PROJECT REPORT: TALL BUILDINGS
and offices in levels above. The client initially wanted two towers, being unconvinced they could meet their stringent efficiency requirements using a single lift core for both differing sets of functions. However, following “a number of engagements” between architect and client throughout the competition, “to their credit, they listened, and opened up,” says Yang. The designers persuaded them that a ‘vertical city’ single tower option, with an integrated garden space, was a valid idea, but the client added a caveat: “Prove it to us you can make it work, and we’ll take a look.”
A further example of how CapitaLand ‘opened up’ was how – via a desire to be a “good citizen, to give back to the community” – they approached opening the Green Oasis as well as retail and F&B to the public. The architect says this commitment is also evidenced by the fact they “have never had a single discussion about cutting the green space out, or downplaying the ambition,” and gives credit to the client for investing in such a generous space with no easily quantifiable return. The efficiency challenge when stacking the offices above the service apartments in one tower, says Yang, was that the office component would be paying for lifts that also service the hotel floors, and that there was ‘wasted’ space in the atrium, from a planning point of view. So the offices “needed to be that much more efficient to make up for it.” He adds: “It’s not cut and dried that a single tower scheme would be more efficient; it was a rigorous exercise in proving that.” BIG’s proposal made the most of the constrained, and expensive, site adjacent to Raffles Place, the centre of Singapore’s CBD: “We were trying to make the most compact solution; this was one of the last sites of the historic downtown that was available for development.” He explains further: “The sightlines were very challenging, so there was an entire exercise of being able to clean that up and imagine what a very compact, efficient tower might look like.” As a result of fitting neatly into the plot, and also facilitating the required elevations, the building has a five-faced shape on plan, a truncated square resembling a cut diamond. The facade is animated, and its otherwise monolithic nature disrupted, by the 6 metre-wide apertures formed by distorting its aluminum vertical fins in three areas to provide porosity – the ground level podium, the atrium, and the roof garden. As
ADF NOVEMBER 2021
the architects say, this creates a “dynamic interplay of orthogonal lines and lush greenery” ranging across the height of the building. Yang adds that it’s “almost a little like a tropical realisation of classic New York modernism.”
Programme
The architect calls the project a “reinterpretation of the modernist skyscraper,” with a new take on the ‘live, work, play’ mixed use concept. In itself, the geometry of the tower is relatively strict, and typical floor plates range from 22,200 to 23,300 ft2
(2062 m2 to 2164 m2 ). But
within those confines, there’s an unusually diverse mix of uses – an “incredible diversity of life,” in the words of Yang. The 299-unit ‘Citadines’ serviced residence section sits below the atrium, which in turn connects to 635,000 ft2
of Grade A office
space above. Then there’s a further green “rooftop experience,” with an Urban Farm growing produce for a top floor food and beverage area, including a high-end restaurant. There’s also a Sky Cube events space topping off the building.
The podium contains the entrance atrium and retail, and on its roof sit amenities for residents, including outdoor gardens, a running track, and swimming pools. Levels two and three contain the ‘food centre,’ which conjures up some of the former buzz and atmosphere of the popular Golden Shoe ‘hawker centre’ – the food hall within a 1980s car park which previously occupied the site, selling a wide range of affordable meals to locals.
The office levels have generous 3.2 metre floor to ceiling heights, which should provide pleasant as well as efficient space for anchor tenant, JP Morgan.
Ground level There was a “holistic agenda between the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), us and the client to connect in a very real and public way,” says Yang, “back to Raffles Place and the green lawn space there.” So the building’s ground level was designed to be porous, and “an extension to that park.” A further goal behind this was to connect the building to the now-pedestrianised former ‘Market Street’ that runs alongside.
Another key ground floor element which is part of this connectivity is the City Room, an 18 metre high structure which sits directly outside the main lobby but within the podium, as a “sheltered space dedicated to public use.” Helping provide
© Fabian Ong
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© Fabian Ong
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