With the construction of a 70-meter-high residential tower, the Sint Trudo housing corporation wants to offer a “new, not to be missed beacon for our city”: the Trudo Tower. In early 2018, the realization of the project, right behind the Apparatenfabriek at Strijp-S, will start.
“Reference for the Trudo Tower is Bosco Verticale in Milan”, Sint Trudo writes in an explanation. “A tower with indeed a ‘vertical forest’, designed by the Italian architect Stefano Boeri Architetti The Studio”. Boeri designed similar projects in Switzerland and China.
The 19-storey high Trudo Tower has to accommodate 125 social housing units. Most striking about the design is the embedding of two large green boxes per loft. In these boxes, a total of 125 trees of about 6 meters high will be placed, as well as over 5,000 shrubs and plants, climbers and pendants. “In this way, a vertical forest will be created here too, with a communal garden of 350 m2 at the ground level.”
For the design of the ambitious green plan, the landscape architects of Stefano Boeri Architetti, Laura Gatti, work together with DuPré Groenprojecten from Helmond and Van den Berk Gardening from Sint-Oedenrode. Architect Stefano Boeri says that urban afforestation improves the city’s environment. “But not only that, it also offers us an opportunity to improve the living conditions of the people who live in that city. The Trudo Tower will be the first vertical forest in social housing worldwide. An attractive living environment for people with modest incomes. A unique contribution to meeting the major climate challenges in our society.”
As elsewhere on Strijp-S, public functions such as retail and hospitality will be found on the ground floor of Trudo Tower. On the first floor, there will be storage rooms for the loft residents and approximately 350 m2 of office space. If construction can indeed start next spring, the residential tower can be put into use in the summer of 2019.
According to Trudo, the tower accounts on an annual basis for about 50,000 kilos of CO2 absorption and 13,750 kilos of oxygen.
Illustrations (c) The Big Picture Visual
