In case you’ve ever wondered what goes on up there, aerial photographer Alex MacLean has assembled his book Up On the Roof: New York’s Hidden Skyline Spaces.
Posts marked urban plant life
Agriculture 2.0 is a design by Appareil for urban vertical farming. Although it’s based on ancient practices, it’s a concept for the future.
Bosco Verticale is a project by Stefano Boeri that is currently under construction in Milan, Italy.
About the project:
Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) is a project for metropolitan reforestation that contributes to the regeneration of the environment and urban biodiversity without the implication of expanding the city upon the territory. Bosco Verticale is a model of vertical densification of nature within the city. It is a model that operates correlated to the policies for reforestation and naturalization of the large urban and metropolitan borders (Metrosbosco). Metrobosco and Bosco Verticale are devices for the environmental survival of contemporary European cities. Together they create two modes of building links between nature and city within the territory and within the cities of contemporary Europe.
Dune by Studio Roosegaarde
About the project:
Dune is a public interactive landscape that interacts with human behavior. This hybrid of nature and technology is composed of large amounts of fibers that brighten according to the sounds and motion of passing visitors.
Our most recent version is filled with hundreds of interactive lights and sounds. Dune investigates nature in a futuristic relation with urban space by means of looking, walking and interacting.
Mikko Lagerstedt’s otherworldly photos of neatly clipped and illuminated park spaces remind me of how different our experience of nature in urban areas can be from the real thing.
This “jungle in the sky” isn’t just an imaginative design for the future, it is being built right now in Singapore.
About the project:
WOHA Architects are completely changing how skyscrapers are built with their Park Royal Tower in Singapore, which will feature twice as much greenery as the nearby Hong Lim Park. The high-end office and hotel tower features a podium absolutely overrun with vertical gardens, contoured green pathways, water features, and leafy terraces. When it is completed later this year, this groundbreaking project will boast a whopping 15,000 square meters of green space!
Simon Heijdens wants to bring nature back into our lives in a very unconventional way.
His concept:
Nature is becoming rare in our daily life. The consequence of the way our world is generally built being, that many people pass the largest part of the day in artificial, perpetual spaces where conditioned climates and 24 hour lighting cover the differences between day or night, spring or autumn.
His solution to this disappearance of nature in our lives is not to bring back more nature, but to recreate aspects of it that can fit within our artificial surroundings. Pictured above are his projects Tree, Branches and Lightweeds.
About Tree:
Ripples on a puddle of water, footsteps in the sand and slowly gathering grime. Natural processes are existent though becoming rare in our increasingly planned surrounding. While the trees on the streets are no longer nature but carefully controlled and managed, the wind that is moving its branches still is. An installation that traces and amplifies the leftovers of nature in the urban surrounding. White silhouettes of trees projected 8 meters high onto the facades of several buildings in a city. Its branches and leaves are moving either slightly or intense; directly to the measured wind that passes the facade of the building on which it is projected. Starting full of leaves at dawn, the tree looses one of its leaves each time someone passes it. When the leaf breaks of its branch, it drops down on the ground in an alley nearby. Because the leaves are made of light, they slowly brighten up the alley as they grow in amount over the course of the evening, and form a developping image that reveals the use of the city. The leaves roll out when someone walks through them.
About Branches:
A living digital organism growing on the ceiling of an indoor space, that rejoins the artificial, built world with an unplanned natural timeline. Branches is a site responsive software that generates a canopy of branches projected on the ceiling of a space. The branches grow, move and behave depending on external environmental conditions as choreographed by outdoor weather sensors, as well as on the use of the space. From the measurements gathered by movement sensors, the branches and leaves open to allow more light into the areas where there is a concentration of movement in the room. All technology of the installation is located in a specifically engineered ceramic canister, that can be placed anywhere in a room.
About Lightweeds:
As natural elements like a lifting breeze, a sudden shower and a setting sun are planned out of our surrounding, the timeline of the every day is lost. A living digital organism growing onto an indoor space, through which the space regains the natural timeline that it has walled out. Uniquely generated plant families that grow up, move and behave closely depending on actual sunshine, rainfall and wind as measured live outside. On passing human traffic they bend, loose their seeds and pollenate to other walls throughout the space, to make up a constantly evolving wallpaper that reveals the character of the space and its use.
Visit the Thinx site