Verdant Spine
Two towers joined by a forest
Location
Tanjong Pagar, Singapore
Typology
Residential
Status
In Design
Completion
2029
Singapore already knows how to put plants on buildings. The harder question is whether anyone actually walks through them.
A pair of residential towers linked at four levels by planted bridges, replacing the podium with a continuous vertical park.
Project data
- Typology
- Residential
- Towers
- 2, linked at 4 levels
- Residences
- 264
- Height
- 168 m / 47 storeys
- Planted bridge area
- 3,900 m², accessible
- Structure
- Concrete to L30, mass timber above
- Whole-life carbon
- −46% vs. baseline
- Completion
- 2029
- Coordinates
- 1.2764° N, 103.8437° E
Green walls that nobody can reach
The city's skyrise greenery is, by any measure, a success — and also largely inaccessible. Most of it is planted on inaccessible ledges, maintained by rope access, and experienced only from across the street.
We started from the opposite requirement: every planted surface in this project must be one a resident can stand in, without a lift key.
Four bridges, forty metres apart
The two towers are linked at levels 9, 21, 33 and 45 by inhabited bridges — six metres wide, fully planted, open to the air on both sides. They are the primary social space of the scheme and they carry structure, which is why they were affordable.
Each bridge has a distinct planting climate driven by its height and exposure: understory at level 9, dry scrub at 45. A resident moving down the building moves through four ecologies.
Mass timber above level 30
The lower thirty floors are concrete for fire and acoustic performance. Above that, the frame switches to glulam and CLT — the first residential structure in the district to do so, and the reason the towers can carry planted bridges at all.
Whole-life carbon is projected 46% below a conventional equivalent, verified against a like-for-like baseline rather than a notional one.
If you cannot walk into the greenery, it is not landscape. It is cladding that needs watering.
— Yusuf Adeyemi, Director of Sustainability
The building as a study model, not a render.
Every scheme begins as stacked volumes on the studio table. This is that model, rebuilt — it turns with the page, and it shows the argument of the building rather than a marketing image of it.
Scroll to rotate · Move to tilt
06 frames
Next project
Porto Atelier
Alcântara, Lisbon