Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 168 City as garden Parkroyal on Pickering Hotel in Singapore is covered in greenery View from a sky-garden on the 20th floor of Skyville at Dawson apartments, Singapore Parkroyal on Pickering viewed from the street In their recent book “Garden City Mega City” Singapore architects WOHA with publisher Patrick Bingham-Hall have set the agenda for how Asian Mega cities can be re-imagined as 21st century garden cities — dense and vertical, yet sociable and sustainable. WOHA design amazing buildings in Singapore that integrate lush landscape and sky gardens. The paradigm for the traditional garden city of Ebenezer Howard of a hundred years ago as a suburban mix of house and garden is now being reinterpreted in an urban and vertical interaction of buildings and green landscape. Malaysian Architect Ken Yeang championed the integration of landscape and buildings and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew drove a green city policy for Singapore. Tropical Asian cities are ideal for vertical landscape with their warm climate and high rain fall but cities like Sydney also has examples of greenery within buildings. SINGAPORE AS GARDEN CITY The amazing work of architects WOHA in Singapore demonstrates how gardens can flow through buildings. The Parkroyal on Pickering Hotel resembles rice paddy fields in its built form with green landscape climbing up and over the flowing built forms. The nearby Oasia Downtown Hotel has a red mesh over the building that has green vines climbing over the whole building. Even 50 storey housing complexes have green landscape weaving through the buildings on sky garden levels, amazingly one finds children playing in a park like garden on the 47th floor of WOHA’s Skyville@ Dawson apartments. As Richard Hassell of WOHA explains the sky gardens are like being on a hill overlooking the city below. And green landscape is everywhere in Singapore. It lines the boulevards and streets and defines the parks, it grows up buildings and appears at unlikely higher levels in buildings.