Sky Gardens
“What if every apartment unit had a real garden?”
SKY GARDEN HOUSING
A New Typology for Private Vertical Landscaping
Sky Garden Housing proposes a new model of high-density living where every resident, regardless of floor level, gains access to a private, full-scale garden in the sky. Instead of treating greenery as a superficial façade treatment or a communal amenity that belongs to no one, this concept restores the human scale by giving each household a private yard, a mini-courtyard, or a greenhouse terrace — directly integrated into their apartment.
At its core, the project asks a simple but radical question:
“What if every apartment had a real garden?”
Not a potted balcony. Not a decorative strip of vines. But a true piece of landscape, suspended in the vertical dimension.
1. Concept Overview
The design organizes residential units around a series of staggered, interlocking garden platforms. These platforms extend the interior living space into nature, forming a vertical sequence of micro-landscapes. Each garden is large enough to support:
- small trees
- edible plants
- flowering shrubs
- soil beds and seasonal vegetation
- recreational or contemplative space
These sky gardens create the sensation of living in a vertical village, where nature is woven deeply into daily life.
The concept differs from most contemporary “green towers” by emphasizing private ownership of each garden rather than communal terraces. This increases maintenance responsibility, strengthens resident connection to nature, and encourages a culture of personal stewardship.
2. A Living Façade
The staggered arrangement creates a three-dimensional façade where greenery becomes a defining architectural element. From the street, the building appears as a cascade of terraces — each distinct, expressing the personality of its resident, yet unified in form.
The result is a building that breathes:
- planting cools the façade
- soil mass stabilizes temperature
- trees cast dynamic shadows
- cross-ventilation passes through semi-open terraces
- birds and pollinators find refuge even in high-density environments
The vertical rhythm of gardens transforms the tower from a sealed object into a living organism.
3. Climate Adaptability
Sky Garden Housing is conceived as a global typology, adaptable to different climates.
Warm and Tropical Regions
- open-air garden terraces
- natural ventilation
- shade-generating vegetation
- biophilic cooling using evapotranspiration
- fruiting species, palms, herbs, edible gardens
Cold and Temperate Regions
- sliding glass enclosures create winter gardens
- enclosed terraces act as thermal buffers, reducing heating load
- hardy shrubs and evergreen plantings
- greenhouse effect brings additional passive solar gain
By adjusting enclosure, soil depth, and planting palette, the system functions year-round from Singapore to Scandinavia.
4. Structural & Environmental Logic
Each sky garden platform is designed as an integrated landscape slab:
- engineered soil beds with controlled weight
- drainage layers to prevent waterlogging
- vertical pipes for rainwater capture
- waterproofing membranes embedded into the floor slab
- optional greywater reuse for irrigation
The slab depth can vary from shallow beds for ornamental plants to deep planters capable of supporting small trees. These platforms also serve as acoustic buffers between units, improving privacy and reducing mechanical noise.
5. Human Experience
The experience of living with a private sky garden goes beyond aesthetics. It creates:
Mental Well-Being
A personal retreat steps away from the living room — a place to breathe, grow plants, meditate, or host a friend.
Social Identity
Each resident curates their own small world: a herb garden, a flowering meadow, a bonsai collection, or a miniature orchard.
Daily Rituals
Watering plants, watching seasonal changes, stepping barefoot into a patch of greenery — these gestures reconnect urban dwellers to tactile, sensory experiences lost in modern cities.
Urban Belonging
From the exterior, a building full of visible gardens reflects a community that values nature, calm, and human life above pure density.
6. A New Vertical Urbanism
Sky Garden Housing moves beyond decorative greening and proposes a new urban model:
- Density without alienation
- Nature without distance
- Privacy without isolation
- Architecture that nurtures instead of dominating
Instead of repeating the typical enclosed apartment stack, this system creates alternating voids — pockets of air, sunlight, and vegetation — giving people a sense of space even in a high-rise environment.
It is a gentle but powerful claim: vertical living can be green, humane, and emotionally nourishing.
7. Vision
Sky Garden Housing imagines cities where:
- towers appear as vertical forests
- every floor feels grounded
- every resident enjoys the luxury of nature
- mental health is part of architectural design
- high density no longer means a loss of landscape
- the boundary between domestic life and outdoor space dissolves
By embedding private gardens into every unit, this concept redefines what an apartment can be. It is not simply a home in a building — it is a home with a yard suspended in the sky.
I : Sky Gardens for Studio Apartments.
I.1
The Vertical Corridor: Weaving Greenery into the Core
An enhancement to the Sky Garden Housing typology involves transforming the inner circulation spaces. We are introducing unit-facing green walls along the inner corridor, coupled with replacing the adjacent apartment walls with full glass panels (or glazed partitions).
This design decision creates a concept we call the Vertical Corridor—a shared space that delivers biophilic design directly to the heart of every unit:
- Borrowed Landscape: Residents gain a dynamic, secondary natural view, looking from their living spaces across the corridor to the lush, communal green wall. This makes the apartment interior feel deeper, brighter, and connected to greenery on two sides.
- Aesthetic & Acoustic Buffer: The green wall converts the traditionally sterile hallway into a calming, visually rich artery. The vegetation acts as a natural acoustic absorber, significantly reducing corridor noise transmitted into the units.
Addressing Integration Concerns
The integration of this glass inner wall is practical and resilient, anticipating common concerns:
1. Privacy Management:
The glass wall facing the inner corridor functions identically to any exterior window. Residents maintain full control over privacy through standard, customizable window treatments, such as integrated blinds, privacy films, or curtains, ensuring sensitive areas (like bedrooms) remain private while still maximizing light and the borrowed landscape when desired.
2. Green Wall Maintenance:
The system is designed for low-impact sustainability. The planting palette consists of hardy, low-maintenance species that thrive in the provided light conditions. Furthermore, the green wall’s irrigation system is integrated with the building’s rainwater harvesting strategy, minimizing both water consumption and human intervention.
III : Sky Gardens for a Sample Two Storied Apartment Unit (Lower Floor : Living Room + Pantry + Study + Garden - Upper Floor : 3 Bedrooms + Lounge)
III.1
The Vertical Yard: Integrating Duplex Units
The Sky Garden Housing concept finds its most compelling expression in the integration of two-story apartment units (duplexes). This iteration maximizes the feeling of living in a detached home by giving the private garden a scale and function typically reserved for a suburban yard.
In this model, the two-story unit is organized as follows:
- Lower Floor (The Public Level): This level houses the main living, dining, pantry, and study areas. Crucially, the entire lower floor opens directly onto the large, deep Sky Garden platform.
- Upper Floor (The Private Level): This level contains the three bedrooms and a private lounge, maintaining separation and tranquility away from the public areas and the garden.
Key Advantages of the Duplex-Garden Integration
The stacking of a private apartment over a dedicated garden platform yields several high-value design benefits:
1. True Backyard Feel: By placing all daytime living spaces (living room, study, pantry) on the same level as the garden, the separation between indoor and outdoor life is almost eliminated. The garden becomes a seamless extension of the interior, functioning as a true backyard for the family.
2. Direct Vertical Access: The garden space is large enough to support integrated vertical circulation (stairs/steps) as shown in the renderings, allowing residents to move freely and directly between the two levels of their unit via the outdoor space. This enhances the sense of luxury and connection.
3. Enhanced Biophilic Immersion: The sheer volume of the two-story unit looking out onto a large, deep garden (capable of supporting established trees) provides an unparalleled sense of biophilic immersion. The upper-floor bedrooms also benefit from the canopy and the elevated, framed view of the urban forest.
This duplex model redefines high-rise living, proving that density does not necessitate the sacrifice of space, privacy, or nature. It delivers the volumetric experience of a house within the convenience of a modern tower.
Conclusion: Redefining the Vertical Home
The Sky Garden Housing typology is not merely an aesthetic proposal; it is a structural and experiential challenge to conventional high-density architecture. By focusing on private, owned nature rather than shared amenities, we have developed a model that fundamentally redefines the relationship between urban living and the natural world.
Our core innovations work in concert to achieve this humane density:
- The Private Sky Garden: Provides every single unit with a dedicated, full-scale yard capable of supporting small trees and a personalized landscape.
- The Vertical Corridor: Introduces green walls and glass internal façades, transforming sterile circulation into a continuous biophilic experience and delivering light and borrowed nature deep into the apartment cores.
- The Duplex Integration: Utilizes two-story units to elevate the garden into a true "backyard" connected directly to the primary living floor, providing the luxury and scale of a house within the tower.
The result is a housing system where high-density does not lead to alienation, and where the tower becomes a vertical village—a collection of individual homes, each with its own slice of sky and earth. Sky Garden Housing proves that a future of urbanism can be both sustainable and deeply nourishing to the human spirit. It is a gentle yet powerful claim for a greener, more humane vertical city.
🌿 Sky Garden Housing: Innovations in Vertical Private Landscaping
The Sky Garden Housing (SGH) typology redefines high-density urban living by integrating a full-scale, private garden—or "vertical yard"—into every residential unit, replacing the traditional balcony with a usable landscape platform. This design incorporates several key structural and environmental innovations to ensure feasibility, safety, and long-term sustainability.
1. Dynamic Wind Load Mitigation
A major structural challenge for deep, open garden platforms on high-rise buildings is the "cup effect," where high-velocity winds create dangerous pressure pockets. Our solution transforms the garden platform into a semi-open pressure equalizer:
- Automated Ventilation Ports: The interior (apartment-facing) wall of the garden platform is fitted with spring-loaded ventilation ports.
- Pressure Equalization: When the external wind pressure exceeds a safe threshold (e.g., 1 kg/m2), these ports automatically open. This allows the built-up air pressure to vent smoothly through the back wall, significantly reducing the pressure differential and the resultant force exerted on the structure and the tree canopies. This passive system enhances the safety and resilience of the entire facade.
2. Structural Efficiency and Support
Unlike pioneering "vertical forest" designs that rely heavily on complex, long-span cantilevers, the SGH garden platforms are engineered for stability and cost-effectiveness.
- Four-Corner Support: The garden slab is not cantilevered; it is supported by columns at or near all four corners, making it function as a Two-Way Slab.
- Reduced Complexity: This support system significantly reduces the required slab thickness and complexity of the structural detailing compared to a cantilever design, allowing the slab to carry the heavy, dynamic loads of saturated soil and vegetation with greater stability and less deflection.
- Thermal Isolation: Structural breaks are utilized where the garden slab meets the interior apartment slab to minimize heat transfer and isolate the living space from the external garden's structural dynamics.
3. Advanced Drainage and Piped Inspection System
To prevent water damage to the apartments below and ensure the health of the plants, a multi-layered drainage system is employed, coupled with a novel maintenance feature.
- Drainage Stack-Up: The system utilizes a multi-layer approach typical of intensive green roofs: high-quality waterproofing membranes, a root-protective layer, a layer of filter fabric, and the planting media.
- Piped Drainage System: The bottom layer consists of thick (3-5 inch), parallel glued perforated PVC pipes. This creates an immediate and highly efficient void for excess water to be channeled away, preventing the shallow soil from becoming waterlogged.
- Remote Inspection: The pipes are accessible for camera inspection. This allows maintenance teams to check for blockages or signs of early root intrusion without the costly and disruptive process of digging up the entire garden bed.
4. Root Control via Containerized Trees
This innovation addresses the single highest long-term risk in vertical landscaping: root penetration of the structural slab.
- Containment Strategy: The general planting area features a thin layer of soil suitable for grass and ground cover. For larger flora, small trees and shrubs are housed in separate, containers (e.g., 1 meter tall) placed directly on top of the thin soil layer.
- Risk Elimination: By limiting the large root ball to a defined container space, the threat of primary roots growing aggressively and compromising the slab's waterproofing is eliminated.
- Simplified Maintenance: This approach allows for easier inspection, rotation, or replacement of trees without affecting the integrity of the slab or the surrounding garden environment, making the system highly sustainable and maintainable over the life of the building.
5. The Mobile Landscape: Flexibility and Outdoor Cinema
The Sky Garden is designed as a dynamic, multi-functional outdoor room, achieved by making the primary landscaping element—the large, containerized trees—fully mobile.
- Dynamic Space Planning: Large tree containers could be fitted with industrial-grade, heavy-duty locking casters. This allows residents to easily wheel the pots toward the walls to create a large, open space for outdoor events, dining, or yoga, and then reconfigure them for privacy or shade as needed.
- Structural Rigor: The wheels and locking mechanisms are engineered to handle the load of the saturated soil and mature trees without damaging the slab. The slab's final finish is durable and level to support the movement of these heavy elements.
- Outdoor Cinema Feature: The mobility of the planters enables a luxury amenity: the Outdoor Cinema wall. By moving the pots away from the central viewing area, the smooth, vertical wall directly in front of the duplex unit's living space is exposed, serving as a massive, ready-made screen for a 4K projector.
6. Mechanized Mobility Solution
While the containers are on wheels, the massive weight of a fully grown tree and saturated soil requires a safe, assisted movement system. To ensure the resident's safety and convenience, we propose an optional, on-demand mechanized solution:
- On-Demand Rental Unit: The building maintenance service provides a rental unit—a small, wheeled, electric jack and robotic maneuvering unit—specifically designed to dock with and lift the heavy planter bases.
- Effortless Reconfiguration: This unit allows residents to effortlessly raise the pot slightly, move it to the desired location (such as clearing space for the outdoor cinema), and securely placed it back into place, all at the push of a button, ensuring that the garden's flexibility is easily reconfigurable.
- Protecting the Structure: This controlled lift movement prevents the heavy, concentrated weight from damaging the grass/ soil or the underlying drainage and slab (if for example during dragging).
⚖️ Key Differences: Sky Garden Housing vs. Bosco Verticale
While both typologies share the common goal of integrating substantial greenery into high-density towers, the SGH design is distinct in its philosophy, typology, and engineering execution.
| Feature | Sky Garden Housing (SGH) | Bosco Verticale (BV) | Significance of SGH Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core Philosophy | Private Ownership & Stewardship: Emphasizes the resident's personal, owned "yard" for recreation, growing, and identity. | Collective Ecological Amenity: Emphasizes urban reforestation, façade filter, and communal ecological impact. | SGH makes the garden a private, curatable home feature. |
| Apartment Typology | Duplex Integration (The Vertical Yard): Garden platform is designed as a seamless extension of a two-story unit's primary living floor, often including exterior circulation (stairs) between levels. | Single-Level Balcony: Standard single-floor apartments with large, cantilevered balconies. | SGH replicates the functional volume and experience of a house with a private backyard. |
| Façade/Structure | Structurally Efficient: Garden slab is a non-cantilevered, two-way supported slab with four-corner column support. Includes dynamic wind-mitigation ports. | Highly Engineered Cantilever: Dramatically extended, long-span cantilevered balconies to push the forest outward. Requires heavily reinforced, thick slabs to counter high bending moments and forces at the core connection. |
SGH is more cost-effective and conventional in its structural base, focusing innovation on usability rather than extended cantilevering. |
| Internal Design | Vertical Corridor: Unique integration of a shared, unit-facing green wall visible through a glass (+ window blinds) inner apartment partition, delivering nature deep into the core. | Standard Interior Corridor: Greenery is contained strictly to the exterior facade. | SGH provides a dual biophilic connection—to the private exterior garden and the borrowed internal landscape. |
| Root Control & Maintenance | Containerized Mobility: Large trees are in separate, mobile pots with heavy-duty casters (and an optional robotic mover). This eliminates the risk of root penetration and allows dynamic space planning. | In-Situ Planting: Large trees are planted directly into deep, continuous soil beds on the cantilevered slab, requiring complex root barriers and specialized "flying gardener" maintenance. | SGH is safer, simpler to maintain, and provides functional flexibility (e.g., the Outdoor Cinema feature). |
In summary, Sky Garden Housing is not a repeat of the "vertical forest" idea; but rather an evolution or a next-generation vertical housing typology that prioritizes private garden functionality / flexibility and structural efficiency.
© Ly De Sandaru
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