Italian architects are turning a desert city in North Africa into a lush, green metropolis.
Stefano Boeri and his team have taken on plans to build and install a series of seven-story vertical forests in the Egyptian city of Cairo. The building will be used for apartments and will also feature shopping and dining real estate.
The ambitious project aims to create a forest teeming with 350 trees and 14,000 shrubs of 100 different kinds. The vertical forest will have as many trees as an area equivalent to 20,000 square meters of forest.
The building will be alive, in a way, creating 8 tons of oxygen for the city’s residents and eliminating 7 tons of CO2 from the air. Cairo, by many accounts, is one of the world’s most polluted cities.
Boeri and his team say the building will help increase the region’s biodiversity. The building will be habitable by all kinds of creatures, including birds and insects. The building will be energy self-sufficient.
Credit: stefanoboeriarchitetti.net
On the architect’s website, he says “Vertical Forest is a model for a sustainable residential building, a project for metropolitan reforestation contributing to the regeneration of the environment and urban biodiversity, without the implication of expanding the city upon the territory.
Boeri has built vertical forests in Milan, Italy, already. That project has 800 trees, 4,500 shrubs and 15,000 plants.
Construction starts in 2020 and will take 2 years to complete.
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