New Vietnamese skyscraper designed to look like rice terraces to be built in Ho Chi Minh City

The 88-storey tower is inspired by Vietnam's striking landscape

The Empire City will consist of three skyscrapers placed on top of a garden mountain-inspired structure

Ho Chi Minh City’s “Empire City” is the latest design by an influential European architect in Asia to incorporate plants into physical man-made structures.

The complex located on the Saigon River will consist of three skyscrapers placed on top of a garden mountain-inspired structure. The tallest, the 88 Tower will reach a height of about 333 metres – far higher than the city’s current tallest building, the 262-metre Bitexco Financial Tower. Its 88 floors will contain residences, office-space, a hotel and a public observation deck.

Continuing the garden-theme, German-born architect Ole Scheeren, famous for designing the CTBUH-award winning CCTV building in Beijing, has created a multi-level platform in the middle of the tower that will play host to the “sky forest”, an inside/outside garden inspired by Vietnam‘s famous terraced rice fields.

Plans for Empire City have been unveiled fresh off the completion of Scheeren’s firm’s three other Asian developments this year: the MahaNakhon skyscraper in Bangkok, the DUO towers in Singapore and the Guardian Art Center in Beijing.

Garden Architecture – or vertical gardens, are becoming increasingly common in Vietnam. Empire City will join a Vo Trong Nghia Architects-designed concrete vertical garden house and the five-star Rex Hotel, with its massive five-storey planters in Ho Chi Minh.

In the rest of East Asia there is a similar movement. The Clearpoint Residencies, near Colombo, Sri Lanka are set to become the tallest garden-structure in the world, the Hotel Icon in Hong Kong recently completed an installation of 8,603 plants (71 species) on the wall of its central lobby. While Singapore’s Gardens By The Bay has won countless architecture awards for bringing together cityscape and nature.