Page 6 - Buildings That Breathe: Greening the World’s Cities

Milan, a city in northern Italy, is home to two innovative green
towers called Bosco Verticale. That’s Italian for “vertical forest.” The
complex, in the heart of a bustling European city with a train station
just steps away, was designed by Italian architect Stefano Boeri. The
two treescrapers not only please residents but also help the entire city.
These are buildings filled with trees and plants, which release the
life-giving gas oxygen and absorb the gas carbon dioxide. They are
buildings that breathe.

CITY LIFE
Cities are one of the most complex inventions of civilization. They
are filled with libraries, schools, museums, factories, and restaurants.
They bring people together to socialize and do business. In cities,
people collaborate and share ideas. Ed Glaeser, an economist at
Harvard University, describes cities as “places of competition . . . places
of innovation.”
But these population centers have many downsides. For
instance, they produce three-quarters of the world’s carbon dioxide.
This gas traps heat from the sun, much like the glass roof and
walls of a greenhouse trap the sun’s heat. Carbon dioxide occurs
naturally on Earth, but humans add extra carbon dioxide to the air
when they burn fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). By driving
gasoline-powered vehicles, heating homes and businesses with oil
and gas, and powering factories and machines with fossil fuels,
humans add more than 44 billion tons (40 billion t) of carbon
dioxide to the air each year. All this heat-trapping gas has raised
temperatures on Earth and changed Earth’s climate. The excess
heat is causing powerful storms and weather disasters such as
droughts (periods with little or no rainfall), floods, and wildfires.
The heat is also melting ice at the North and South Poles. As the
ice melts, sea levels rise, threatening to flood coastal cities and
engulf low-lying islands.

6 Buildings That Breathe