Continuing the theme, I spotted this post on Treehugger, showcasing the amazing work of Luc Schuiten, a Belgian architect who offers “…a visionary approach to rethinking cities, in a biomimetic fashion. In his lush and fantastical renderings of what he calls “vegetal cities,” urban centers are transformed into living, responsive architectures that merge nature with the man-made.”
The Woven City (image above) is indicative of the type of work he proposes. These illustrations remind me of a combination of the illustrations of Malcolm Wells, the immersive vegetated architectural constructions of Hundertwasser to and the botanical constructions like pooktre or botany buildings to name a few. These are solidly in the vegitectural lexicon, so surprised that i haven’t heard of Schuiten and his work before. I’m glad i did now, as it expands the notion to the city scale, and provides compelling visuals to match the notion.
A few of the images from his website:
Sao Paulo
The City of the Waves
As a huge fan of the use of portmanteau to describe interesting concepts (i.e. Vegitecture) i stumbled a bit over Schuiten’s concept of Cite Archiborescente (tree architecture) is maybe a bit of a mouthful – perhaps less so in French. Better is the concept of habitable trees, noted as Habitarbres or more simply ‘tree-house cities’.
Digging in a bit more to his site – so amazing stuff from a career focusing on this concept. A video of his Ted talk from Nantes is found below for a bit more context on the approach.
Comments
One response to “Vegetal Cities”
Really interesting concept, and something that’s is both visually impressive and actually necessary to pursue in these unsustainable times.