<Tower>Flower</Tower>

How:
The vertical garden - Tower Flower consists of more than 380 giant automatically irrigated planters. Each planter is home to two bamboo plants except for one planter for each apartment, where residents can plant their own plants. The irrigation system also manages fertilization. Water continuously flows through a pipe that is part of the balcony railing. The planting requires no special maintenance and the vertical garden is, to a certain extent, self-sufficient.
Black and white concrete monolith - thanks to the use of particularly strong concrete for each part of the structure, Tower Flower behaves as if it were made from a single piece. The walls, floors, giant planters, and small columns are all made of concrete. The columns and planters are prefabricated. The black and white floors were randomly installed in place. The alternation of colors depends on how the delivery trucks arrived on the construction site.

Why:
While walking through Paris, Edouard François noticed people's desire to have a bit of nature in the city as well. Almost every balcony is now planted. It serves almost exclusively this purpose: it filters the city, helps in escaping from it, creates a gap, and minimizes its density. This takes on a certain kind of heroism in practice. Balconies were not originally intended for planting: there is no water faucet, planters come in different heights, and are often very small, while plants continually grow.
The greening of my building is evident. An apartment building surrounded by continuous balconies filled with giant automatically irrigated planters that also serve as railing. In the vicinity of my Tower Flower, additional residential blocks and a park will be created. To better fit the building's composition (half rock and half plant) into its designed surroundings, it acts as a black and white camouflage and a light fuzzy grove.

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A new residential complex in the 17th arrondissement of Paris has risen on an uninviting site. On two sides, it is flanked by expressways, on another side, a railway corridor forms a dam, and the last side of the block is closed off by the busy Victor Hugo street. The authors of the new apartment complex thus had no choice but to direct life into the inner courtyards. A semi-public park is lined with high-rise apartment buildings, each building having a different author. This has created a colorful mosaic and a guarantee that the result will appeal to more people. Most pleasing to our eyes is the Tower Flower project by Edouard François, whose work has been accompanied by greenery throughout his professional career. In the early 90s, he collaborated on experimental projects with François Roche (today's studio R&Sie) and in 2000 he caught attention with his realization of the 'sprouting house' in Montpellier. For the apartment building in Paris, he replaced wire baskets with giant planters that surrounded the entire building, creating a lush green cloak.
Most architects encounter greenery in their work. However, very few manage to do so in such an innovative and captivating way as Edouard François. In designing the unique ten-story building in northwest Paris, the architect was inspired by a fact he noticed while walking through the city: Parisians are obsessed with growing greenery on their balconies. Even in the nearly inaccessible narrow gaps between the window and the outdoor railing, they manage to squeeze in at least one planter with plants. This phenomenon adds life to the city. Thus, François merely recorded the clear impulses of Parisian residents that they want to live in greenery, which he then incorporated into his apartment building design. The result of transforming and multiplying this hobby of Parisians is that the building itself becomes lost in greenery, creating a barrier against external noise and overall appearing like a showcase with giant planters. However, the form hidden behind the greenery and the internal layout are simple and rational like most apartment buildings. What makes the building unique is the 380 concrete planters planted with bamboo. Its leaves act as natural sunshades and rustle pleasantly in the breeze. The planters embedded in the ceiling slabs are irrigated by an automatic system located in the balcony railing, ensuring that the plants won’t dry out during anyone's summer vacation. François's simple idea ultimately offered residents of a very busy urban area the illusion that they live in a bamboo grove or by a rustling sea shore.