After years of anticipation, Singapore’s stunning new State Court building has recently been completed! The building was designed by Serie & Multiply Architects (with local partners CPG Consultants).
I have been looking forward to see this building come together since first seeing the incredible design concept years ago, and have watched the construction site with anticipation over the years. The tower is visually striking with incredible depth and materiality. It’s one of the best new skyscrapers I’ve seen in years!
The skyscraper courthouse is conceived as an open structural framework with externalised garden circulation spaces and interior spaces set onto the framework like individual objects. It’s a programmatic diagram uniquely suitable for the tropical climate, and symbolically visible to the general public.
The individual courtrooms are clad in fluted clay-tone precast concrete panels, impeccably detailed and recalling the terracotta rooftops of the surrounding district.
The massive 150 metre tall structure is made elegant by a formal division into two tower blocks, the wider tower for the freestanding courtrooms, and an adjoining slimmer block for the judges chambers and ancillary facilities. The structures are conjoined by a series of glass bridges.
The slim tower faces the city, and is clad in a refined curtain wall that evokes moiré patterns with a subtly distorted grid.
The building acts as an extension to the existing brutalist state court building (built in 1975), and complements it well without being overly sensitive.
It is still rare to see a sustainable and climactically appropriate building that is also architecturally significant. But this one ticks all the boxes!
The designers behind this building, Serie and Multiply also collaborated on some other remarkable buildings that were completed recently, including the net-zero-energy architecture building at the National University of Singapore and an urban oasis in Punggol.
Images by Jonathan Choe
