MILAN — As balconies bristle with tree branches and sunshine dapples the leaves of thousands of plants, two apartment buildings in the heart of Milan have almost disappeared under lush forest.

The brainchild of Milanese architect Stefano Boeri, the Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) uses more than 20,000 trees and plants to adorn the high-rise buildings from top to bottom — a project now being exported all over the world, from China to the Netherlands.

The two original leafy towers dominate the skyline in the northern Italian city, giving residents — including celebrities like footballer Ivan Perisic — an enviable view over the new district of Porta Nuova and beyond.

Cherry, apple and olive trees spill over balconies alongside beeches and larches, selected and positioned according to their resistance to wind and preference for sunlight or humidity.

Mr. Boeri said the idea came from his obsession with trees and determination to make them “an essential component of architecture,” particularly as a weapon to combat climate change.

“I was in Dubai in 2007 and I watched this city growing in the middle of the desert, with more than 200 glass towers multiplying the effect of heat,” he recalls.

He wanted instead to create something that “as well as welcoming life, can contribute to reducing pollution, because trees absorb microparticles and CO₂.”

“Cities now produce about 75% of the CO₂ present in the atmosphere. Bringing more trees into the city means fighting the enemy on the spot,” he said.

‘BEST TALL BUILDING WORLDWIDE’
Opened in 2014, the Vertical Forest won the prestigious Frankfurt International Highrise Award, and the Chicago Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat named it Best Tall Building Worldwide.

“It’s a unique thing to live here, we’re in direct contact with the plants while being in the city centre and in a super modern skyscraper,” says Simona Pizzi, who can see the mountains from her 14^th floor apartment.

“The plants have developed a lot over the past three years, and we see them changing with the seasons,” adds the proud owner of an apple tree, where the white flowers contrast magnificently with the green foliage.

Mr. Boeri worked closely with botanists to create a nursery of a thousand trees that have been trained to grow under specific conditions.

The team faced numerous challenges, from how the balconies should be structured to take the weight of the plants, to how to secure the tree roots and what needed to go into the soil.

They even carried out resistance tests at a hurricane center in Miami.

“For every human being living in the building, there are about two trees, 10 shrubs and 40 plants,” Mr. Boeri said.

THE FUTURE OF HOUSING?
The vegetation soon transformed into a veritable wildlife park: 9,000 ladybirds brought over from Germany to eat parasites — to leave the plants pesticide free — multiplied over the space of a few weeks.

“The extraordinary thing that we did not expect was the incredible amount of birds that nested here. We have small hawks on the roofs, and swifts that had previously disappeared from Milan,” Mr. Boeri said.

The architect and his team are now working on a dozen or so Vertical Forest projects around the world, including Lausanne in Switzerland, Utrecht in the Netherlands, Sao Paolo in Brazil and Tirana in Albania.

The aim in Eindhoven in the Netherlands is to swap the sort of luxury pads seen in the Milan project — which go for some €11,000 ($12,900) per square meter — for social housing, a project Mr. Boeri says he’s particularly keen on.

And because the cost of the trees is low, it’s not an unreasonable ambition, he says.

He is also thinking big in China, where not only are two towers under construction in Nanjing and a hotel in the works in Shanghai, but there are plans for a “Forest City” of some 200 buildings in Liuzhou.

“China is now realising it faces the dramatic problem of air pollution, but also of uncontrolled urbanization, with cities growing out of suburbs, creating megacities,” he said.

“Every year fifteen million peasants abandon the countryside to come to the city, we have to come up with some answers, with new green cities,” says Mr. Boeri, who took part in the COP21 conference on climate change in Paris in 2015.

The architect has not patented the Vertical Forest and has even written a book revealing the secrets and techniques behind it, which he hopes will encourage a new, greener way of developing cities. — AFP

ALIANA ACEVEDO isn’t collecting a paycheck, because the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, is shut indefinitely. She’s trying to get a job with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a lifeline for the battered island’s tourism industry in more ways than one.

More than 13,000 federal government workers who were dispatched to Puerto Rico for hurricanes Irma and Maria are filling the open hotels — sometimes three to a single room. For those that remain shuttered, the agency is giving idled employees hope until tourists return to the US territory’s beaches, rain forests and colonial Spanish beauty.

“I just need a job,” said Ms. Acevedo, 25, a waitress at the hotel’s Mares restaurant, explaining that she had only $800 in cash. “It’s making me anxious. I’ll do whatever. ”

The recovery after this year’s devastating hurricane season, which is already a slow period for hotels, is providing a welcome, if temporary, boost for a tourism industry worried about its future. The federal government’s hotel reimbursement rate of $167 a night in San Juan, which rises to $195 during high season, can last only so long. FEMA deployments are typically for 30 days, though they can be extended.

Hurricane Harvey’s aftermath gave Houston’s hotels a similar boost. They went from being the worst performers through July this year to leading the nation in occupancy and revenue growth since the cyclone made landfall Aug. 26.

In Puerto Rico, federal personnel are staying not only in hotels, but on cots at the convention center, in sheds and on ships. The work force is still swelling.

On Sunday, Rosario de Liriano spent her day stopping people on the streets of Fajardo who looked like they might work for FEMA in hope of landing a job. Before the storm, she owned a small business on the island of Vieques. She came to Puerto Rico’s northeast corner because she thought she’d have a better chance of tracking down information.

Such job-seekers have shaped the agency’s work force for years. “Many FEMA employees started as local hires in their own states following a declared disaster,’’ Corey Coleman, a FEMA officer, wrote in an e-mail.

The jobs are needed more than ever. Tourism in Puerto Rico is almost “all gone, certainly, through the first quarter, if not the first half of 2018,’’ said Martin Rapp, a senior vice-president at Altour International, Inc., a New York travel agency.

Bookings to Puerto Rico are down about 20% since hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria began in late August, said Donna Cheek, an agent with Bentley Hedges Travel in Oklahoma City. “We do a lot of cruise business and people are concerned about whether or not Puerto Rico is going to be a port of call for them,” Ms. Cheek said.

The drop-off comes amid a broader economic crisis. Puerto Rico in May sought protection from creditors in the largest insolvency of any US municipality, $74 billion. The situation has been deteriorating since 1996, when the repeal of a corporate tax break caused manufacturing and investment to decline and younger people to leave the island. Average weekly wages in Puerto Rico are about half the US average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Travel and tourism, much of it from the US mainland, contributes about 3% of Puerto Rico’s gross domestic product and employs about 21,000 workers, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council in London. Together with indirect benefits, such as investment spending and domestic purchases by businesses dealing with tourists, the impact is about 8% of GDP, the lowest among the Caribbean islands.

The island became a destination for Americans with the 1949 opening of the Caribe Hilton Hotel. It was the first Hilton property outside the continental US and — at least according to its Web site — the birthplace of the piña colada.

Hilton Worldwide Holdings, Inc. is continuing to pay workers at its Puerto Rican properties until business insurance kicks in, spokesman Nigel Glennie said. McLean, Virginia-based Hilton employs about half the roughly 3,400 people who work at its nine properties; the rest work for third-party management companies.

“Although our Puerto Rico properties are not currently accepting new reservations, there remains plenty of work for our team members to do,’’ including gathering donations, packing food and water being delivered by barge, and tending to emergency personnel, Mr. Glennie said.

STORM SURVIVORS
About 600 people from FEMA, the FBI, the Red Cross and other organizations have been staying at the Wyndham Grand Rio Mar Beach Resort & Spa in Rio Grande, an hour’s drive from San Juan along the coast. Having escaped serious structural damage, the most pressing problem has been cleaning up water seepage, said general manager Nils Stolzlechner.

Because of the arrival of relief workers, the resort, which is running on generator power, has remained at 100% staffing.

“Generally speaking, we’ve been very lucky,” Mr. Stolzlechner said. Nine holes of the golf course should be open by Saturday, with the other nine back in business about three weeks later.

On Tuesday afternoon, it was possible to linger in the resort’s Margaritaville vacation club and encounter few signs of distress. A small cadre of off-duty workers sat at the fully stocked tiki bar and watched about a dozen people swim in the pools on either side, most of them guests who endured the storm and hadn’t secured an exit from the island.

“I’m extremely hopeful we’ll have a strong winter,’’ though rebuilding the power grid and other long-term economic challenges remain, said Mr. Stolzlechner. “Tourism will be okay. It’s just all the other stuff.” — Bloomberg