The Structures team of MOST Enginyers, led by Antonio Lara Silva, has received from IDEA StatiCA the winning prize in the Large Scale Steel Projects category for the Vertical Forest Project at the CaixaForum in Barcelona. IDEA StatICA is the leading software in the world for the design of steel joints and connections, finite element analysis and the verification of regulations in concrete details.
On April 13, Barcelona's first Vertical Forest was inaugurated, with the presence of Elisa Duran (Deputy General Director of the LaCaixa Foundation), Constantí Serrallonga (Executive Director of Fira Barcelona) and Janet Sanz (Lieutenant of Mayor of Barcelona City Council). It is a set of Mediterranean vegetation and 9 trees in suspension, from a self-supporting metal structure 50 m long and 12 m high. In total, it gathers 19.000 plants of 104 different species, most of them indigenous.
The Project has been sponsored by the LaCaixa Foundation as a gift to the city for the twentieth anniversary of the CaixaForum de Barcelona. To carry out the project, more than a hundred professionals have participated: gardeners, agricultural engineers, industrial engineers, civil engineers, architects, etc. It should be noted that the irrigation installation is designed to reuse the water from the rain and from the surpluses of the irrigation diffusers, through a network of 13 tanks with a capacity of 2000 liters each, with internal circulation systems that allow to optimize to the maximum the use of water resources.
