Oscar Holland, CNNSingapore
Finding room for green spaces is a challenge in any city, let alone the world’s most densely populated ones. So in downtown Singapore, anyone looking for a new park to stroll in may need to turn toward the sky.
A third of the way up the recently completed CapitaSpring tower, the soaring glass and aluminum facade seemingly bursts open to reveal plants and trees growing hundreds of feet above ground. At street level, passersby and office workers can line up for an elevator leading to this so-called “Green Oasis” — a spiral garden path that winds past exercise equipment, benches and tables on its journey through four stories of tropical flora.
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At 280 meters (919 feet), CapitaSpring is now one of the Asian city-state’s tallest skyscrapers. The building is privately owned by real estate giants CapitaLand and Mitsubishi Estate, with the investment bank J.P. Morgan among its corporate tenants. But in keeping with a government drive to ensure that Singapore’s business district offers residents more than just office space, the developer has opened some of the tower’s landscaped areas to the public.
There is more above the Oasis: On the building’s top floor, visitors can stroll through a 4,500-square-foot rooftop farm that supplies fruits, vegetables, herbs and edible flowers to three on-site restaurants. During CNN’s visit to the building, an urban farmer tending the garden estimated that it generates 70 to 100 kilograms, or 154 to 220 pounds, of produce each month.
In total, the 51-story building houses over 80,000 trees and plants across 90,000 square feet of landscaped area, which also includes a shady covered plaza at its base. According to the Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), which designed the tower in collaboration with Carlo Ratti Associati, most of the plant species found throughout the site are indigenous to Singapore and thus adapted to the year-round heat and humidity.
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The architects describe CapitaSpring, which broke ground in 2018, as “biophilic,” an increasingly popular term that describes the integration of nature and design. The firm said in a press release that the placement of greenery “mimics the plant hierarchy of tropical rainforests,” with those requiring the least direct light lying beneath a “canopy” of taller trees.
“Due to the unique character of Singapore’s urbanism — both extremely dense and green — we decided to make the design a vertical exploration of tropical urbanism,” BIG’s founder, Bjarke Ingels, said in a statement, adding that the tower is “like a vision of a future in which city and countryside, culture and nature can coexist.”
