In 2019 a real living forest will appear in the centre of Moscow just a few steps from the Red Square. Zaryadye Park – designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, creators of the acclaimed High Line park in New York – comes under the heading of what is known as Wild Urbanism, an urban design trend that extends nature and the countryside into the urban landscape, in which natural elements and crops coexist and interact with the built environment, creating a new genre of public space.
This re-naturalisation process, which is gaining ground in the great global metropolises, is also reflected in interior architecture and design.
Following Milan, the Stefano Boeri Studio of Architecture will create a new vertical forest in Lausanne. The 117 meter high Tour des Cedres (Tower of Cedars) will be home to 100 trees, 6,000 shrubs and 18,000 perennial, hanging and ground cover plants. The protagonists of the green skyscraper will be four different species of cedar, one of the most majestic trees in the world, regarded as sacred since ancient times because of its great ability to adapt to extreme climate conditions. An actual “natural monument”, capable of surviving for up to 2,500 years.
Interior and furniture concepts also draw inspiration from a new imaginary plant world, channeling a widespread desire to re-establish contact with nature at its wildest and least domesticated. The natural elements make a powerful insurgence into the domestic context as an integral part of the design and as a natural extension of the outside environment, not as appurtenances or mere decoration.
