Architect Stefano Boeri has always been obsessed with trees. The Italian traces his fascination back to a novel he read as a child, "Il Barone Rampante" ("The Baron in the Trees"), in which a young boy climbs up into a world of trees and vows to never to return. "I think trees are individuals," Boeri said in a phone interview. "Each has its own evolution, its own biography, its own shape."
 
Unsurprisingly, there is child-like wonder to the architect's best-known building, Il Bosco Verticale, or the Vertical Forest. Built in his home city of Milan, the celebrated complex teems with greenery, its facades transformed into living, breathing organisms.