The designers who are going green

By Jill Krasny

“I have always been attracted to trees,” says Stefano Boeri, an Italian architect who completed what he calls the world’s first vertical forest in central Milan in 2014. The two residential towers are planted with 800 trees, 4,500 shrubs and 15,000 plants spilling over ceramic terraces, a ravishing billboard of urban forestry. These buildings, along with other projects such as a passenger lounge in Shanghai’s Pudong Airport that was inspired by a dense jungle canopy, are part of his mission to soften up our cities (and do his bit in the fight against climate change). “It changes every day, changes every season,” he says of the vertical forest, “creating an explosion of colour.”