Garden Tower
Zero carbon structure building: a vertical, energetic village

Sociality changes the way we relate and consume. Currently, cities and urban areas consume seventyfive percent of the planet's energy reserves and produce eighty percent of CO2.

New vertical urban densities
Between now and the end of the century, the concentration of the world population in the megalopolis will produce, among many other imbalances, also the increase of an increasingly compact verticality that will give rise to urban scenarios of extreme density, intensifying both the greenhouse effect and the consumption energy. As a first and more immediate consequence, social exchanges will be physically confined within a few square meters between one floor and another, while the connection with the rest of the planet will mostly be a virtual illusion.

Garden Tower, Horizontal Verticality
Garden Tower represents a possible alternative to the current increase in vertical constructions, among the many formal solutions that can adapt to different climatic and cultural realities. It is a village, suspended at a variable height depending on the site, energetically autonomous, able to recreate the vitality of medieval and renaissance villages, where nature and human contact were the basis of daily sociality, a model that is difficult to re-propose with current urban planning schemes.

Garden Tower - The benefits
Apart from the softer benefits in terms of well-being and aesthetic enhancement, there is significant scientific evidence to show that this also brings improvements in air quality, Urban Heat Island reduction, noise reduction, stormwater attenuation and urban biodiversity. There is also the potential for energy production and urban agriculture helping to reduce transport waste. In order to be made, those benefits require a distributed and managed “green infrastructure” network on both the city and the neighbourhood scale. This can help reduce the load on traditional infrastructure systems.