Vertical forest
Surrounding ourselves with nature, particularly plants, brings huge benefits to emotional and physical wellbeing. More and more architects are finding ways of bringing the outside indoors in office blocks and apartment buildings. We’re all being encouraged to populate our living spaces with air-purifying plants such as peace lilies, and city planners focus on including green spaces in their design of new urban areas.
In some parts of the world, however, finding space to do this is difficult. In Japan, for example, or the larger cities in China, space is at a premium and so other ways have to be found of including a bit of green. One such example is the vertical forest of Milan. The Bosco Verticale, sitting on the side of a block of residential apartments, contains 500 trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 plants. The individual apartments benefit from looking out of their window and seeing relaxing foliage, giving them the ability to imagine that they live in the middle of the forest, rather than the middle of a city.