses in Milan is like

On an autumn day when the air is calm, a cloud of brownish-yellow exhaust gases can be seen in the distance over Milan. The city is well known for its bad air where it is located on a plain surrounded by high mountains. In winter, smog can linger for weeks.

Architect Stefano Boeri wanted to do something about bad air by building houses covered in trees, shrubs and plants that produce oxygen.

– Studies in Chicago have shown that the vertical gardens of the two houses absorb 30 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The measurements should be redone now. Because today, trees have grown bushier on balconies and generate twice as much oxygen as when they were first planted, he says.

The two houses it was completed in 2014. The tallest house is 112 meters high and has 26 floors. In total, there are 131 apartments with 800 trees, 4,500 shrubs and 15,000 smaller plants on large outdoor terraces. The plantations correspond to three hectares of forest.

Stefano Boeri has a long career as an architect and urban planner behind him. Exhibits projects at biennials and furniture fairs. This project was actually born because he’s obsessed with trees, he tells DN.

– Not so much for its vegetation, but more because trees like humans are an incredible creation. Trees are like human beings. Very soon the idea of ​​incorporating living plants and trees into an architectural context emerged.

Your idea is not entirely new. It shows an image of a famous tower in the city of Lucca in Tuscany. The 45-meter-high tower of the 15th-century Giunigi family has a roof terrace where three large leafy holly trees grow.

During a trip to Dubai, Stefano Boeri reacted to the giant glass and steel skyscrapers.

– I was there to study how the city grew. There were more than 200 skyscrapers. All built with huge glass windows that amplify the solar heat.

Instead, Stefano Boeri decided to make his own version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Had something similar never built before. The preparations were meticulous. Many important questions need to be answered: for example, how do you prevent trees from blowing up and damaging houses and people in high winds?
Stefano Boeri got in touch with various botanists. An important detail was that the climate is completely different on the first floor compared to the 26th floor. This also applies to the amount of daylight.

Other practical problems were finding a working irrigation system that would cover multiple floors, as some trees are so large that they stretch from a terrace to the upper floor. Neither those who rent or buy their apartments can decide what to grow on terraces and balconies. So this is not a private garden plot for the one with green fingers. Everything related to trees and shrubs is in charge of gardeners. They sow, plant and prune.

Plants are grown first in a nursery that Stefano Boeri calls a botanical nursery. There, the plants are carefully checked for disease or have been affected by pests that could otherwise easily spread throughout the skyscraper.

– It would not work if every apartment owner planted what they want. We concluded that it was better for us to centralize this. This makes it easier and cheaper to administer. All vegetation belongs to the tenant-owner association, he says.

Fruit trees cannot be planted. Pear and apple trees are impossible. It would be a great risk with fruits that could fall from a height of one hundred meters and injure people in the street below.

How the years have passed terraces and balconies have become more and more leafy and leafy. But there is a limit to the extent of the vegetation.

– Trees detect how much space and soil they have to grow. We can see how trees literally stop and stop growing when there is no more space. However, they grow tall. Now we have trees that are ten meters tall.

Skyscrapers are sometimes referred to as luxury accommodation that only an elite can afford. And prices have more than tripled in just a few years. For the higher floors, the current price is in a range between SEK 210,000 and SEK 261,000 per square meter.

On the sixteenth floor Simona Pizzi lives with her husband Antonio and their youngest son. Receive in your spacious apartment with three terraces adjoining different rooms. In total, the green area outside the apartment is 87 square meters. But it is not a garden to walk around, it is defined terraces.

– My best friend always tells me when she comes to visit that it is so beautiful here that there is no need to go out. But I have to go out, says Simona Pizzi and laughs.

The Simona Pizza family chose the Isola district because it is centrally located and close to the Porta Garibaldi train station.

– We immediately fell in love with the idea of ​​living in an ecological skyscraper that helps create a better air in the city, says Simona Pizzi and tells us that they bought the apartment already in 2013.

Only three years later if they could move, the tree houses were finished. He is often asked what it is like to live in this tower. Many people believe that trees and plants cause moisture and many insects. But that’s not the case at all, he emphasizes. Even mosquitoes are less than in ordinary gardens.

At the same time, the towers have enormous biological diversity, here there are more than 11,000 different species. Several animals have also taken refuge on the lush terraces. Birds like swallows and hawks have built their nests here.

– In 2014, a stork nested on one of the highest floors of the scraper. Then they didn’t talk about anything other than the stork in the skyscraper, laughs Simona Pizzi.

Stefano Boeri plans to build entire cities that he calls “smart forest cities.” The project that has advanced the most in planning is in a district of Cancun, Mexico. Here, 130,000 inhabitants will live in an area where a huge shopping center was previously planned.

Councilor Pierfrancesco Maran, responsible for Milan’s parks and green areas, has launched a very ambitious project. In ten years, up to three million trees will be planted in the city to improve the air. A figure that several critics believe is completely unrealistic.

At the same time growing Huge Milan. In ten years, the city’s inhabitants have increased by half a million. Today, the city itself has 1.4 million inhabitants. And on the outskirts of Milan, in the suburbs, live hundreds of thousands of people who travel daily to the city center. High levels of carbon dioxide emissions have long been a subject of constant debate. It is true that the pandemic has reduced traffic, but now private motoring will soon return to previous levels.

– You can’t just go back to our everyday life as usual, says architect Stefano Boeri, who believes that in the future people will want to live in cities with large green areas and fresh water.