At first sight, Milroy Perera’s vision of the world’s tallest residential vertical garden at Clearpoint Residencies in Sri Lanka seems ridiculous. The website exhorts you to “experience sheer luxury without compromising on one’s preferred lifestyle.”

Which would all be very well, but in life you sometimes have to compromise. If you took the same attitude in other aspects of life you could install heating on your bicycle (please, please don’t say this already exists) or flumes in your office. The truth is that you can’t pick and choose the best of both worlds from different lifestyles. If, like me, your lifestyle choices involve cycling everywhere, then you take the good with the bad. On some days, you’re flying down a hill with the wind in your hair and on other days you’re being soaked from head to toe by a giant lorry driving too closely, through a giant puddle.

But there’s actually something pretty special about a balcony garden. For apartment dwellers, it’s their little bit of private outdoor space and for many, their best opportunity to grow flowers, herbs or even vegetables. My friend has even managed to transform a crumbling balcony in a communist apartment block in Bulgaria into a couple of square feet of paradise. So the only difference with the Clearpoint tower is that the balcony terrace gardens come pre-planted, with inbuilt self-sustaining watering systems that will utilise grey water recycled from showers and sinks.

The balcony gardens will also have a whole host of other advantages in Sri Lanka’s climate, providing shade, buffering radiant heat, and filtering the air for dust and carbon dioxide before it enters the apartment. This, along with a range of other sustainable energy technologies like solar panels, will help to reduce the need to use air conditioners and ventilation systems, and thereby reduce energy demand in the apartments.

Sri Lankan readers may be interested to know that the building is expected to be completed by 2015. 

Image Source: Clearpoint Residencies