‘Hotel in nature’: Inside the world’s best new skyscraper

By Oscar Holland, CNN

Singapore (CNN) — Tropical plants creep up vast structural columns and dangle from ledges, hundreds of feet above the ground. Guests lounge around a lagoon-like swimming pool nestled away from the scorching midday sun. A series of soaring terraces sit within the tower’s frame, like caverns carved into a mountainside.

This is Singapore’s Pan Pacific Orchard, which has just been named the world’s best new tall building by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH). Announcing the award in a press release Wednesday, the industry group described the tower as a “hotel in nature” that demonstrated a “groundbreaking approach to high-density urbanism.”

Despite the lofty accolades, the lush open-air cavities of the 461-foot-high structure feel surprisingly intimate. “You experience the hotel not as a very big building, but at more of a neighborhood scale,” said architect Hong Wei Phua of WOHA, the Singaporean firm behind the design, as he toured CNN around the site on Thursday.

The unique design comprises a series of L-shaped volumes that divide the tower into four distinct stacks, freeing up space for urban gardens and greenery. Each of the four terraces is based on a different motif relating to Singapore’s tropical environment: forests, beaches, gardens and clouds, in ascending order.

The ground-level “Forest Terrace,” the only one accessible to passersby, features a cascading water feature and dozens of plant species, many of which are native to the island nation. Phua said it was designed as a public gesture that set the design apart from more conventional “podium and tower” high-rise hotels.

“Instead of arriving at a podium — into an internalized space, or a labyrinth of rooms and passages — you enter into a forest space,” he said, describing it as an “oasis away from the hustle and bustle” of Orchard, Singapore’s famously busy shopping district.

Moving up through the building, the elevated “Beach Terrace” contains a pool surrounded by palms; the “Garden Terrace” offers walking paths around a rectangular lawn; and the “Cloud Terrace,” in the building’s upper reaches, serves as a verdant event space overlooking the city.

Covered yet open-air (an essential quality in the country’s warm, humid and frequently stormy climate), each stratum acts as a giant sunshade, or rain shield, for the one below.

Many of the hotel’s 347 rooms include balconies overlooking the landscaped areas. Owned and operated by Singaporean real estate giant UOL Group, the hotel also features a 400-seat ballroom, two restaurants and a “canopy” of rooftop solar panels.

Singapore has developed a reputation for nature-inspired (or “biophilic”) architecture in recent years, and was famously dubbed the “garden city” by the country’s founding father and former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew in the 1960s. Greenery is often seen spilling out from skyscrapers, crawling over urban facades or integrated into public infrastructure, and the 6-million-person city-state is now home to Asia’s largest timber building.

In some areas, Singapore’s strict building codes even require property developers to include large amounts of greenery when constructing new towers. In densely populated neighborhoods, like Orchard, these spaces — usually a combination of sky terraces, planter boxes, gardens and plant-covered walls — must be equivalent to the gross area of the entire site.

Combined, the green spaces at Pan Pacific Orchard amount to around three times more than this legal minimum.

For WOHA, which has designed several other biophilic buildings in Singapore (as well as a housing complex for senior citizens named “World Building of the Year” in 2018), providing green space is not just about satisfying planning regulations. In a press release acknowledging the CTBUH award, the firm’s founding director Mun Summ Wong said he believes “skyscrapers can serve as green lungs within dense urban environments.”

Founded in 2002, the CTBUH Awards recognize the best high-rise buildings and their architects. Other recent winners of the Best Tall Building Worldwide prize include One Vanderbilt Avenue, in New York City, and Australia’s Quay Quarter Tower, a building dubbed the world’s first “upcycled” skyscraper after architects 3XN retained more than two-thirds of the 1970s tower previously on the site.

“Pan Pacific Orchard represents the best in responsible vertical urbanism today,” said CTBUH’s CEO, Javier Quintana de Uña, in a statement.

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