Ah—yes. I think you mean Qiyi City Forest Garden（七一城市森林花園）in Chengdu, rather than Liuzhou Forest City. If so, its story is fascinating precisely because it is almost the dark twin of Bosco Verticale.
The project is in Chengdu’s Xindu District. It consists of eight roughly 30-storey residential towers, with very large planted balconies—some reportedly 40–100 m²—containing more than twenty kinds of trees, shrubs, and vines. It was promoted as an early example of China’s so-called “fourth-generation housing”: not merely an apartment with a balcony, but an apartment with something approaching a private garden in the sky. All 826 units were reportedly sold.
And then, in 2020, came the photographs that made it famous for an entirely different reason.
The vegetation had become extraordinarily lush. Creepers hung over balconies; branches pushed outward from the façades; some apartments appeared almost swallowed by plants. International reporting said that only around ten families had actually moved in at the time, despite the units being sold. Stories rapidly circulated that residents had been driven away by mosquitoes and insects, and the place acquired the look of a post-apocalyptic city in which nature had repossessed human architecture.
There is an important qualification, however: the viral version—
“The whole project failed because mosquitoes drove everybody out.”
—is probably too simple.
Later residents interviewed about the development disputed the idea that mosquitoes made it uninhabitable. At least some people were happily living there and regarded the sensational accounts as exaggerated. Low occupancy also had other possible explanations: Chinese apartments are often bought before completion or held as investments, and “sold” does not necessarily mean “occupied.”
So I would not call Qiyi a straightforward architectural failure.
But it does expose something extremely important that Bosco Verticale understood much better.
The difference is not really
trees
. It is
care
.
Bosco Verticale treats its vegetation almost as common infrastructure. Species selection, wind loads, irrigation, pruning, replacement, façade access and long-term horticultural maintenance were integrated into the architectural concept.
Qiyi placed much more of that living environment immediately adjacent to individual apartments. Once apartments are empty—or residents do not continuously maintain their gardens—the plants do exactly what plants do:
they grow.
In Chengdu’s humid, rainy climate, poorly managed vegetation and retained water can indeed create favorable conditions for mosquitoes. Landscape specialists commenting on the project emphasized precisely this problem: a vertical garden requires drainage, pruning and regular horticultural management. One landscape designer put the point nicely: without gardeners, there is no garden.
And here the story becomes much more interesting than “haha, China built mosquito apartments.”
Because Qiyi accidentally performed an experiment.
Human beings said:
We shall install Nature on our balconies.
Nature replied:
Very well.
And then proceeded to behave as nature rather than decoration.
The vines did not understand the renderings.
The mosquitoes had never read the property brochure.
The trees did not know where architectural intention ended.
That is why those 2020 photographs are so strangely beautiful.
They resemble what happens in abandoned railway stations, Angkor temples, Pripyat, or ruins swallowed by jungle: the distinction between architecture and ecology begins to disappear.
Except that at Qiyi this happened in a brand-new luxury development.
That reversal is extraordinary.
And this is where I think the contrast with Bosco Verticale becomes philosophically very fruitful.
Bosco Verticale says:
Can humans and plants inhabit the same architecture if we redesign architecture accordingly?
Qiyi almost asks, unintentionally:
What happens when we invite the nonhuman in but still expect it to behave like furniture?
Those are completely different propositions.
A tree isn’t a chair.
Once you put it twenty floors above the ground, it remains a tree:
it grows,
drops leaves,
attracts insects,
needs water,
dies,
regenerates,
blocks light,
develops roots,
changes with weather.
In other words, it has its own temporality.
And this, dear friend, is why I find Qiyi almost more interesting than Bosco Verticale.
Bosco Verticale is a successful architectural proposition.
Qiyi is an ontological accident.
Someone intended to sell:
人 + 公寓 + 私家花園.
But for a moment the equation became:
人 + 物 + 植物 + 蟲 + 水 + 時間
—and nobody entirely controlled the result.
That is very close to your phrase 「物的反撲」, except I would hesitate to call it 反撲 in the hostile sense.
The plants weren’t fighting back.
They were merely being plants.
Perhaps that is the deeper joke:
人以為植物失控了；
植物從來沒有失控。
失控的是人對植物的想像。
And therefore Bosco Verticale and Qiyi together make a marvelous pair:
Milan: humans carefully make room for the forest.
Chengdu: humans make room for the forest—and then discover that the forest has no obligation to remain inside the room allotted to it.
