There is nothing quite as refreshing as waking up to sunshine, crisp air and the smells of the living world outside your window. Like a fresh spring morning stroll or a picnic on a cool fall day, we crave interaction with nature. However, as metropolitan areas become more crowded, air gets thicker with pollution and smog. City dwellers crave fresh air, green spaces and closeness to nature.

To combat this overcrowding, Italian architect Stefano Boeri’s project “Vertical Forest” was erected in the Isola area of Milan’s fast-developing Porta Nuova district in 2014. Two residential towers are adorned with a mixture of large and small trees. Specially cultivated for this project, they have been planted on balconies on all four sides of the towers, accompanied by 5,000 shrubs and 11,000 floral plants.

“This is a kind of biological architecture that refuses to adopt a strictly technological and mechanical approach to environmental sustainability,” said Boeri Studio in a statement.

“The plants will absorb the dust in the air and create an adequate micro-climate in order to filter out the sunlight. This is a kind of biological architecture which refuses to adopt a strictly technological and mechanical approach to environmental sustainability.”

After the success of the project in Milan, Boeri has unveiled plans for a new Vertical Forest in China, in the center of Nanjing.

Over 1,000 trees, 2,500 cascading plants and shrubs will line the facades of the Nanjing Vertical Forest, which is already under construction in the city’s Pukou District.

Boeri describes it as “a real vertical forest that will help to regenerate local biodiversity, will provide a 25 tons of CO2 absorption each year and will produce about 60 kilograms of oxygen per day”.

Read on in this detailed interview with Boeri on Mashable.

We can’t help but wonder – as Southern California continues to grow in population, do you think we may eventually see buildings like this grace the skylines of San Diego and Los Angeles? Would you live in one of these building?