PROGRAM DIAGRAM ARCHITECTURE OMA SERIES
PROGRAM DIAGRAM ARCHITECTURE OMA FREE

They also serve as the circulation path leading to each core. The building volumes shade these spaces, which are meant to inspire community and are filled with greenery and water features.

PROGRAM DIAGRAM ARCHITECTURE OMA SERIES

This is in part achieved by an interconnected series of eight courtyards that knit the structures together, each with a slightly different program. “It's both defined and yet totally permeable,” says Scheeren, and he's right. Though the unified form is enormous by any measure, the effect on the ground, or from a balcony, is never oppressive. The megacores are made of six columns that help support the blocks. The points where the volumes overlap-again, hexagons-become the “megacores,” which contain services and circulation. “It's still a skyscraper, but it reads entirely differently,” says Scheeren. The architect varied the concrete buildings' height-among 6, 12, 18, and 24 stories-by stacking the volumes in different configurations. This allowed for around 200 feet of space between the towers and views out-to the tropical forest, ocean, and other buildings nearby-at every turn. Taking blocks 230 feet long and 54 feet deep, he arranged them in hexagons and then rotated them 120 degrees. Instead, he “toppled the towers,” making the vertical horizontal. Originally, CapitaLand proposed 12 towers for the site, each 24 stories tall, which would have resulted in about 115 feet of residual space between the towers, “like a mini-Manhattan in the middle of nowhere,” says Scheeren. It sits in a lush greenbelt to the west of the downtown core, about two miles from the National University of Singapore and a mile from the ocean.

In 2007, CapitaLand, the largest residential developer in Singapore, behind Hadid's project and many others, commissioned Scheeren to design what became the Interlace. The question he wanted to answer was: “How could we gain some of these qualities back so there is a sense of togetherness and a texture that expresses that visually?” “There is a need for increased density and also a sense of privacy and individuality,” says the architect, who believes that both the look and feel of a village can be maintained at a large scale. Singapore is home to 5.3 million people, with the government projecting there will be 6.9 million by 2030.

PROGRAM DIAGRAM ARCHITECTURE OMA FREE

Scheeren believed he could break free of these constraints even while working within them. “If you do not hit certain efficiency targets, you simply cannot build.” This economic pressure has forced architects into a design “straightjacket,” he says. “Singapore is one of the most refined and ruthless markets,” says Scheeren. A good example is d'Leedon, Zaha Hadid's seven 36-story residential towers, still under construction, that show almost no sign of their creator's outrageous signature. This leads to “self-referential, isolated, vertical extrusions that leave very little sense of community,” says Scheeren. Singapore is crowded with drab residential high-rises-any attempt at “design,” if it was there to begin with, has been whitewashed by a slavish adherence to developers' strict economic-efficiency ratios. The Interlace is smart architecture, and its intelligence is inextricable from its context. The building snakes around and through its roughly rectangular 20-acre site like a line of toppled dominoes.īut this isn't big for big's sake. The flush, white-painted concrete facades are occasionally interrupted by slender horizontal balconies, from which greenery will cascade as it grows. It is a breathtaking one, made up of 31 six-story rectangular blocks that appear woven, and are arranged on top of each other at angles.

Once you have a certain amount of success, you are only associated with that success,” says Scheeren.Īt a superficial glance, the Interlace-a 1.8 million-square-foot apartment complex with 1,040 units-is another of these projects, the design of which Scheeren completed before he left OMA, that threatens to further pigeonhole the architect. “I think architects always battle an ironic position. In 2010, Scheeren left OMA to open his own firm, Buro Ole Scheeren, with offices in Beijing and Hong Kong, and he has continued this large-scale work with a mixed-use tower rising in Kuala Lumpur, another under construction in Singapore, and a cultural center in Beijing.

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