High in the bloated central business district of Utrecht, the Netherlands, an unexpected tenant has taken root inside a 23-story office building. Occupying two middle floors of the aptly named Central Park development, the towering indoor garden contains more than 1,500 plants and trees and is divided by a stone-lined stream. The park serves tenants such as McDonald’s Netherlands and Dutch bank ABN AMRO in an office building accessible to the public via an elevated walkway from nearby Utrecht Centraal railway station.
The surreal interior landscape is the result of a collaboration between Amsterdam-based green design agency MOSS (Makers of Sustainable Spaces), Rotterdam-based Group A architects, developers Angelo Gordon and APF, as well as dozens of architects, landscapers and technical consultants.
“We’d sit in engineering meetings years in advance to plan irrigation, lighting, and integrated structural support,” says Kelly Dieple, managing director of MOSS. “If the discussion only occurred at the end of the project, then this scale of green dreams would not be possible to achieve.”
Steel tension bars are added to load-bearing beams under garden trees and to platforms raised in the space to support their additional weight. The double-height curved glass panels, supported by anchors attached to the concrete floors, were assembled off-site and raised into place.