Shared Growth: Leaf Venation Becomes an Urban Network for Living and Working in Singapore

Most biophilic architecture treats plants as a finishing material: a green roof here, a planted atrium there, a vertical garden draped over an otherwise conventional frame. Shared Growth rejects that sequence. It starts with the leaf itself, its veins, its branching stems and its flowering forms, and asks what happens when botanical logic is allowed to organise structure, circulation and programme from the outset. The answer is a speculative urban field in which office, residence, park, bridge and public space stop behaving as separate categories and begin to grow into one another.

Designed by 伍 柳西, the project was shortlisted in NomadHouse 2020, a competition concerned with the shifting relationship between where people live, where they work and how they meet. Singapore is the chosen ground, and the choice matters. The city's long-standing identity as a Garden City gives the proposal a credible starting point: a place where urban planning and greenery have already been negotiating for decades, and where the next step might be for architecture to behave less like an object in a landscape and more like a living organism.

Extending the Garden City into an Ecological Network

The proposal's visual research traces Singapore's historical transformation before projecting it forward under changing patterns of work and habitation. This framing is the project's quiet strength. Rather than inventing a fantasy ecology from scratch, 伍 柳西 positions Shared Growth as a continuation of an existing urban trajectory, one in which greenery has moved from the margins of planning toward its centre.

What the project pushes further is scale. Nature here is not confined to the gaps between buildings; its geometries are meant to govern the arrangement of the entire system. Instead of a masterplan of isolated blocks with landscaped setbacks, the drawings describe a field of interconnected structures, where green areas are threaded through elevated pathways and branching routes. It is biophilic design operating as urbanism rather than decoration.

Leaf Veins as Structure, Circulation and Skin

The derivation studies are where the project earns its argument. Leaves, veins, flowers and stems are examined, then extracted, separated, repeated, deformed and reorganised into larger architectural assemblies. Leaf venation carries the most weight. In a living leaf, veins distribute water and nutrients while also holding the blade in shape; Shared Growth borrows that dual role, translating venation into networks that can read simultaneously as circulation, structural support, enclosure and connective tissue.

A thinning, branching vein pattern is developed into a porous envelope with varying densities and openings. The result is a cellular surface rather than a uniform skin, one that keeps a visible relationship with its biological source. This is also where the project's parametric thinking becomes legible: organic characteristics are recast as geometric rules that could, in principle, be expanded, repeated or adapted to different spatial demands. The open question, worth pressing in further development, is how those densities would respond to Singapore's sun, rain and humidity, since a porous skin in the tropics is as much a climatic instrument as a formal one.

Flower Platforms, Spherical Rooms and a Programme Without Borders

At the scale of inhabitation, the botanical vocabulary multiplies. Flower-like platforms, spherical living elements and organically shaped shared facilities are suspended within a web of elevated paths. The programme is deliberately loose: spaces for working, temporary living, meeting, moving, gathering and observing sit within the same continuous network rather than being assigned to discrete buildings. For a brief about nomadic life, this is a fitting move. A worker who stays for weeks rather than years needs adjacency and choice more than a fixed address.

The circulation does much of the social work. Branching routes, modelled on the way stems split and rejoin, create multiple paths between any two points, which in turn generates the chance encounters that a shared work and living environment depends on. Movement is not a corridor between destinations; it becomes one of the programmes, with observation and gathering folded into the act of passing through.

Why This Project Matters

Shared Growth is valuable less for its imagery than for its method. It treats biology as a design procedure, a sequence of observation, extraction and transformation, rather than as a source of pleasing shapes. That distinction is what separates biophilic design that merely looks green from biophilic design that organises space differently, and the project lands firmly on the more ambitious side of that line.

It also makes a timely case about programme. As the boundaries between home and office continue to blur, the proposal suggests that architecture may need to blur them too, replacing zoned categories with networks that grow, branch and overlap. The scheme remains speculative, and its environmental performance would need rigorous testing, but as a shortlisted NomadHouse 2020 entry it offers a clear and memorable proposition: a city that grows its shared spaces the way a plant grows its leaves.

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About the Designers

Designer: 伍 柳西

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Project credits: Shared Growth by 伍 柳西 NomadHouse 2020 (uni.xyz).