When heavy rain lashes Bengaluru every monsoon, roads fill up, drains struggle, and thousands of trees and branches across the city come down.

But on one five-storey home, a 600-square-foot forest on the terrace keeps standing.

It is a dense rooftop ecosystem of over 100 varieties of fruits, vegetables and medicinal plants — coffee, vanilla, cherries, dragon fruit, drumstick trees, pepper vines and native greens, all rooted together in a layered, living network.

For mechanical engineer Venkataraman, the terrace has become proof of something he has been building for years: nature, when designed to work as a system, can hold its own.

Built to behave like a forest 

Step into Venkataraman’s terrace and the city seems to........

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