© Stefano Boeri
It’s the rendering that launched a thousand blog posts, Stefano Boeri’s Vertical Forest, with planters and trees on balconies and the roof, so green that you can barely see the building. Tim De Chant notes that it is just one of many that architects are drawing these days.
Tim doesn’t mention what I think is a bigger problem: the size of the planter. City trees have enough trouble finding enough space for their roots at ground level in sidewalk planters, and even if they survive, they rarely grow much bigger than they were when they were planted. The American Standard for Nursery Stock suggests that a 36" planter can hold a tree with a maximum caliper of 3.5 inches. So are the trees on this building ever going to look like they do in that rendering?
Studio Nicoletti/Promo image
Sometimes they are just unrealistic and impossible, even as renderings. As I noted about this dead project at the time,
© Paris Invisible
Édouard François tried this back in 2004 with his Flower Tower, putting bamboo in large planters. Visiting it in 2011, Invisible Paris found that the “The bamboo is not in perfect condition, but certainly in a better state than could have been expected”. It has grown out to look quite different from when it was first planted, and it appears that some of it is struggling. And this is bamboo, not big trees.
De Chant concludes that it is all futile.
I conclude that it is all greenwrapping:
Perhaps a landscape architect should have to approve the perspectives, declaring that yes, the building will look like the rendering in five years. Otherwise we are probably going to be seeing a lot of really scrawny or dead trees on our buildings.
