2Amsterdam Brings a Forest Garden to Zuidas

What does nature look like in a place built to keep it out? At Zuidas, Amsterdam's high-rise business district, the answer has long been: minimal. Paved surfaces dominate, biodiversity is low, and the sensory richness of seasonal change barely registers. With Two Amsterdam, KCAP challenges that condition head-on, placing a densely planted Forest Garden between two repurposed 1980s office towers and making the experience of nature the centrepiece of a major mixed-use transformation.

A Natural Gathering Point, by Design

Corporate landscaping often defaults to decorative greenery: trimmed hedges, token planters, a strip of lawn. The Forest Garden at 2Amsterdam operates on a fundamentally different premise. Rather than softening the architecture, it establishes a complete landscape environment with its own spatial logic, microclimate and ecological diversity.

The garden occupies the sheltered ground between the twin towers, where shadow and enclosure define the growing conditions. KCAP responds to this context with a curated palette of shade-tolerant species, arranged in layers that range from low groundcover to full canopy. An undulating topography of planted mounds shapes the space into a sequence of intimate rooms, where the height and density of vegetation varies to create shifting degrees of enclosure. The effect is immersive: standing inside the garden, the surrounding towers recede, and the city feels distant.

At the centre, a sunny plaza breaks through like a clearing in the woods, catching the available light and offering a natural gathering point. An elevated path system meanders through the mounds, inviting visitors to move slowly, to pause, to sit. Pockets of seating accommodate everything from solo breaks to informal outdoor meetings.

Rainwater: Retained and Reused

Beneath its naturalistic surface, the Forest Garden performs serious technical work. The elevated path system doubles as a rainwater management device: water infiltrates into overflow areas alongside the paths before draining into a retention layer beneath the garden. That retention layer sits entirely above an underground parking garage, making the whole system a rooftop landscape in disguise.

During heavy rainfall, the system prevents flooding. During dry spells, it irrigates the planting from below. It is a quietly radical piece of climate-adaptive infrastructure, fully integrated into the landscape experience and entirely invisible to the visitor.

Matching the Rhythm of the District

If the garden offers retreat, the entrance square provides its counterpart: urban energy. Here, the material palette shifts to mineral. Hard paving dominates, but with deliberate interruptions. Sections of the surface are cut away, like missing pieces of a puzzle, and planted with groundcover, fine grasses and small-leafed trees that push up through the hardscape.

Generous terrace space runs along the tower façades, while a central circular bench anchors the square as a social meeting point. The design accommodates the pace and intensity of daily life at Zuidas while offering an inviting threshold between the district's public realm and the garden within.

Where Landscape Architecture Becomes Identity

Two Amsterdam demonstrates that the most transformative move in an urban retrofit is not always the most visible one. While the towers gain new facades, new floors and new programmes, it is the ground plane that fundamentally redefines how the complex is experienced. The Forest Garden turns a leftover space between buildings into the project's most distinctive asset, proving that even in the most built-up urban environments, landscape architecture can deliver not just amenity, but identity.

“The Forest Garden at 2Amsterdam makes nature tangible in the city” ​
​– Pieter Theuws, Landscape Architect

Project Photography

Project Drawings

Project Details

Location: Zuidas, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Client: Commerz Real Investmentgesellschaft (CRI) / Provast (delegated developer)

KCAP: Urban Design, Architecture & Landscape Architecture

Collaborators: Gemeente Amsterdam, J.P. van Eesteren, VDNDP, Copijn Boomspecialisten B.V., RHDHV, Deerns, Melia

Total Area: approx. 50,000m²

Programme: Transformation and extension of two 1980s office towers into mixed-use: 4-star hotel, A-class multi-tenant office (~20,000 m² LFA), sky bar, semi-public Forest Garden, underground parking garage (374 spaces)

Construction: 2018–2021

Photography Credits: KCAP & Aiste Rakauskaite

About KCAP

KCAP is a leading international design practice specializing in architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture. Founded in 1989 by Kees Christiaanse, the firm is today led by seven partners — Xavier Blaringhem, Jeroen Dirckx, Ruurd Gietema, Anouk Kuitenbrouwer, Irma van Oort, Ute Schneider, and Edward Schuurmans. From its offices in Rotterdam, Zurich, and Paris, KCAP’s team of over 100 international professionals works on a diverse portfolio of projects across Europe and Asia, shaping sustainable, human-centered environments at every scale.

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