"Imagining a Vertical Forest" by Endrit Marku 
  

A tower carved with niches of trees. A monumental piece of architecture and an apparent intelligent solution, pleasing everyone, the egos of architects and developers, their wealth too, but also their desire for a public display of social responsibility. The building shadows the old land-consuming city that paved the path for the relentless earth’s anthropization. This tower aspires to become one with nature, claiming a place among the planet’s remaining forests, and it feels special, fresh. Before it, there were just the mountain forests, the Babylonian gardens, Chernobyl’s abandoned khrushchyovka’s or even the potted flowers on grandma’s terrace. It is made of concrete, earth’s alienated son. Labyrinths of pipes pumping water upstream, for the trees to survive, are an improved version of nature’s streams. The missing fertilizers can be bought in any hypermarket. The imagined architecture is a simulacrum of already built simulacra precariously floating without foundations in illusory perpetuity.