BREATHING ARCHITECTURE

From garden life to vertical cities

Stefano Boeri, Cairo Vertical Forest, 2019

Today we cannot build without considering carbon form every aspect of design. This means urgently surrender our need for all referential trends, movements and short-term gains to applying only the craft of design in service of the environment. Climate change, resource scarcity, speed of technological flux call for new modes and radical new strategies. Singapore’s studio WOHA calls their core strategy ‘Garden City Mega City’ and it consists of three pillars: Layering Cities (a multiple-layered ecosystem that in effect creates a vertical city); Planting Cities (re-greening and integrating sky gardens and parks); and Breathing Cities (open buildings striving for full sustainability). In Days No.3 we showcase a group of world-leading studios who face our climate challenge head on, take on the responsibility to educate clients and the courage to take the first step in building another (and better) green world.

Breathing architecture featured in Days No.3

Environmental considerations as a framework for architectural research are of course nothing new - the question is just are we designing through nature (or better: with nature as an ally) or to overcome nature. The latter sentiment is harking back to an idea of modernism that was largely shaped by the industrial revolution and its colonial objective to ‘control’ the uncivilized wilderness of the world and force a (western) shape and structure upon it. As many contemporary economists and ecological philosophers have noted, modernism failed us as it never included nature as an input but a hinderance that symbolizes chaos and disorder. Previous to modernism, ideas of architects considered nature as a social space (i.e. the Gardens of Versailles, 1671)or designed along it to embrace it aesthetically (i.e. The Conservatory of Flowers, 1879).

Khmaladze Architects, Coffee Plant, 2019

Looking at the past, it is interesting to see how much consideration we often had towards nature even at a time when life itself was not considered as precious and valuable as it is today. Strategies such as letting the elements just simply ‘be’ in order to get closer to them as in farming; to merge with them in order to create a balance; or by studying the angle of sun rays in order to stay warm and sustain energy; are all as relevant today as they where then. It seems like we are re-learning very basic principles that in our previous search for formalism got lost. As we embark on working in single worlds of many worlds, it is time to re-discover some of the other universal truths that connect us with each other and to nature.

Days No.3, Pages 46-45 — Days No.3, Pages 46-47

STELLA ZHONG

MARGHERITA DI BATTISTA