Artificial and botanical can coexist

Urbanization is a synonym of artificiality, of extreme imposition on the part of man. This is nothing new: in Latin, urbs means “to mark a boundary,” to divide human space from natural space. Cities were founded in this way: legend has it that Romulus plowed a furrow, inside which Rome was born. And Remus leapt over the boundary, to tease his brother and his idea of separating the savage from the human. The story ended badly, and a power struggle leading to fratricide was the foundation event of a civilization. The extreme character of this symbolism encompasses a large part of the history of urban architecture, which transforms the botanical world and its inhabitants into ornament, taming them, kidnapping them and putting an end to the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants. Antonio Girardi, an architect at Pnat, explains: “To stay in metaphor, we might say that we are trying to recover the thinking of Remus: the idea that men and plants can return to a relationship of mutual cooperation.”

Plant-based solutions

“The first experiments with plant-based solutions,” Girardi continues, “have been tested in public situations. And they have demonstrated that massive injections of greenery in different types of buildings work, and have wide-ranging repercussions.” The Urban Jungle in Prato is an example of a regeneration project. A social housing complex has been equipped with a high-efficiency greenhouse, creating quantifiable employment, expertise and micro-economic initiatives. An Air Factory that replaces or supplements traditional ventilation systems has been installed in a sheltered market, to provide substantial improvement of air quality, better oxygenation and, once again, economic rewards. Plants are also pleasing to the eye, a universal factor of aesthetic enhancement. Around the Air Factory, inside the market, a market restaurant has been set up. The Coop at Novoli, where another Air Factory has been installed, has reported improvement in the health of employees and significant energy savings.

Greenery makes people happy

Girardo says these are scalable projects that can easily be shifted into companies and private residences. Massive injections of greenery boost architectural performance, transforming the relationship between design and plants into one of cooperation. The air is filtered by the terrain and absorbed by the plants, which purify it, transforming pollution into biomass. The result is clean air.

“We are natural animals, accustomed to living in open spaces, with a profound relationship with the botanical world,” Girardi continues. “This explains why coexistence with plants makes us feel well: experiments prove that instinctive memory produces a sensation of security and wellbeing when we are immersed in greenery.” Inevitably, this also happens in artificial situations.

Plants and gardens transform “non-places”

The experimentation conducted by Pnat and Mancuso, though it is the first to report quantifiable benefits, is not the first attempt to incorporate plants in buildings. The design challenge for cities of the future seems to be to create continuity between inside and outside, nature and civilization. Urban structures are constructed in which plants are a fundamental, pervasive and surprising functional presence for the use of spaces, with functions of social aggregation. The many terminals of Changi Airport in Singapore are connected by the Changi Jewel, a multifunctional building that contains shops and hospitality facilities organized on 10 levels, with an area of 136,000 square meters. It also contains tropical gardens with over 3000 trees and 60,000 shrubs. The project is by the firm Safdie Architects, the same one that has designed the Marina Sands urban complex in Singapore. An architectural giant that combines residences, hospitality structures, shops and offices, featuring a pervasive presence of plants and gardens.

The happy green dystopia

Moishe Safdie, founder of Safdie Architects, has worked extensively in the Orient and in tropical zones, where nature is completely different with respect to Europe. A nature that is harder to tame, invasive, omnipresent. Yet Safdie emphasizes that the rapid urbanization of the Far East is disrupting the appearance of cities. His aim is to restore harmony, to include surplus tropical biomass inside high-density architecture. Or the reverse: the design opens itself to the plant world, asking permission to coexist and cooperate in harmony.