Redevelopment of Faber House

The redevelopment of Faber House is a striking new project on Orchard Road’s most prominent junction. The mixed-use development comprises an 18-storey hotel with commercial and retail spaces.

Acting as a gateway to the Somerset precinct, it presents a memorable image to the bustling Cairnhill intersection with a 15-storey cascading waterfall and cliff-like, verdant vertical landscape set into the façade, visually extending the green terraces of WOHA’s neighbouring development Design Orchard. The innovative and unique vertical landscape, with pavilions, staircases and activities connects all the hotel levels.

The lower levels of the development make a major contribution to the public realm via new public spaces, gardens and facilities. The Urban Verandah, a fully public space at the third level, will host art and design programming and facilitates future connections to surrounding developments. Lifestyle banking, food and beverage, and retail stores complete the public space facilities.

The hotel experience starts at the 5th level with a lobby adjoining a sky terrace and infinity pool looking over Orchard Road. Above, naturally-ventilated guestroom circulation flows around the vertical landscape, leading to compact but elegant rooms. The hotel is crowned by a rooftop bar and restaurant.

The Reserve Residences

The Reserve Residences is a nature-inspired, nature-positive development and the new southern gateway to the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Singapore’s largest surviving primary rainforest. It integrates residences, serviced residences, retail and community spaces with a bus interchange and is directly connected underground to the Beauty World MRT station.

The design stacks various uses vertically, creating multiple ground levels with public and resident amenities, gardens and facilities. This strategy multiplies community spaces throughout the development, providing high-density, high-amenity live-work-play-learn spaces embedded in lush sky greenery.

The expansive and diverse landscaping connects to the greenery of the surrounding nature reserves and extends the natural forest into the urban fabric. It enlarges the nature reserve’s ecological capacity and strengthens the region’s biodiversity.

The facade, reminiscent of the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve’s picturesque re-wilded quarries, blends stone walls with hanging gardens around the development’s perimeter, evoking a sense of place while shading the building interiors. Passive strategies (natural ventilation, daylighting, sunshading, breezeways and landscaping) in combination with active strategies (hybrid cooling, HVLS fans) create a comfortable environment and reduce energy consumption.

The residences are tranquil havens clustered to form ‘Sky Villages’ amidst the highrise greenery. These elevated neighbourhoods encourage residents to get to know each other and create their own close-knit micro-communities within the development.

21 Carpenter

21 Carpenter is a 48-room heritage boutique hotel at the gateway to the historic Chinatown district, near the Singapore River. The hotel is built around a group of four conserved shophouses from 1936, with a contemporary rear extension.

The design of 21 Carpenter pays homage to the building’s history as a remittance house, the birthplace of Singapore as an international financial hub. An important part of the history of the building, beautifully poetic phrases from remittance letters, sent home by Chinese labourers, were incorporated into the art façade of the new extension, and inside the hotel.

The perforated aluminium art façade panels act as a skin for the building which fully shades the inner envelope, preventing it from heating up in the sun. Photovoltaic panels on the roof help the hotel produce its own energy, and a hybrid cooling system, combining fans and air-conditioning, further reduces power consumption.

The hotel has two landscaped terraces, greenery on its balconies and planting along the covered walkway. The plants create delight, improve the conditions of the neighbourhood and increase the environmental performance of the building.

2024

  • SIA Architectural Design Awards - Design of the Year

    awarded by Singapore Institute of Architects

Resort in Rawai

The 270-room resort is located on a seafront site, and encompasses a small hill with 270-degree views to the sea, nearby islands, coconut groves, the Phuket Town bay, and the mountains.

It is comprised of simple, elegant buildings that evoke Thai architecture in a very contemporary way. The design uses clusters of simple rectangular forms, lightened by elegant screens in timber, and embellished with intricate pavilions with screens that emulate Thai silk out of layers of metallic coloured anodised aluminium.

The resort is organized around a series of public spaces that are placed along an axis that connects the sea to the hilltop. Each public space has their own character, which defines a neighbourhood of rooms and facilties. The floral axis turns the hillside into a living textile, changing with the seasons, and providing a stunning foreground to the azure sea and islands behind.

The Pano

This was the winning entry in a limited competition to masterplan 4-hectares for a mixed-use development. The site, which lies along the Chao Phraya, is to be developed in 3 phases, beginning with a luxury condominium. This comprises a 53-storey tower and low-rise apartments gathered around a lotus pond which amplifies the sense of living by the water.

 

The architecture explores the issue of tropicality in high-rise buildings, using devices such as sun-screens, overhangs, and ample plantings on sky gardens. Additionally, this project tackles the problematic multi-storey car-park podium—common in Bangkok where underground parking is avoided due to high construction costs—by treating it as a rocky outcropping, using it to create topography on an otherwise flat site.

 

Wilkie Edge

This project is in Bras Basah – Bugis district, an arts, education and nightlife zone. New zoning allows media facades and advertisements, which are not allowed in the rest of the central district: the intent being to create night time buzz.

The area has a diverse mix of buildings of different eras and scales. To the north-east is a conservation area of 3 storey shophouses. Mt Sophia, to the north, is in transition from old houses and institutional buildings to dense 12 storey apartments. To the west are large podium and tower buildings from the 1980s. On the east are public housing slab blocks in bright colours. Urbanistically, we wanted to address the disjunctions in scale, and contribute to the buzz of the neighbourhood.

The brief and regulations encouraged a podium and stumpy tower, which was out of scale with the fine textured shophouses. Instead we developed a finely textured skin that filled the planning envelope, and carved out volumes that created silhouettes that are in dialogue with the scale of the buildings around them. These volumes open up light and air to the form, and allowed multiple sky gardens and terraces to be created at different levels. The carved out surfaces are aluminium sunshades and screens, which create a vertical proportion and texture relating to the historic shophouse facades. The silvery skin is a folded, perforated skin that changes with the light conditions, from silver solidity to a misty transparency.

The masterplan designated the corner as an “illuminated node”. Rather than a screen applied to the building, the media façade is integrated into the architecture. A unique LED projection system called A:Amp (Advertising Amplifier) was developed by realities:united which creates a soft light like watercolour on the façade.

Gilstead Brooks

This cluster housing project was designed in 2001, placing 28 houses on a site that previously had 2 bungalows on it. The houses are compact terrace and semi-detached houses arranged around a central landscaped pool. The site was conceived as strips that slip and slide alongside each other, allowing the terrace houses to conform to the irregular site profile. This detailing developed the concept at various scales, such as the sun shading and fenestration.

Odeon Towers Extension

This commercial project was designed in 2001 and involves making use of spare floor area created in an existing building by changes in area calculation methods of the planning regulations. A new low-rise showroom and retail element is constructed on an existing open space that is currently under-utilised.

A signage wall wraps the party wall of an adjoining development and creates an eye-catching entry statement that evokes memories of the Odeon cinema that used to occupy the site. A rooftop garden provides a place for product launches for the showroom and gives greenery and shade to this inner-city site.

NS Square

NS Square will replace the existing Float @ Marina Bay as an event venue featuring a National Service-themed gallery, community sports facilities and a public waterfront promenade.

A new permanent stage deck will replace the existing floating platform, with a grandstand of 30,000 seats curving around the stage to provide an uninterrupted line-of-sight as well as bring spectators closer to the ‘action’. The space can be configured for events of different scales and types, such as concerts, performances, sporting activities and competitions. When not in use for events, the stage will be transformed into multi-purpose space for community activities. The public can enjoy a new waterfront promenade in front of the stage that will form part of the continuous loop around Marina Bay.

Leveraging on the unique waterfront location, NS Square will feature a water sports facility to support dragon boating, canoeing and kayaking. There will also be a swimming pool and water play areas for the public to enjoy. The development will incorporate a gallery that showcases Singapore’s National Service story in a mix of open and enclosed exhibition spaces.

NS Square will be the central focus Singapore’s new downtown and reinforces its identity  as a vibrant, resilient and sustainable city state.

Duxton Plain Competition

WOHA explored strategies of high-density living in a high-rise tropical environment, and urban strategies unique to the site. A central issue to the design was what Singaporean public housing should be. WOHA proposed that for subsidised housing, a higher degree of community interaction would be encouraged, building of community spirit. The design facilitated several scales of interaction.

At city level, a strong image on the skyline of the cluster of towers with hanging gardens was proposed. At the neighbourhood level, a strong street edge was made based on the shophouse structural bay and form, with commercial activities, a five-foot way, and the public park extended under the towers the popular Duxton Plain Park. This form enhanced the Chinatown busy street edge, while providing recreational areas within the site for public use. Views down the historic streets were improved by the rhythm and scale of the street-edge.

At village level, the “sky villages” were created – homes are placed in a high-rise community, linked by “sky streets” and “sky parks”. The covered sky streets led from the local village to the high-speed lifts, which brought the inhabitants down to street level. Sky parks were provided as places for recreation and socialising. In these common areas, people would be brought into contact in a natural way, and social bonds formed.