BIO-SPACES FABRIC: A Kowloon Housing Tower Reimagined as a Vertical Landscape That Contains Homes

Most high-density housing treats greenery the way a restaurant treats parsley: a garnish placed at the edge of the plate once the real work is done. BIO-SPACES FABRIC reverses that order. Its premise is that nature should be the system around which a residential tower is organized, not an amenity bolted onto its podium or roof. The proposal asks a direct question that Hong Kong makes urgent: what if living with nature in a dense city did not require escaping the city?

Designed by jonatan jimenez, Dulce De León, Natali Pinedo, and Ana Lizbeth Gutiérrez Díaz, the project was shortlisted in the Abode competition. The team sets the scheme in Kowloon, near Hung Hom Station and its bus and ferry connections, a district shaped by residential towers, commercial activity, and intense pressure on land. Their site studies map prevailing winds, temperature, rainfall, mobility, green areas, water systems, building typologies, socioeconomic conditions, and pedestrian routes. The response is not a suburban retreat transplanted into the city, but an attempt to make ecological systems themselves vertical.

A Courtyard Stream Running Beneath Cantilevered Terraces

The opening rendering sets the project's tone. An upper terrace cantilevers over a planted courtyard, its copper-clad columns landing among vegetation, while a shallow stream runs through the ground plane. Water appears here as something residents walk beside and look into, rather than infrastructure hidden behind a ceiling. The white butterflies, which recur across the entire set of images, are a deliberate narrative device: the team frames wildlife as a resident of the building rather than an occasional visitor.

The covered walkway beside it shows the same thinking at the scale of circulation. A curved wall carries a carved copper lattice panel, a pine tree stands at the edge, and sunlight filters through in patches. Moving through the complex becomes an encounter with shade, texture, and planting. This is where the project's idea of a "biospatial fabric" becomes legible: greenery is not concentrated in one garden but distributed along the routes people use every day.

Reflecting Pools, Screen Walls, and a Catalogue of Garden Elements

The garden courtyard slows the pace. A rectangular reflecting pool edged with gravel and ferns sits beneath mature trees, offering a still counterpoint to the moving stream elsewhere. Read alongside the repeated view of the lattice-walled walkway, the sequence suggests a choreography of thresholds: open court, filtered passage, quiet pool. Interior and exterior stop being rigid categories, which is precisely the condition the designers argue dense housing has lost.

The third image is the most instructive. A courtyard with a cut-out screen wall and a waterfall wall sits above a row of small axonometric diagrams of garden features. The diagrams reveal the method behind the atmosphere: the team treats vegetation, water, and screening as a kit of parts that can be redeployed across levels. That modular logic is what allows nature to move throughout the building instead of pooling at its base.

A Spiral Stair Ringed by Vine-Covered Tiers

Looking upward through the spiral stair, the vertical ambition of the scheme becomes clear. Vine-covered tiers wrap around white columns, and a flower bed full of butterflies anchors the base. The stair works as a green spine, a vertical garden that residents climb through rather than past. In a typology where lifts usually flatten the experience of height into a sealed box, this gesture makes ascent a spatial event and gives each level a visible relationship to the planting above and below it.

Shared Rooms Where Planting Becomes Part of the Furniture

The project's communal programmes overlap with vegetation rather than sitting apart from it. Stepped timber seating tiers face a projector on a pedestal, with low sun streaming through side windows, a space that can serve screenings, talks, or informal gatherings. Next door, workstations are divided by dark laser-cut screens topped with leafy plants, so the partition between desks doubles as a planter.

These interiors matter because they extend the biophilic argument beyond the terrace. Remote work and shared leisure are now part of how people inhabit home, and the team folds both into the residential fabric. The screened work area, in particular, demonstrates how a small design decision can carry the larger concept indoors without resorting to decorative pot plants.

A Vine-Draped Glass Cylinder Between Curved Balconied Wings

The dusk view pulls back to show the architecture as a whole. A glass cylinder draped in vines stands between two curved wings lined with balconies, and figures and butterflies are scattered across the landscaped terrace. The curved massing reads as a response to the wind and ventilation studies the team carried out on site, while the planted cylinder acts as a vertical focal point that ties the wings together. Here, the designers' own phrase fits: the building is conceived less as a tower containing gardens and more as a vertical landscape containing homes.

Why This Project Matters

BIO-SPACES FABRIC accepts verticality as a fact of metropolitan life instead of fighting it. That acceptance is its strength. Many biophilic proposals default to imagery of meadows and low-rise villages, which offers little to a city like Hong Kong. This team instead asks how gardens, water, circulation, and shared programmes can be stacked and interwoven so that contact with living systems happens on the way to work, at the desk, and on the stair, not only on weekend trips out of town.

The renderings lean heavily on atmosphere, and a fuller treatment of how planting is irrigated and maintained across levels would strengthen the case. Still, the diagrams of garden elements point toward a repeatable system rather than a single set piece, and the site analysis grounds the scheme in real conditions around Hung Hom. For an Abode brief about rethinking the contemporary home, the project offers a clear position: in the densest cities, nature has to be designed as structure, not as surface.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: jonatan jimenez, Dulce De León, Natali Pinedo, Ana Lizbeth Gutiérrez Díaz

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: BIO-SPACES FABRIC by jonatan jimenez, Dulce De León, Natali Pinedo, Ana Lizbeth Gutiérrez Díaz Abode (uni.xyz).