Rising above the hip Tanjong Pagar district in downtown Singapore is a striking crimson tower quite unlike any structure ever built- the new Oasia Hotel Downtown by Singaporean architectural firm WOHA.
Oasia is one of a handful of high-rise buildings around the world to eschew the internationally proliferated modernist typology of the sealed international-style glass box for culturally and climactically specific skyscrapers, grounded in their specific contexts. Remarkably, there are still very few examples of contextuality in high-rise architecture, primarily limited to the harsh climates of the Middle East and tropical Asia. These represent a surprisingly sparse application of the post-modern critical regionalism on cookie-cutter faux modernist tall structures which have been propagated across the world at an exponentially increasing rate.
Within the oeuvre of WOHA Architects are a number of contemporary regionalist high-rise structures designed with a profound understanding of the tropical climate and Asian cultures. These buildings act as prototypologies of the skyscraper as vertical extensions of the city with multiple tiers of public spaces, new urban greenery, and sky-rise naturally ventilated spaces for the hyper-dense Asian megacity.
Oasia Hotel Downtown (also known as PS100) expands on these typologies with a porous, green tower on a dense urban site. The tower consists of three tiers of vertically stacked ‘L’ shaped plans, eschewing the typical stacked plate climactically-controlled skyscraper for a high-rise microcosm of the city with multiple ground levels providing ample public and green spaces. This also means that every unit of the one-room-thick building opens up to a city view on one side, and a multi-storey skygarden on the other side.
The multi-red-tone double-skin facade system acts as an environmental buffer, blocking the harsh tropical sun from heating the hotel rooms and sky terraces. It also serves to blur the transition between air-conditioned interior spaces, naturally ventilated public spaces, and the exterior of the building.
The stunning crimson metal mesh facade will soon be covered in its 200m entirety with dozens of species of creeping and flowering vines, which combined with the generous skygardens and rooftop gardens means that 750% of the original site area is given back to new urban greenery.
Atop the building sits a spectacular roof crown, the 4th stack in the tier. The open-air space with two swimming pools for hotel guests is sheathed by a curvilinear continuation of the building facade, terminating at a giant ring-beam oculus. It demonstrates the opportunity to create green public spaces in dense cities, often much more spectacular than a similar space on grade.
The crowd pleasing, comfy interiors of over 300 hotel rooms and public spaces were designed by the trendy Patricia Urquiola, and features many of her iconic furniture designs. The spaces feature a rich material palette of timber, colourful tiles and textiles, and iPhone-esque rose gold metallic finishes.
This groundbreaking building represents the future of cities- where modernist mono-use parcellated urban plans are replaced with vertical integrated metropolises where vibrant urban life of the increasingly congested ground plane is replicated in the sky, within culturally and climatically appropriate buildings.
Images by Jonathan Choe unless otherwise stated. The views expressed in this post are solely my own and do not represent the views of my employer.
