Selected Works
Archigardener is a digitally-native multidisciplinary design consultancy based in the Asia Pacific region and currently headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. Founder Jonathan Choe is a Singapore-registered architect & designer with over a decade of experience creating intrinsically sustainable designs of various typologies and scales across Asia & Australia.
Our focus is creating green spaces and places: both literally verdant and fundamentally environmentally sustainable, blurring boundaries between indoor & outdoor at the junction between urbanism, architecture, interiors & landscape. Each project is approached uniquely from a specific point of view without preconceived notions of form or style. This is achieved through a deep understanding of the site & cultural context, client ambitions, programmatic requirements, and other project particulars.
We offer a holistic suite of design services including: masterplanning, feasibility studies, urban design, building design, building integrated and urban landscapes, renovations, bespoke interiors & furniture design. We do not solely provide services which require a licensed architect in any jurisdiction, and will collaborate with registered firms as required.
Read more about the services that we provide and see our portfolio of works below. For further information on collaborations, please contact us at designs@archigardener.com.
GreenHouse, Melbourne Australia
Role: Founding director in charge
Status: Concept (2021)
Have you ever dreamed of living in a greenhouse? This prototype for temperate life within year-round nature imagines the communal areas of a private residence as living-in-a glasshouse.
This conceptual design was envisaged as a renovation of a Victorian terrace house in Melbourne, a common typology in the Australian city’s inner city areas. The traditional pitched roof form is extruded to form a continuous roof surface, which becomes glazed above the glasshouse living areas. The existing or extended fair-faced brick walls and a new glass roof will enclose the space. The entrance will be relocated to the side of the house, entering directly into the communal areas. A metal mesh in front of the brick and below portions of the glass ceiling will allow for vining plants to grow, providing dappled shade. In-ground planters along the brick walls on both sides will provide a fringe of lush greenery.
The light-filled, open-plan glasshouse will become the verdant communal heart of the home. At the rear of the historic portion of the terrace house, a kitchen will be built into the charming gabled end wall, facing a kitchen island with barstool seating. A dining area will be located at the centre of the space, and a living arrangement with a mirror-concealed tv will be placed along the opposing gable wall. The historic front portion of the terrace house will house two bedrooms. The enclosed space at the back of the block can be used as a studio office, or a two car garage.
Nest Pavilion, New Zealand
Role: Founding director in charge
Status: Competition (2021)
Nestled into a woodland clearing, the Nest Pavilion will enhance natural habitats while also creating a contemplative space for human visitors to reconnect with nature. An open-plan multipurpose space will be created from lightweight and natural materials, treading lightly on existing natural habitats while creating new ones!
The existing grassy grove will continue seamlessly below the pavilion, keeping 100% of the woodland intact for native birds, frogs, and other wildlife. The structure has been conceived as a series of stacked timbers in varying scales, supporting the building and blurring boundaries between interior and exterior with a filigree shelter. The smallest of the stacked timbers will be natural hollow bamboo, creating a nest-like assemblage that creates additional habitats for birds, insects and bees. This will contribute to local biodiversity and support the bee yards on the property.
A natural timber log framed structure will define a simple open-plan space. Generous transparent pivot doors on all sides of the structure will create an activity platform floating within 360 degree nature views. The pavilion will tread lightly on the natural surroundings, being simply assembled from manageable materials on site without any carbon-intensive concrete, high-skilled trades, or wet works. The foundation of the building will be supported on proprietary steel ‘ground screws’, which are drilled into the existing soil with minimal machinery and disturbance to the environment. The site will not even need to be cleared of native grasses during construction, limiting disturbance of natural habitats. The primary structure will be created from locally sourced sustainable timber logs of varying diameters. The filigree shading elements would be made from sustainable bamboo, creating insect and bee habitats within the hollows. This timber structure will sequester carbon, and is likely to be carbon neutral!
Design Orchard, Singapore
Role: Project lead, designer & project manager for project at WOHA Architects
Status: Completed (2016 – 2019)
Design Orchard is located at a prominent junction along one of the world’s iconic shopping streets, Singapore’s Orchard Road. The building is designed to act as an incubator for emerging Singaporean designers: integrating a high-profile retail space at ground level with co-working creative spaces at levels two and three.
Atop the building is a rooftop public space, which is tiered away from the junction to form an urban amphitheatre and stage along with a shaded pocket park. The collaborative spaces provide a nurturing environment for young designers to go from concept to production, market their products at the retail spaces below, and showcase their designs with fashion and design events at the rooftop garden amphitheatre. (Text by WOHA Architects)
Awarded the Good Design Award from the Chicago Athenaeum, 2019
Awarded the Singapore Good Design Award, Special Mention, 2019
Shortlisted for the ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards, Commercial, 2019
Inside Outside Penthouse, Singapore
Role: Founding director in charge
Status: Completed (2018)
The interiors of this two story penthouse apartment were designed to take advantage of the fact that each interior space in the unit has an adjoining space. Each room was designed to flow seamlessly from inside to outside with custom furnishings and design elements. In the double height main room, a six meter long custom plywood desk and cantilevered floating shelving continue out onto the balcony. In the living room, the couch is placed against balcony sliding doors, with one side table indoors and one outdoors. Handmade reclaimed timber shelves on the other side of the room also continue straight out onto the balcony. Potted plants can be kept on the exterior and the room can be opened up and expanded while in use, but exterior spaces still feel like part of the room when the glass doors are closed for air conditioning.
Due to the compact nature of the 1,000 sqft unit, the material palette of the interiors was kept deliberately restrained. The space was treated as a pure white box, with odd kinks and unnecessary details stripped away to decrease visual clutter, and mirrored surfaces used strategically to bring in light and enhance the spatial volume. Solid surfaces along outward facing walls were painted dark gray, which visually diminishes them against views of external greenery. Furniture within the spaces is largely natural timbers and warm textiles, relating to the ample greenery.
The highlight of the apartment is a lush rooftop garden, where a steel-framed timber screen conceals a sink, storage and services, and provide privacy. A deep planter on top of the sink provides lavish overflowing greenery, without sacrificing usable area. Strange and unsightly recesses in the walls were used to create interesting features, such as a steel trellis for growing climbing plants, and a fish pond to cool the space through it’s thermal mass and increase biodiversity.
Kinetic Battery Towers, Concept
Role: Founding director in charge
Status: Competition (2021)
By building kinetic battery towers in our urban reservoirs, the power storage and supply problems of renewable energy can be solved, securing a sustainable future! For the first time in human history, sustainable energy generation is within reach. However, the feasibility & efficacy of renewable power is currently limited by storage and supply problems with our energy distribution systems. Intermittent power created by solar and wind energy generation creates inconsistent supply, misaligned to consumer consumption demands.
During the day, excess renewable electricity from the power grid (produced during peak solar supply) will be used to pump water from drinking water service reservoirs into the kinetic battery towers, saving power that would otherwise be wasted to be redistributed as necessary, balancing the power grid. A solar photovoltaic energy generating canopy atop the towers would also power the pumps, kinetically storing energy while also reducing evaporative losses of reservoir water.
At night and during peak periods where demand exceeds sustainable energy supply, water will be discharged from the kinetic battery towers, generating renewable electricity to balance consumer demands on the power grid. This will stabilise the supply of sustainable energy to the power grid, allowing carbon-intensive conventional power generation to be taken permanently offline. Rooftop urban farms will take advantage of the shaded space below rooftop photovoltaic arrays to grow sustainable produce.
Four Walls in the Woods, Slovenia
Role: Founding director in charge
Status: Competition (2021)
Nestled among the trees in an enchanting Slovenian forest clearing, a series of four parallel walls take shape. These elemental forms, crafted from rammed local earth, create a tranquil habitat from which to enjoy the natural environment! The building has been carefully positioned among the forest trees to minimise any disturbance to the surrounding natural environment.
The interior spaces will be materially experiential, with rammed earth as the primary finish. An open-plan living and sleeping area will be delineated by two rammed earth walls, framing dramatic forest views through full height glazed windows at either end. Openings on either side of the living space will form simple yet bespoke kitchenette and bathroom areas. A low maintenance green roof with wild grasses and native ferns can provide additional insulation and help the structure blend into nature.
Rooftop Urban Farm, Singapore
Role: Project lead, designer & construction manager for project completed at WOHA Architects
Status: Completed (2015 – 2016)
The organic rooftop urban farm at the WOHA Office demonstrates how skyrise greenery can not only be an attractive sustainable contribution to the city, but also productive! An empty concrete rooftop was transformed into a 200 sqm lush urban farm, featuring over 100 species of edible plants- including herbs, vegetables, leafy greens, fruiting trees and creeping vines.
Plants are grown in box planters, loose pots, vines on trellises, and within an aquaponics system- all of which are watered via auto-irrigation fed from rainwater. The front area of the farm is a productive showcase farm garden with casual seating amongst edible greenery, shade vines and ponds with edible tilapia fish (in an aquaponics system) and consumable water plants.
Organic waste produced by the office is collected and composted in both compost aerating tumblers and a worm composting system. Fresh compost and worm castings are then used to return nutrients to the soil, organically supplementing plant growth and creating a complete biological cycle. Rainwater from tropical monsoon downpours is collected into water tanks, which are used to supply water to the irrigation systems on the rooftop. The rainwater system is designed to supply the entire irrigation requirement of the rooftop farm, even through drought periods of up to two weeks. Above the farm area at an inaccessible roof area, a 120 sqm photovoltaic (PV) array which supplies around 7% of the building’s power consumption.
Punggol Digital District & Singapore Institute of Technology Master Plans
Role: Designer, master planner & manager for project completed at WOHA Architects
Status: Master plan completed (2014 – 2018)
This large scale master plan in suburban Singapore combines a new university campus for the Singapore Institute of Technology with a commercial business park, co-located to provide synergy between education and industry. The design capitalises on an existing secondary rainforest to create a ‘campus-in-a-park’, centred around a large central forest courtyard where existing mature greenery is preserved as a new park at the heart of the district.
The master plan for Punggol Digital District adopts an integrated planning approach that brings together business, education and community facilities with transport infrastructure. The district-level planning approach creates synergies, optimises land use and catalyses community building. Leveraging on the site’s undulating terrain, two public ground levels that segregate vehicles from pedestrians are created, forming a people-friendly, car-lite campus. These fenceless, 24/7 publicly accessible ground levels are interconnected across land uses throughout the district, linking shared carparks and a series of key public spaces.
Rooftops will be used for large-scale urban farming and an array of photovoltaic panels, which provide renewable energy to the district-wide micro grid.
Guggenheim Museum, Helsinki Finland
Role: Project manager & design lead for project completed at WOHA Architects
Status: Competition (2014)
The future Guggenheim site is poised at a crucial urban intersection of city axes, a bustling harbour, and a hilltop park. However, the current site condition terminates this junction of urban features in a prosaic and disjointed manner. Our proposal aims to bridge these civic gaps with a museum that pieces together disparate urban elements to enhance the civic realm of the city.
The key architectural strategy was informed by three site attributes: the prominent urban axes of Helsinki, a missing connection between Tähtitorninvuoren Park and Eteläsatama, and the requirement for continued port operations. One decisive move allows these civic goals to be achieved simultaneously- raising the museum above Laivasillankatu Road to connect the park, harbour, and city. In front of the building, an expansive public plaza is created, bustling with activity from spill-out museum programmes among large-scale sculptures and a harbour and cityscape backdrop. At the other side, another public space joins directly to the slope of Tähtitorninvuoren Park, allowing events, sculpture gardens, and a grassy outdoor amphitheatre-basin to spill out into the park.
The typological convention of the museum as an insular art container is inverted to employ the museum as an connective urban device, improving not only the experience of museum visitors, but the daily lives of Helsinkians. The rectangular museum footprint is sliced diagonally to create a vibrant museum lobby doubling up as an activated public thoroughfare. This frames spectacular views to Helsingin Tuomiokirkko at one end, and the verdant park to the other. The lobby can be opened up during summer to encourage public use, and closed during the winter as an inviting winter garden. (Text by WOHA Architects)
Tengah New Town Master Plan, Singapore
Role: Project manager & design lead for project completed at WOHA Architects
Status: Competition (2013)
This master planning competition poised a unique challenge- to create 60,000 new public housing dwellings on a 730Ha site currently overgrown with secondary rainforest. Our approach was to design an integrated tropical eco-town in a forest, retaining half of the existing green landscape by creating a new urban-planning paradigm for dense urbanism in the tropics. The design goal was achieved using ‘3D master planning’ consisting of layered strata rather than typical mono-use parcellated planning.
Using a strict height limit to our advantage, the housing blocks are lifted off the ground, providing an expansive canopy for large-scale urban farming and photovoltaics. By elevating the housing, the entire lower strata is liberated for public uses. This approach allows the implementation of macro-scale benefits such as an elevated car-free community terrain integrating an intra-town transport network with pedestrian and cycling paths, retaining over 50% of the existing rainforest to promote biodiversity and for the benefit of residents, generous inter-block spacing around natural forested courtyards, ample shaded tropical community spaces, a recreational reservoir lined with unique commercial development, and a 100% zero energy self-powered town.
Beyond technical considerations, this proposal seeks to demonstrate how the challenges of rapid urbanization can be turned into opportunities for creating a highly liveable and sustainable integrated eco-town that is visionary, vibrant and innovative, yet rooted in place, people-centric and endearing. This new typology for tropical urbanity allows the versatility to create a town that is progressive yet personal; structured in a flexible yet legible manner; possessing a scale and character that is robust yet romantic, one that charms with its imageable car-free townscape of trams, rustic villages and brick kilns (lift cores / hot stack chimneys, referential to the site’s history as a brickworks) and beckons with its vibrant waterfront and scenic preserved existing forested hills. (Text by WOHA Architects)
Punggol Town Hub, Singapore
Role: Project manager & design lead for project completed at WOHA Architects
Status: Competition (2013)
This brief for this public competition required squeezing a bus interchange, regional library, medical centre, government office, senior care centre, police centre, public food centre and a large-scale commercial office development onto a relatively cramped site adjacent to a major rapid transit station in one of Singapore’s most densely populated public housing estates. Using a conventional approach, the bus interchange and commercial offices alone would take up the entire site, leaving the community stakeholders with undesirable upper-storey facilities and a largely un-activated and disconnected site.
This proposal rejects the orthodox method of dividing the site into mono-functional land parcels and instead stacks a layer of car parking and commercial offices across the entire site as an urban umbrella- providing shelter and shade for the community layer below, and acting as a flat datum upon which to house an extensive rooftop photovoltaic array. This approach provides street level frontage for ALL community stakeholders and the bus interchange, while allowing a variety of open-air, breezy yet sheltered tropical community spaces ranging from convenient passageways to large-scale covered event plazas throughout the site. At every level of the building, the plan is modulated slightly to create step-out skygardens, which along with planted green facades create ample skyrise greenery as an additional public amenity, turning what could have been a typical inward looking air-conditioned suburban mall into a network of civic amenities and climate-appropriate public spaces, acting as the green community heart of this housing estate. (Text by WOHA Architects)
Museum at Alila Villas Bintan, Indonesia
Role: Architectural designer for project completed at WOHA Architects
Status: Detailed design completed, unbuilt on-hold (2013-2014)
This design forms the cultural & commercial heart for a new planned resort on Bintan Island in Indonesia. The resort was conceived to sit sensitively within a forested hilly peninsula, with 52 hotel villas. The museum complex is comprised of a museum gallery, art gallery, spa, boutiques and fine dining establishments which form a community village at the top of the forest ridge.
The building touches the ground lightly by following the natural slope of the site, minimising heavy construction works and conserving as many trees as possible. The gallery spaces are formed from open-sided concrete boxes, allowing display of art with the backdrop of forest and sea views. Walls made from natural stone collected on site form the enclosure of the building, and colourful pavilions host commercial spaces which appear as a village in the forest.
Permeable Lattice City, Concept
Role: Architectural designer for project completed at WOHA Architects
Status: Concept (2011)
This conceptual project imagines a prototype for high density, high amenity urbanism in the future. In order to achieve an incredible density of 100,000 residents per square kilometer, we envisioned a vertical ‘Permeable Lattice City’ that uses skyscrapers as ‘City Columns’ that support ‘Multiple Ground Levels’ within the height of the structure.
Arranged in a staggered alignment to create a high degree of perforation and porosity, the towers create cross-ventilated breezeways that ensure that fresh air and natural daylight reach every part of the inner city. These ‘City Columns’ free the real ground level for nature reserves and heavy industries and are held together structurally by a network of ‘City Conduits’ that serve as ‘Multiple Ground Levels’. The towers are woven together socially by layers of parks, gardens and commercial spaces. ‘City Community Spaces’ are connected vertically by multi-cabin lifts and people-mover systems. The ‘City Columns’ establish a fully pedestrianised city, entirely negating the need for cars above the ground level.
Read more about the services that we provide. For further information on collaborations, please contact us at designs@archigardener.com.