The Oasia Downtown Hotel, in the heart of Singapore’s business district, near Chinatown distinguishes itself as an unforgettable visual contrast, against a typically urban back-drop of concrete, steel and glass. A slender silhouette wrapped in a “living cloak” of climbing plants, it occupies entirely its tiny site, and is made up of horizontal stratums. Its four sky gardens at levels 6, 12, 21, 27, becomes new ground planes.

As a new genre, the building showcases an intimacy with greenery more typically found on the ground, by elevation of vegetation into the sky. Vegetation as architecture, combats rabid intensification of urban density – a means to re-imagine airspace as landscape space. This augments bio-diversity while providing visual relief from reflectance and glare, and thermal relief from urban heat island effects.

The “living cloak” of climbers became a giant organic mosaic of different species, textures and patterns, painted on a canvas in the sky. In time, Nature herself becomes the artist, for this living mosaic is expected to change over time, as plants find their own environmental equilibrium in space.