PARKROYAL on Pickering is a 2013 project by WOHA located in Singapore, Singapore. This glossy hotel is complemented by tropical sky-gardens and wave-like precast concrete that have been integrated throughout the exterior and public areas to create a power-play between organic and inorganic aesthetics. 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.

Comments