The recently completed CapitaSpring tower, the glass, and aluminum facade opens to reveal plants and trees growing hundreds of feet above the ground. At street level, passers-by 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.
At 280 meters (919 ft), 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-sq-ft rooftop farm that supplies fruits, vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers to three on-site restaurants. In total, the 51-story building houses over 80,000 trees and plants across 90,000 sq ft 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.
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 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, adding that the tower is like a vision of a future in which city and countryside, culture and nature can coexist. CapitaSpring is one of several eye-catching biophilic buildings to have opened in Singapore's Downtown Core district in recent years.
Singapore's government has long promoted itself as a ‘garden city’ a term applied to the country by its founding father and former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, in the 1960s. In the decades since, planners have embarked on city-wide tree-planting programs and landscaping projects in its vast public housing complexes.
The city-state also demands that private property developers set aside space for greenery when building new high-rises. In Downtown Core, where CapitaSpring is located, they are required to provide landscaped zones equivalent to the gross area of the entire site.
Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority is simultaneously hoping to turn the business district — which can be eerily quiet during evenings and weekends — into what it calls a "round-the-clock vibrant commercial district." To this end, officials have offered the owners of existing buildings incentives to convert the structures into mixed-use developments with leisure and lifestyle facilities.
