A Twisting Tower For Taipei

They wanted to bring some greenery to a city short on trees, so a father-and-son team is building high-rise apartments with lush gardens on every level.

- Ralph Jennings

Taipei teems with sparkly new apartment towers, but one ritzy building headed for completion this year is naturally getting a lot of attention. The unusual corkscrew-shaped structure allows for 23,000 trees and plants to grow on the expansive balconies, giving each of the 40 apartments a woodsy private garden.

The father-and-son team that runs Taipei based developer BES Engineering sprouted the idea for the 21-story building as a way to bring some greenery to the city of 2.7 million. Most residents live in high-rises, and the city is so densely populated that few streets are treelined. Pocket parks provide what little green space there is, and they’re sometimes so small you can throw a ball from one end to the other.

The developers want to take Taiwan back to when it was greener, says Eliot Shen, 40, project manager for the building and a company director. When his father, Shen Ching-jing, 71, the parent company’s chairman, was growing up in the hills of Taiwan’s now largely industrialized Hsinchu County, “Taiwan had a simpler life, and there wasn’t that much industrialization,” Eliot says. “So in the mountains, along the river, nature used to be your main entertainment, your playmate.” The next generation had a lot less of that nature and “so my father was considering, ‘How should we do this? What can we do to help society?’ ” The answer: Tao Zhu Yin Yuan, the name of the Taipei tower. It translates to “the Hidden Garden of Tao Zhu.”