Future Island

Abstract

This article explores Singapore's Gardens by the Bay as a sci-fi botany fantasy and a postcolonial super garden of the twenty-first century. The Gardens presents an island botany complex that internalizes imperial horticultural display for an electric tropicality powered by biodiversity, sustainable energy, and a global ambition for the postcolony. Its award-winning cooled conservatories and Supertree Grove are all emblems of this futuristic vision. Using the architectural and botanical performance of the Gardens as the basis for reading this complex, Lim considers its cool design and sensory logics as an aesthetic and vision of transnational performance in the twenty first century. This is a new iteration of island performance that also marks Singapore's allegorical transmogrification from tropical colony to global city to transnational island.

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