PARKROYAL on Pickering WOHA 新加坡 酒店设计

PARKROYAL on

Pickering / WOHA

?

?

?

Patrick Bingham-Hall

Architects:

WOHA

Location:

Singapore

,

Singapore

Project Team:

Wong Mun Summ, Richard

Hassell, Donovan Soon, Sim Choon Heok,

Toh Hua Jack, Bernard Lee, Amber Dar

Wagh, Mappaudang Ridwan Saleh, Evelyn

Ng, John Paul Gonzalez, Josephine Isip,

Goh Kai Shien, Luu Dieu Khanh, Tan Szue

Hann, Alen Low, Pham Sing Yeong,

Vanessa Ong, Novita Johana, Andre Kumar

Alexander

Area:

29,811 sqm

Year:

2013

Photographs:

Patrick Bingham-Hall

Management Company:

Pan Pacific Hotels

Group

Civil & Structural Engineering:

TEP

Consultants Pte Ltd

Mechanical & Electrical Engineering:

BECA

Carter Hollings & Ferner (S. E. Asia) Pte Ltd

Quantity Surveyors:

Rider Levett Bucknall

LLP

Lighting Consultant:

Lighting Planners

Associates (S) Pte Ltd

Landscape Consultant:

Tierra Design (S) Pte

Ltd

Fa?

ade Consultant:

Meinhardt Facade

Technology (S) Pte Ltd

Greenmark Consultant:

LJ Energy Pte Ltd

Acoustic Consultant:

CCW Associates Pte

Ltd

Signage Consultant:

Design Objectives Pte

Ltd

Kitchen Consultant:

KI Consultant Pte Ltd

Main Contractor:

Tiong Seng Contractors

(Pte) Ltd

Client:

UOL Group Limited

Section

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.

?

Patrick Bingham-Hall

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.

?

Patrick Bingham-Hall

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.

?

Patrick Bingham- Hall

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.

?

Patrick Bingham-Hall

WOHA are reconciling the excessive (and

almost exclusively privately funded)

construction of 21

st

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.

?

Patrick Bingham-Hall

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.

?

Patrick Bingham-Hall

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.

?

Patrick Bingham-Hall

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.

?

Patrick Bingham-Hall

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.

?

Patrick Bingham-Hall

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 17

century Europe, so

it may not be impudent to describe WOHA?s

exuberant tableaux as Baroque: just a touch of

Borromini for the 21

century.

st

th

5th Storey Plan

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.

?

Patrick Bingham-Hall

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.