Skyrise Greenery Commemorative Stamps featuring LKCNHM Building
The Singapore Post (SingPost) has launched the Skyrise Greenery Stamp Series featuring the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum (LKCNHM) building! With its sprawling greenery, our museum building is among the most quintessential skyrise greenery projects in Singapore. Read on to learn more about our museum building design intent and the stamp issue.
Vertical greenery with a purpose
Designed by acclaimed architect Mok Wei Wei, our museum building looks like a moss-covered rock with angular cleaved sides. The façade’s focal point is a verdant cleft resembling a vegetated cliff landscape, filled with native species of trees, shrubs and ferns cascading down the side.
The plants are thoughtfully selected with an educational intent, introducing visitors to a combination of the common species and unfamiliar endangered species such as Calophyllum inophyllum and Eurycoma longifolia. Native cliff-dwelling coastal species populate the planting layers to emulate a typical cliff habitat on some of Singapore’s offshore islands.
There is a remarkable contrast in Mr Mok’s award-winning design, as he pointed out during an interview with The Straits Times in October 2020. “While you have thousands of static displays and storage of specimens and fossils, outside, with the moss-covered facade and lush greenery, you also see biodiverse life teeming amid the verdant foliage.”
The meaningful incorporation of vertical greenery in the museum not only softens the look of the monolith, but also reduces the heat absorption by the building, helping to cool it more efficiently. Our museum building design clinched the Excellence Award in the Skyrise Greenery Awards 2015 in the Community Facility category, as well as an Honourable Mention in the 16th SIA Architectural Design Awards 2016 under the Institutional Projects category.
A stamp of innovation and sustainability
Along Singapore’s journey to become a biophilic City in Garden, its greening efforts did not stop at lining up roadsides with trees or providing parks and gardens. Developers were also incentivised to incorporate biophilic design in the built environment, resulting in a growth in skyrise greenery projects.
Today, greenery is omnipresent in every part of Singapore’s built environment, and it reflects the national commitment to greening this dense city-state. Skyrise greenery adds a new dimension to integrate greenery into our urbanscapes, helping to transform what would have been a concrete jungle into a City in Nature. Besides the LKCNHM building, the stamp set features other iconic buildings with skyrise greenery built in the last ten years: the Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, Oasia Hotel Downtown, Kampung Admiralty, Jewel Changi Airport and SkyTerrace@Dawson. Vibrant and full of character on the outside, these six developments have inspired new possibilities in skyrise greenery, which encompasses both rooftop and vertical greenery.
Measuring at 81.6mm in height each, the Skyrise Greenery stamps go down in Singapore’s history as the tallest stamps ever issued. The stamp set also comes in Presentation Packs and Pre-cancelled First Day Covers. These are available for purchase at all post offices, philatelic stores and the Singpost online shop here while stocks last.