The context is odd, perhaps even a little overwhelming. The adjacent Marina Bay Sands complex is a monster, a strange, sci-fi echo of a futuristic Stonehenge, a 55 storey complex topped by a ‘skypark’ looming in the background. There is no competing with it. Moshe Safdie’s huge ‘Integrated Resort’ (Singapore is still, despite the scale of a complex which out-earns Las Vegas, a little squeamish about the word ‘casino’) stamps its authority on the newly reclaimed land but also stomps out any possible competition. How can a park possibly compete with an architectural object on that scale? How can the new gardens assert themselves on the skyline? The flat reclaimed land offered few possibilities for the kind of dramatic landscaping that would have allowed the gardens to become a feature able to compete with the city’s burgeoning architectural profile. So this would need to be an eccentric kind of landscape, a garden with a verticality to echo Singapore’s spiky skyline and an intervention with a theatricality to be able to create a place from seemingly nothing. 

Perhaps gardens in the centre of Singapore were never going to be serene. In fact, just as nature itself goes into a kind of tropical overdrive in the permanent summer of an equatorial climate, so the gardens accommodate a kind of hypernature, a pumped up vision of nature as theatre. 

The result is the pair of vast glass conservatories which embed the gardens in the cityscape alongside the vertical mushrooming of the supertrees, the complex webs of futuristic armature which create green-clad skyscrapers within the gardens. 

This is an essay by Edwin Heathcote which was published in the book Supernature: How Wilkinson Eyre Made a Hothouse Cool (Oro Editions, 2014).