“For more than 30 years, Belgian architect Luc Schuiten has taken 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.
“In the TEDxNantes video below (subtitles available), Schuiten explains how he believes that the tree’s inherent structure is already sound, saying, “So why redesign the tree? Why redesign what was already there first?” and proposes that humans develop ways to plant trees, guide their growth, prune and graft them into dwellings that would populate these vegetal metropolises. Schuiten calls his approach to building “archiborescence”: a portmanteau of “architecture” and “tree,” using principles similar to biomimicry where one designs with nature as inspiration.”
TEDxNantes – Luc Schuiten – YouTube
Architect’s Future ‘Vegetal Cities’ Merge Nature With the Man-Made (Video)
“Imagine a world in which nature is intertwined with the industrial: giant lotus flowers replace concrete skyscrapers; an urban forest forms a city constantly in shift through a tree’s life cycle. This is the imaginarium of Belgian architect Luc Schuiten. To discover his work is to fall under the spell of a colourful cosmos, where architectural blueprints are swapped for visionary storyboards that invite the viewer to dive into his utopian dreamscape.”
“We like to think of Luc Schuiten as the godfather of solarpunk, a derivative of the more familiar 1980s science fiction genres known as cyberpunk and steampunk. While steampunk imagines a retro future with steam as the main energy source and cyberpunk imagines a techno future (and how things can go wrong), solarpunk on the other hand, is an art movement that imagines how things can get better. And in Luc’s world, the future is bright, renewable, and oh so green…”