1-    Apple Park, California, USA

Apple’s new campus is widely regarded as one of the leading examples of biophilic design. The doughnut-shaped structure copies the natural curves found in nature and brings light into the offices from every angle. A new, 9,000-tree woodland also surrounds the campus.

2-    Bosco Verticale, Milan, Italy

Finding nature in a high-rise apartment seems quixotic, but it may be just the biophilic injection dense cities need. After centuries of practice distinguishing the urbane from wilderness, a pair of residential high rises in Milan, Italy, has flipped the paradigm by proposing a new social ecology within its building façade and is providing an option for ultra-urban access to nature.

Bosco Verticale, designed by architect Stefano Boeri, opened in 2014 to provide residents with an alternative to suburban single-family neighborhoods. Boeri envisioned public exchange with neighbors through a terrace-scape on the building’s exterior façade. In this space, residents would have views of nature, direct access to vegetation, and the opportunity for neighborly exchange about the pleasantries of gardening, plants, and wildlife. Relying on a compact intimacy of the gardening tradition, Bosco Verticale expands Milan’s cultural habits of terrace gardening into a community-level asset that occurs as a forest on a building within the city.

3-    Kampung Admiralty

Kampung Admiralty offers a case study on how nature can be a primary element of these residential buildings. It, too, provides residents with rooftop agriculture and gardens throughout. The multitiered levels of the building progressively treat stormwater that flows through the site. The building has flourished within the three years since it opened to residents. 

^{Figure … source:  Jana Soderlund}