While vertical gardening may be a more recent obsession, vertical living has been going on for a long time. Both are innovative responses to maximizing the space needed to nurture living things in crowded urban areas.

Growing six tiers of strawberries in a reclaimed pallet is one thing, designing an efficient way to hold hundreds of people in a building that by design takes up a small footprint of real estate is another. While those who have raised orchids may disagree, to thrive human beings require more intricate care than plants.

Winner of the eVolo Magazine 2015 Skyscraper Competition, Polish design firm BOMP proposed an urban mega-structure that puts amenities like rock climbing walls to shame. Their project, Essence Skyscraper, features diverse natural habitats, or as the designers describe it, a secret garden that combines architecture and a nature.

Essence Skyscraper is not a space to live in, but rather an escape hatch from the metropolitan hustle. You might call it a secret garden, but it is much more than that. It is as if the building plucked the natural beauty from outside the city and placed it all into a tidy vertical structure–swapping a concrete jungle for a verdant one.

“The main goal of the project is to position non-architectural phenomena in a dense, urban fabric, by using the building as a neutral background,” explain the designers. “An inspiration rooted in the nature allowed to form a representation of external worlds in a shape of the vertical structure.”

The building itself contains eleven overlapping natural interior landscapes: an underwater area, the ocean, a jungle, a swamp, the mountains, a cave, a waterfall, a glacier and more. Each environment is designed to flow naturally into the other, creating what the designers call a “roam-like” experience. And when in roam…

It’s tempting to compare this concept to visiting the real-life landscapes that the building recreates. But,unlike what exists in the natural world, Essence Skyscraper is really its own landscape, with its own visual, acoustic, thermal, olfactory and kinetic stimulation.

So beyond a structure designed for escaping hectic city life, Essence Skyscraper is a world in and of itself.

All images courtesy of eVolvo.