Vincent Callebaut designs the Paris of the future
At the request of the City of Paris, Vincent Callebaut has designed Paris Smart City 2050 featuring eight prototypes of mixed, vegetated towers. The project aims to combat climate change by using innovative buildings that allow the densification and clean-up of the urban environment "for a sustainable, dense and connected city".
With the objective of reducing three quarters of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, the French capital has called on the architects of Vincent Callebaut Architectures and the engineers of Setec Bâtiment. Towers should be thought out according to bioclimatic rules, with innovations allowing the creation and use of renewable and recoverable energies. For example, Tour Montparnasse would become "a veritable vertical Central Park open to the public" featuring fifty-eight floors as an extension of the Parc du Luxembourg. In railway stations, the Mangrove Towers would create forests of plants with positive energy, with housing, hotels and offices for travellers.
Photovoltaic and thermal solar shields, rainwater retention tanks, garden balconies, community food gardens, public elevators with renewable energy, insulating bio-façades that produce biofuel, the integration of clean, renewable energies such as biomass, methanisation, photovoltaic, thermal and wind power are just some of the examples of innovations developed for the Paris Smart City project 2050.
Graduating at the age of twenty-three from the Institut Supérieur d’Architecture in Brussels, in 2001, the Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut won the Godecharle Prize for the best hope of Belgian architecture with his project Elasticity, "a fully-autonomous aquatic city of 50,000 inhabitants". In 2005, a Korean publishing house dedicated a monograph to the architect's projects. With the second monograph, Archibiotics, Vincent Callebaut positioned himself as one of the leaders in "very high quality, environmental, green architecture".