Tall & Urban News

New Singapore High-Rise will be Veiled in Hanging Gardens

18 April 2019 | Singapore, Singapore

Heatherwick Studio has revealed the first images of EDEN, a new residential tower in Singapore featuring a series of lush hanging gardens, the practice’s first residential project in Asia.

The 104.5-meter-high tower for Swire Properties, nearing completion in the city-state’s Orchard Road neighborhood, will provide 20 luxury apartments which “entwine nature with city apartment living.”

The scheme for EDEN resembles a spine, with its simple vertical rectilinear planes and slim windows, and generous garden balconies in between. The building features “unconventional” concrete walls molded with a topographical map of Singapore’s terrain, which has been abstracted to create a three-dimensional texture.

Heatherwick Studio said the scheme responds to the first prime minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew’s original vision of a “city in a garden” by providing a series of hanging gardens that connect the interior living space with the outdoors.

The decision to create a garden for each flat was inspired by the “disconnection” between Singapore’s high-rise apartments and the lush greenery at street level.

Thomas Heatherwick, founder of Heatherwick Studio, said: “Like most global cities, Singapore’s skyline is filled with angular steel and glass towers. With Swire Properties, we wanted to create something distinctive that represents Singapore as a city in a garden, and recreate the verdant backyard access once ubiquitous across homes here. Instead of glass-clad edifices with token balconies, each home within EDEN will have a lush garden right at the doorstep, with organic and generous living spaces achieved by breaking up the traditional boxy floor plate.”

The studio’s first project in Singapore, the Learning Hub (now known as The Hive) at Nanyang Technological University, opened in February 2015.

In addition to the residential project for Swire Properties, the studio is also currently working on a new terminal for Singapore’s Changi Airport with KPF.

The practice said the EDEN tower was due to complete by the end of 2019.

For more on this story visit the Architects’ Journal.