Designed to house 111,111 people in a checkerboard of 69-story buildings stacked on top of each other, the Permeable Lattice City takes the notion of high-density urbanism to an extreme. Its staggered arrangement of building blocks brings light and air to all parts of the complex, while providing spaces for sky gardens and communal facilities connected vertically by multi-cabin elevators and people movers. Imagine a city grid turned vertical and you get an idea of what Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell, the partners of the Singapore-based firm WOHA, have in mind with this XXL-size project, which they developed as a research tool. 

In recent decades, Southeast Asia has become a vibrant laboratory of high-density urbanism with places such as Singapore, Bangkok, and Hong Kong packing more people into taller buildings on smaller parcels of land. If built, the Permeable Lattice City would provide 17 square kilometers of gross floor area on a site that is just 1 square kilometer. Garden City Mega City, an exhibition that opened on March 23 at the Skyscraper Museum in Manhattan and runs through September 4, looks at 12 high-rise projects by WOHA and challenges Americans’ ideas of what it means to live in close quarters.