Area: 29,811 sqm
Photos: Patrick Bingham-Hall
Project's description on ArchDaily:
Photos: Patrick Bingham-Hall
Project's description on ArchDaily:
Singapore-based WOHA Architects have long been advocates of the ultimate ‘green city’ – one that would be comprised of more vegetation than if it were left as wilderness – and the PARKROYAL on Pickering was designed as a hotel-as-garden that actually doubled the green-growing potential of its site.
Massive curvaceous sky-gardens, draped with tropical plants and
supporting swathes of frangipani and palm trees, are cantilevered at
every fourth level between the blocks of guest rooms. Greenery
flourishes throughout the entire complex, and the trees and gardens of
the hotel appears to merge with those of the adjoining park as one
continuous sweep of urban parkland.
Most of Singapore’s recent architecture – especially in and around the
city centre – is nothing more than generic and can be seen anywhere in
the world, regardless of climate and culture. An equilibrium point of
architectural anonymity has been derived from a number of factors –
corporate and bureaucratic risk-avoidance, a desire to promote a global
(homogenous) image rather than local, and the ubiquity of semi-famous
international architects – but a uniquely progressive tropical city has
been sold short.
WOHA paid no attention to the placeless blandness of the modern
Singapore skyline, and finally the city has a uniquely expressive urban
landmark that reinterprets and reinvigorates its location. The PARKROYAL
on Pickering was a purely commercial development, with well-defined
budgetary and programmatic constraints. But as with many of WOHA’s
projects built throughout Asia over the last decade, the hotel performs
unambiguously as a public building.
WOHA are reconciling the excessive (and almost exclusively privately funded) construction of 21st
century Asian cities with the remediation of the built environment. And
WOHA are proposing that commercial architecture must respond to the
city as its civic duty… as public architecture.
The PARKROYAL on Pickering occupies a long and narrow site on the
western edge of the central business district, between Hong Lim Park and
the HDB apartment blocks of Chinatown, and overlooks the historic
shophouse district between the park and the Singapore River. The
development could thus respond to many separate and disparate
environments, it could provide public connections between those zones,
and as the building would be extremely visible – from and across the
parkland to the north – the architects could make a grand (and green)
urban gesture.
Perched above the open-to-all-the-elements pool deck of a five-storey
podium, a twelve-storey tower forms an E plan, so that all guest rooms
look north to the park and/or into the sky gardens, whilst the services
and the external connecting corridors were placed on the southern
elevation. As the hotel is ‘self-shaded’ – by the projecting sky gardens
and the adjacency of the three room-blocks – and shielded from early
morning and afternoon sun by adjoining buildings, the rooms could be
fully glazed (by low-emissivity glass) without external screening
devices.
The podium is a remarkable piece of architectural theatre: it presents a
monumental embellishment to the Singapore streetscape, and has thus
immediately achieved something that no other recent building has even
attempted. Referred to by WOHA as ‘topographical architecture’, the
stratified undulating layers of pre-cast concrete wrap around, through
and above the car park and the public areas of the hotel, as contour
lines weaving through a modular grid of cylindrical columns. Cascades
flow down from swimming pools and garden terraces on the podium roof,
over the ‘eroded rock-forms’ of the striated mass and into crevices and
ledges from which trees and vines can thrive.
The geological metaphor – green architecture at its most elemental – is
one that WOHA have used in many, if not all of their large-scale public
buildings, but here the geometry and the allusions are more nuanced and
more complex. The snaking bands of fluted concrete weave through the
length and breadth of the podium without interruption, and without
acknowledgment of the boundaries between exterior and interior.
The architecture is fundamentally organic, but the fluid geometry has a
loftier sense of purpose. The ascending vistas, the scenes above the
external and internal spaces of the ground floor (and the fifth floor
public area), whilst not spiritually preordained – the geometry is
topographic, not cosmic – draw unambiguously from the heavenly gaze to
be had within a mosque, a temple, or a church. It might be observed that
the business hotel plays a similar role in contemporary culture to that
of the cathedral in 17th century Europe, so it may not be
impudent to describe WOHA’s exuberant tableaux as Baroque: just a touch
of Borromini for the 21st century.
The elaborately composed timber mouldings above the reception area
reveal WOHA’s fondness for utilising crafted ornament as interior
design, thus incorporating the traditions of vernacular Asia within the
modern city. However, the decorative forms of the PARKROYAL on Pickering
tangibly pay homage to the lingering legacy of the mosques of the Moors
and the Persians, to the exotic patterning of Isfahan and the Alhambra.
The great volume of the porte-cochere appears to be inordinately
over-scaled in terms of its perceived functions – a drop-off zone for
hotel guests and an entry to the car park – but it has a grander
purpose, a larger agenda. The space serves as a link, as an axis,
between two distinctive and discrete areas of the city: Chinatown and
the apartment blocks to the south, and Hong Lim Park and the commercial
district to the north. A visual connection has been established by the
monumental void, as it effectively constitutes a ceremonial gateway
between the precincts.
WOHA’s desire to restore a feeling of community to Asian cities is
crucial to their architecture, and reciprocity is intrinsic to their
vision of the city at large and to their projects in particular. The
PARKROYAL on Pickering is a very public and very Singaporean hotel. The
scale of the architecture responds to the intricacies of the city: the
height of the ubiquitous tree canopies, the size and orientation of the
adjoining tower blocks, and the proportions of the historic
streetscapes.
WOHA calibrated the massing and the details so that the entire
development retains a human scale at all times, in stark contrast to
all-pervading abstraction of the city’s office buildings. The podium
mirrors the density and height of the shophouses across Hong Lim Park,
the raintrees of the park frame the podium and screen the blocks of
guest rooms above, and the mass of the building is horizontally
segmented by the great open verandah on the fifth floor and by the
projecting shelves of the sky gardens above.
The over-riding concept was that of a building-as-garden for an
idealised green city. As WOHA say… “We wanted to recreate an urban
street scale, so that people walking and driving could pick up
interesting details. And we wanted to work with the building’s mass and
appearance, so we could avoid the usual city scale of
building-as-silhouette, and so we could implement a garden-themed
aesthetic.” text by Patrick Bingham-Hall
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