The view from BAM park
From the lawns of the Library of Trees the towers read as a vertical extension of the park itself โ the most honest angle for a photograph.
Daniel Case โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท BBB2021 โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Mit.d.sheth โ CC BY 4.0 ยท Nanda Sluijsmans from Den Haag, Nederland โ CC BY-SA 2.0
Yes, on one condition: do not cross the city for it. The whole visit is half an hour to an hour, so fold it into an evening in Porta Nuova with Piazza Gae Aulenti and Corso Como, and maybe Brera afterwards. A dedicated round trip to look at a building facade? No โ not in a two-day schedule.
No. Both towers are entirely private, the entrances are key-card only, and there is no observation deck, rooftop restaurant or public balcony. Tours advertised online as visiting the Vertical Forest are exterior walking tours of the Porta Nuova district โ perfectly good on their own terms, but they do not take you into the building. If what you want is a view over Milan from above, the Duomo rooftop is the right answer.
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Eight hundred full-grown trees live suspended in mid-air here, some of them a hundred metres above the pavements of Milan. This is the Vertical Forest: two residential towers by Stefano Boeri and his studio, finished in 2014 in the Porta Nuova district, one about 110 metres tall and the other about 76, their balconies carrying โ alongside the trees โ roughly 4,500 shrubs and 20,000 plants drawn from a hundred species. The thinking behind it is almost impudently simple: if a city has no spare ground on which to lay out a park, stand the park upright instead. It worked well enough to win the International Highrise Award in 2014 and the CTBUH world award in 2015, and to be copied afterwards in cities from Eindhoven to Tirana to Nanjing. Know the important thing before you go: these are private homes, not a museum and not a viewing platform. There is no lift up, no balcony to stand on, and anyone selling you a tour 'inside the Vertical Forest' is selling you a walk around its base. But the outside is genuinely the point โ the building was designed to be read from below rather than inhabited by visitors. The two best angles are BAM, the Library of Trees park spread out at the towers' feet, where they look like a vertical continuation of the lawns, and Piazza Gae Aulenti a few minutes' walk away. It costs nothing, and thirty to sixty minutes covers it comfortably. Timing changes the picture completely, which the photographs circulating online never mention. Most of the facade trees are deciduous, so in December, January and February you will find a grey concrete frame with bare branches clinging to it โ nothing like the image that brought you. Late spring and early autumn are the forest's real season. One detail worth knowing: maintaining all this is not ordinary gardening. Teams of professional climbers abseil down both facades once or twice a year to prune the trees and check how they are anchored, under a shared maintenance contract the residents pay for through their building charges. For families, the destination is really what sits underneath rather than the towers themselves. BAM is free and open every day of the year, with broad lawns where children can run without being told off and smooth paths that take a pushchair easily. Porta Garibaldi metro is five minutes away, and neighbouring Piazza Gae Aulenti is full of cafรฉs and restaurants, several with vegetarian and fish options for anyone watching what they eat. Treat it as a short evening stop folded into Corso Como and Brera โ not a trip you cross the city to make on its own.
From the lawns of the Library of Trees the towers read as a vertical extension of the park itself โ the most honest angle for a photograph.
Teams of professional climbers abseil down both facades once or twice a year to prune eight hundred trees and check their anchoring.
A few minutes away, it gives you a slightly raised angle with the last daylight bouncing off the glass of Porta Nuova.
Via Gaetano de Castillia 11, Porta Nuova, 20124 Milan, Italy