Gardens by the Bay: Biophilic Architecture at City Scale

Few places show the idea of a city in a garden as vividly as Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. Giant tree-like structures covered in ferns and climbers rise above lakes and lawns; two vast glass domes hold a cool Mediterranean garden and a misty mountain forest in the middle of the tropics; and every evening crowds gather under the Supertrees to watch them light up. For many visitors it is a tourist attraction. For architects and planners it is something more useful: a working demonstration of how landscape, buildings, water and energy can be designed as one system at the scale of a city district.

Indian cities face many of the same pressures that shaped the project — heat, heavy rain, scarce land, the need for public green space and the wish to make a modern city memorable. They also face the temptation to copy the image rather than the idea: steel trees bolted onto flyovers, green walls that die within a year, decorative domes without a climate strategy. Understanding how Gardens by the Bay actually works is the best protection against that kind of copying.

This article describes the project's origins, its three main elements — the Supertree Grove, the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest — and the water and energy systems that tie them together. It then scales the lessons down to what Indian cities, campuses, buildings and homes can realistically apply, with dimensions and indicative costs. Facts about the project are limited to those that are widely documented; where exact figures vary between sources, they are described as approximate.

Why Singapore built a garden on reclaimed land

Singapore has pursued greening as national policy for decades. In 1967 the government launched the Garden City vision, planting trees along roads and in public spaces to make the young, crowded city state pleasant to live in and attractive to investors. Over time the idea evolved into a City in a Garden and, more recently, a City in Nature. Gardens by the Bay was planned in the 2000s as a flagship of that idea: a large public garden at the heart of the new downtown being built around Marina Bay.

The site is land reclaimed from the sea at the mouth of the Singapore River. The creation of the Marina Barrage, completed in 2008, turned Marina Bay into a freshwater reservoir, so the gardens sit at the edge of a body of water that is also part of the city's water supply. An international design competition was held in the mid-2000s, and the winning team for the largest garden, Bay South, was led by the British landscape architects Grant Associates with the architects Wilkinson Eyre, who designed the conservatories, supported by environmental and structural engineers. Bay South opened to the public in June 2012.

The Supertree Grove: vertical gardens as infrastructure

The Supertrees are the image everyone remembers. There are eighteen of them, ranging from about 25 to 50 metres tall — roughly the height of a nine- to sixteen-storey building. Twelve stand together in the Supertree Grove, and the others in smaller groups elsewhere in Bay South. An elevated walkway, the OCBC Skyway, runs among the Supertrees in the Grove at a height of about 22 metres, giving visitors a canopy-level view of the gardens.

Each Supertree is built in layers. At its centre is a reinforced concrete core that carries the main loads; around it, a steel framework forms the trunk and the spreading canopy; fixed to the trunk are planting panels that hold epiphytes such as ferns, bromeliads and orchids, together with climbing plants that cover the structure over time. The Supertrees are not merely decorative. Some carry photovoltaic panels on their canopies; several are integrated with the cooling systems of the conservatories, serving as exhausts for their air systems; and they collect rainwater and provide shade to the spaces beneath. In the evening they become the frame for a light-and-sound show.

The Supertrees show three ideas that matter far beyond Singapore. First, vertical greenery needs a structure designed for it from the start: the planting panels, irrigation lines and maintenance access are part of the frame, not afterthoughts. Second, a structure can do several jobs at once — shade, rainwater collection, energy, air handling, lighting and identity — which helps justify its cost. Third, plants are chosen for the conditions on each part of the structure: the Supertrees use epiphytes and climbers that naturally grow on tree trunks in tropical forests, not ground plants forced to live vertically.

The conservatories: cool climates under glass

The two conservatories, the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest, are the project's most technically ambitious buildings. Each is a column-free enclosure of glass on a steel gridshell supported by large arches, designed so that plants from climates very different from Singapore's can grow inside. The Flower Dome is the larger and lower of the two; it recreates a cool, dry Mediterranean and semi-arid climate, with plants from regions such as the Mediterranean, South Africa, Australia and the Americas, and has been recognised by Guinness World Records as the largest glass greenhouse. The Cloud Forest is smaller in area but taller, and recreates the cool, moist conditions of tropical mountains, with a planted mountain of about 35 metres and an indoor waterfall at its heart.

Keeping these spaces cool in a city that is hot and humid all year is the central engineering challenge. The approach combines several strategies. The glass is selected to admit plenty of daylight for the plants while limiting solar heat; automated shades deploy when the sun is strong; only the lower part of the volume, where plants and people are, is actively cooled, while warm air is allowed to rise and collect at the top; and air is dehumidified before it is cooled, which reduces the energy needed. The energy system draws on a biomass boiler that burns horticultural waste from Singapore's parks and gardens, generating electricity and heat that are used in the cooling and dehumidifying processes. The conservatories were named World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival in 2012.

Water: lakes that clean the city's runoff

The gardens' lakes are part of the water system as well as the landscape. Rainwater falling on the gardens is collected and passed through the lake system, where aquatic plants and wetlands help filter it before it flows on towards the Marina Reservoir. The lakes also provide habitat for fish, dragonflies and birds, and the water moderates temperatures around it. This is a city-scale example of what designers call water-sensitive design: treating rain as a resource to be slowed, cleaned and used, rather than a nuisance to be piped away as quickly as possible.

Indian cities are perhaps the places where this lesson matters most. Monsoon flooding in Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru, Surat and many other cities is made worse when every surface is paved and every drain is a concrete channel. Gardens, open lawns, planted swales, rain gardens and ponds can absorb and slow storm water, and rainwater harvesting — required for many plot sizes by local building bye-laws — can recharge groundwater. The principle scales from a city park down to a single bungalow plot.

What biophilic architecture means at city scale

Biophilic design is the practice of connecting people with nature through the spaces they use: plants, daylight, water, fresh air, natural materials and forms. In interiors, as this site's biophilic interior guide explains, it means plants chosen for each light zone, natural materials and views. At city scale, the same idea becomes a network: parks and gardens linked by green streets, trees that shade footpaths, green roofs and facades, water bodies that cool and clean, and public spaces where people can be outdoors comfortably. Gardens by the Bay sits within such a network in Singapore, which also requires or encourages greenery on new buildings to replace the land they occupy.

Lessons for Indian cities and campuses

India already has a strong tradition of biophilic architecture at city and campus scale: Mughal charbagh gardens, temple tanks and stepwells, the courtyards of havelis, the tree-lined avenues of colonial cantonments, and modern campuses such as those of the IIMs and IITs, where buildings sit within large landscapes. What Gardens by the Bay adds is the deliberate integration of landscape with engineering — water treatment, energy and cooling — and a level of investment in long-term maintenance that many Indian public projects lack.

• Treat parks as infrastructure: design lakes and lawns to store and clean monsoon runoff, not just to look green.
• Shade first: tree canopies over footpaths, parking and plazas do more for comfort in Indian heat than any decorative feature.
• Link green spaces with shaded streets and cycle routes so that the network, not one park, carries the benefit.
• Choose plants for the local climate and maintenance budget; native species usually need less water and care.
• Budget for maintenance from day one — horticulture staff, irrigation, pruning and replacement — or the project will decline.
• Use green waste: compost leaves and cuttings on site, as Gardens by the Bay uses its waste as fuel.

Many of these ideas have Indian ancestors, which makes them easier to adopt and to explain to clients and city authorities. The table below pairs each Gardens by the Bay idea with an Indian precedent and a practical modern application.

Lessons for buildings and homes: green facades and terraces

At building scale, the Supertrees' lesson translates into green facades and roof gardens designed as systems. A green facade — climbers grown on a trellis or cables fixed off the wall — is the simplest and most robust option for Indian buildings. It needs a planter or ground bed with enough soil, a trellis set 150–300 mm off the wall so that air can circulate and the wall stays dry, drip irrigation on a timer, an overflow and drain, and safe access for pruning. A living wall with plants in modules or felt pockets on the wall itself is more dramatic but more demanding, and this site's biophilic interior guide prices indoor living walls at about ₹1,200–3,000 per sq ft installed (indicative October 2026), plus a maintenance contract.

Two warnings apply to every green system in India. First, structure: wet soil is heavy, and a terrace garden or a balcony planter adds significant load to a slab that may not have been designed for it. A structural engineer should check any planter on a cantilevered balcony, terrace or podium before it is built. Second, waterproofing: a planter or roof garden that leaks into the flat below is the most common and most expensive failure. The waterproofing, protection board, drainage layer and filter fabric should be specified by someone who has done it before, tested by ponding before the soil goes in, and the outlets kept accessible for cleaning.

Mistakes to avoid when borrowing the look

The most common mistake is to copy the Supertree image without the system: artificial trees in steel or fibreglass, with no plants, no water and no function, placed in a traffic island or a mall atrium. They age badly and teach nothing. The second is the dead green wall: an ambitious vertical garden installed without a maintenance budget, which within a year becomes a wall of dry stalks. The third is the glass dome in a hot climate without the shading, glass selection and cooling strategy that make the Singapore conservatories work; in Indian sun, such a dome becomes a greenhouse in the worst sense. Aaditya Interior's advice to clients who admire Gardens by the Bay is to start with what the project does well and cheaply — shade, water, the right plants and maintenance — and only then consider anything spectacular.

Where city-scale biophilic design is heading

The direction is clear in many cities around the world: greenery is being treated as infrastructure that cools streets, manages storm water, supports biodiversity and improves health, rather than as decoration. Singapore's move from a City in a Garden to a City in Nature reflects that shift. In India, urban heat, monsoon flooding and air quality are pushing city governments, campuses and developers in the same direction, and green building rating systems such as IGBC and GRIHA already reward landscape, water and heat-island measures. The next step is to design these systems together, as Gardens by the Bay did, and to fund their maintenance as seriously as their construction.

Eight rules for biophilic architecture, borrowed from Gardens by the Bay

• Design plants, water, shade and energy as one system, not as separate add-ons.
• Give every vertical garden a structure, irrigation, drainage and maintenance access designed from the start.
• Choose plants for the exact conditions — sun, shade, wind, height — on each part of the building.
• Shade glass and hard surfaces before thinking about cooling them.
• Treat rain as a resource: slow it, clean it with planting, store it or recharge it.
• Let people use the green — terraces, walkways and courtyards — rather than only look at it.
• Check structure and waterproofing for every planter, terrace garden and green roof.
• Budget for maintenance for the life of the project, or choose simpler planting.

Frequently asked questions

What are the Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay made of?

Each Supertree has a reinforced concrete core, a steel framework forming the trunk and canopy, and planting panels fixed to the trunk that hold epiphytes and climbers. Some canopies carry solar panels, and several Supertrees are linked to the conservatories' air systems.

How is the Flower Dome kept cool in Singapore's heat?

By combining selective glass that admits light but limits heat, automated shading, cooling only the lower zone where plants and visitors are while warm air rises to the top, dehumidifying air before cooling it, and an energy system that uses a biomass boiler fuelled by horticultural waste.

Who designed Gardens by the Bay?

The masterplan and landscape design of Bay South were by the British landscape architects Grant Associates, and the conservatories were designed by the architects Wilkinson Eyre, with specialist environmental and structural engineers, following an international competition.

Can Indian cities build something like Gardens by the Bay?

The spectacle is expensive, but the principles are affordable: large shaded parks that also store and clean monsoon water, green networks along streets, climate-suited planting, and proper maintenance budgets. Many Indian campuses and traditional gardens already apply these ideas.

Is a vertical garden suitable for an Indian flat?

A small living wall can work on a shaded balcony or indoors with grow lights, if it has waterproofing, drip irrigation, drainage and regular maintenance. For most flats, climbers on a trellis or grouped potted plants are cheaper, sturdier and easier to keep alive.