The Wonderwood Vertical Forest is part of the broader Wonderwood project – an edifice, but actually much more than an edifice, comprising a series of offices, owned and rented apartments, a rooftop park with a restaurant, a gym, a large central bicycle storage, an underground parking lot with a shared mobility hub, an immersive digital art space called Nowhere, and other commercial functions, all distributed across two towers. One of these is the Wonderwood Vertical Forest, a green tower inspired by the Milan Bosco Verticale, approximately 105 meters high. The other, shorter tower – about 73 meters tall – is by the Amsterdam studio MVSA Architects, connected to the first by a suspended bridge.

Inside Wonderwoods, there will be 360 trees, 9,640 shrubs and bushes, and 10,000 plants, making the building equivalent to one hectare of green land, which in turn will attract around thirty animal species. Besides the obvious visual benefits of greenery, the trees and plants also function to absorb CO2 and harmful substances like particulate matter and exhaust fumes. Moreover, they have a sound-dampening effect and help regulate and mitigate human heat. As Stefano Boeri aptly explains: “Our Vertical Forest in Utrecht, one of the two buildings in the Wonderwoods project, is a fundamental stage in the research we are carrying out all over the world [...] The building we have designed for Utrecht hosts a combination of considerable vegetal biodiversity and a wide range of functions including exhibitions, commercial, tertiary, and residential uses as well as hospitality options. It will be a real building/city as well as a rich and complex ecosystem”.

All this translates into a complex, multifaceted project with a dual nature: on one hand, it is a skyscraper contributing to an unprecedented city-nature coexistence, respecting and enhancing the characteristics of the Croeselaan and Jaarbeurs Boulevard district; on the other hand, it is a building that changes as it rises, in line with the urban history of the city of Utrecht. Its aesthetics are further defined by the overlapping of four orders, which create a rotation of the building’s body along the vertical axis. This movement progressively detaches it from its alignment with Croeselaan Street, allowing it to be oriented East-West, thus creating a spatial connection with the adjacent tower designed by MVSA. All of this is aimed at creating a new type of architecture increasingly integrated with the urban fabric and accessible to all.