Garden City Mega City: Rethinking Cities for the Age of Global Warming by WOHA & Patrick Bingham-Hall
Pesaro Publishing, 2016
Paperback, 384 pages

[Front and back covers of Garden City | Mega City | Image: Pesaro Publishing]

Two thousand sixteen was a good year for Singapore's WOHA: the firm had just completed Skyville@Dawson, one of their largest projects; their projects were put on display at an excellent exhibition at the Skyscraper Museum in New York City; they participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale; and they released their latest monograph, Garden City Mega City. It was at the Biennale that I first encountered the book by WOHA and longtime collaborator Patrick Bingham-Hall, the photographer, writer and head of Pesaro Publishing. A book launch took place at Palazzo Bembo, inside a darkened room whose walls were graced with drones-eye videos of their projects. Some covers of the books laid out on a table showed the lush vegetation covering their PARKROYAL on Pickering, while others showed a skyline of generic apartment blocks under an ominous orange sky. This prompted one visitor to ask if he could take both books, only to learn from WOHA's Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell that it was in fact one book in two halves: the 75-page Mega City, which focuses on problems; and the 309-page Garden City, which proposes solutions.
[Garden City | Mega City exhibition at the Skyscraper Museum | Photo by John Hill]

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