Marina One is a high-density, mixed-use building complex in the heart of Singapore’s new Marina Bay financial district which supports Singapore’s ambition to become a “City in a Garden”. Designed by Ingenhoven architects to appear as a plant-covered mountain rising up into the Singapore skyline, the four-tower scheme will include the city's largest public plaza and will include lush planting, green sky terraces, and tree-covered public spaces on the rooftops.

In the centre of the building, Gustafson Porter + Bowman’s design for the ‘Green Heart’ creates a seamless transition between the sculptural and planted elements of the building’s architecture. Our landscape design is based on the understanding how public space is used in Singapore. There is often a preconception that the climate is too hot and humid to make active use of outdoor space. But by breaking down the barriers between air conditioned interior space and exterior shaded space, we can still create spaces to dwell which are softened by plants, with a light breeze and the sound of water movement. With a positive attitude, one can enhance the quality of experience and make better use of the public realm within this development and the surrounding city.

The vertical garden is designed with lower and mid-level ‘sky terraces’ offering lush vegetation, spectacular waterfalls and calm reflecting pools. The planting is designed to create inspiring and multi-functional urban spaces to be enjoyed by all in Singapore. The ‘Green Heart’ at the heart of the Marina South towers evokes a rice paddy field, terraced into steep hillsides and made arable for the cultivation of rice, an essential crop of the East Asia. Visitors and inhabitants ascend skywards from the Green Heart into ‘Strata Terraces’, ‘Cloud Garden’, ‘Green Screens’ and ‘Rooftop Gardens’ that allude to the changing environments and habitats that one might experience whilst climbing a mountain.