Italian Vertical Forests Before Bosco Verticale
Luciano Pia’s 25 Verde finished in Turin in 2012, two years before Stefano Boeri cut the ribbon on Bosco Verticale on 10 October 2014—which makes the phrase Italian vertical forests a plural that Milan has spent a decade pretending is a singular. The story usually told runs in a straight line from Boeri Studio’s Porta Nuova twin towers to a global typology now imitated from Nanjing to Eindhoven. The story actually built on the ground includes a five-storey courtyard block at Via Chiabrera 25 in Turin’s San Salvario district, 80 steel columns shaped like tree trunks, and 200 living trees that were already irrigated, pruned and inhabited while the cranes were still climbing the De Castillia and Confalonieri shafts in Milan. ...