MeyerHouse

Along Meyer Road, in Singapore’s eastern residential enclaves, sits a condominium development housing 56 dwelling units adjacent to a 1 hectare forested park. The 5-storey with attic development is arrayed in a contiguous ‘C’ configuration with residences looking out onto a 50m by 75m internal forested garden that spills out onto the adjacent park.

Living spaces extend onto large outdoor rooms nestled amongst tall forest trees set amidst a formal English garden. Terracing gardens and water bodies cascade down onto a lower ground arrival level, opening up the subterranean arrival lobbies and facilities to natural daylight, ventilation and greenery.

From street level, the building is scaled to the proportions of a traditional French Chateau with a stately façade of customized louvers and panelling that envelops the entire form. The louvered façade is inclined to secure privacy for units from street level. The façade finishes extend onto the roof, creating an envelope that is sculptural and abstract.

Internally, the forested garden is cocooned by timber blinds that screen the residences imbuing the tranquil garden spaces with warmth and character. Within the garden, a long pool set centrally along the main axial views of the forested park reflect the tall trees and warm facades of the development. The pool is overlooked by guest and entertainment facilities that house a generous dining room, a cosy lounge and outdoor activity decks.

2023

  • Green Good Design Sustainability Awards - Winner

    Awarded by Chicago Atheneum in the Green Architecture category.

Alila Villas Bintan

The brief was conceived as an art-hobby resort-cum-weekend home located along the northern coast of Bintan island to reconnect urbanites with nature. A sensitive design approach of “camouflaged architecture” has been adopted, one where building is overtaken by landscaping, enabling flora and fauna to coexist with human habitation.

Comprising 12 beachfront residences and 52 hotel villas, the public area of the resort is designed to function like a public square, with its landmark roof structure acting like an orientating devise, analogous to that of a town hall’s clock tower. The art palette comprises of a community village at the forest ridge that crowns the development like a tropical acropolis. Accessible to the public, the art palette features a museum, art gallery, spa, boutiques and fine dining establishments that promote wholesome food harvested from the resort’s very own organic farm and orchard.

The project champions sustainable efforts on various levels. Physically, the development touches the ground lightly by following the natural slope of the site with minimal cut-and-fill construction; guest rooms are orientated to act as wind funnels for sea breezes, minimising the need for air-conditioning and all lower terraces serve as green roofs/gardens. As many trees as possible are conserved, with lightweight construction vehicles and human labour deployed wherever feasible. Only natural swimming pools and natural springs in which biological filters and hydroponic plants clarify and purify the water are designed in keeping with the surrounding lushly landscaped setting.

Pan Pacific Orchard

The design of Pan Pacific Orchard envisions a new prototype for high-rise tropical hospitality. This 23-storey 350-room building is a distinctive garden hotel, adding to the green and spectacle along Singapore’s Orchard Road shopping belt.

To overcome the limited site area and to break down the scale, the design stacks 4 distinct strata with 3 Sky Terraces inserted as elevated grounds with amenities surrounded by gardens. The guest rooms are split into 3 stacks configured in L-shaped stacks overlooking either the Sky Terraces or city.

The 1st stratum is designed as a Forest Terrace set between Claymore Road and Claymore Drive with a water plaza and cascades and edged by forest trees, creating a dramatic entrance and a memorable urban connection.

The 2nd stratum is conceived as a Beach Terrace, offering guests a tropical oasis, with meandering sandy beachfront and palm groves around an emerald lagoon, set against Orchard Road.

The 3rd stratum is set up as a Garden Terrace orientated towards the quiet residential estate of Claymore Hill. Flanked by the Bar and Lounge, the Terrace showcases a manicured garden, complete with verandah, lawn, fountains and garden.

The 4th stratum is envisaged as a Cloud Terrace comprising of a 400 seat ballroom and event lawn, surrounded by thin mirror pools and filigree planting, washed by natural light filtering through the PV roof canopy.

The interiors are designed to reinforce the experience of each strata, offering a unique boutique-scale hotel experience. Huge living green columns with creepers visually connects the 4 strata, juxtaposing against the stacked massing and lend the urban hotel with a touch of resort.

Crowne Plaza Changi Airport

Crowne Plaza Airport Hotel, at Terminal 3, Singapore, is designed to create a sensual “time-out” for the exhausted traveller – a quick shot of the steamy tropics, a taste of Singapore, new Asia, 24 hours a day.

Designed in 2006, the building “floats” on a delicate filigree floral cage that filters and softens the surroundings, filled with tropical vegetation. The guest rooms drift on a carpet of jungle, water, palms, suspended over the tangle of roads. Beneath the carpet the travellers are collected from the departure level, arrival hall and entrance road by sensuously flowing walls, and then gently guided towards service and hospitality spaces wrestled from the left over spaces between the roads.

The architecture and interior expression is derived from South-East Asian textiles and tropical jungle. The façade is a 3-dimensional batik fabric that provides 60% shading to the facade. The public areas are wrapped in flowing bands of timber veneer, glazed Thai tiles, Indonesian Batik and Chinese metal mesh. The ballroom is an abstracted forest under a ceiling of raintree canopies in perforated metal. Materials are intentionally rough, sensuous and intense, contrasting in colour, texture and solidity to counteract the blandness of commercial aviation environment.

2009

  • 3rd LIAS Awards for Excellence - Silver Winner

    Awarded by Landscape Industry Association (Singapore)

  • ULI Awards for Excellence: Asia Pacific - Winner

    Awarded by Urban Land Institute

  • Design & Engineering Safety Excellence Awards 2009 - Merit Award

    Commercial Category awarded by Building and Construction Authority

2008

  • Development of the Year 2008 - Winner

    Awarded by Hotel Investment Conference Asia Pacific (HICAP)

  • World's Best Airport Hotels 2008 - Finalist

    Awarded by ForbesTraveler.com

29 HongKong Street

WOHA’s own office in Singapore is housed in a converted shophouse near to the river.

Two adjacent units of the traditional building typology were merged into one to house the office’s growing needs for space. Apart from the more traditional office elements like studios and meeting rooms, 29 HongKong Street also accommodates a gallery (WOHAGA), extensive roof terraces and a fully equipped kitchen and lounge.

While the front facade is protected by conservation guidelines, the more recent extension in the rear allowed more substantial changes. The top floor, previously cramped under a pitch roof, was converted into double-storey loft like space.

The traditional element of the shophouse courtyard was maintained for visual connection between the studios as well as cross ventilation. It also acts as an experimental ground for ongoing research and development of green wall systems.

In the extensive fit-out works on the building’s interior, furniture designs from the old office were developed further, transporting aspects of the familiar environment and its atmosphere to the new location.

InterContinental Sanya Resort

The Intercontinental Sanya Resort is in Sanya, Hainan, China’s tropical island and comprises of a hotel with 350 rooms and related facilities. The hotel stretches from a busy entertainment spine to the natural forest of the rocky point.

One third of the rooms are located in a 10-storey curved linear block that frames the arrival space. Two thirds of the rooms are located in huge water courtyards, and are more resort-like in feel. These rooms are an innovative hybrid of detached villas and room blocks. Each room has a private open air garden bathroom, and a detached cabana that is reached via a bridge or garden. The cabanas sit within the huge watergardens, each a hectare in size.

The design combines masterplanning, landscape, architecture and interiors to set up a series of views and vistas to the sea, framed by coconut trees, reflected in water, and then reframed again with stone, timber and fabric, ensuring every room has a special view. The design of the various public areas varies from urban and formal to casual and beachy, allowing the hotel to address many different markets and customers.

The entire resort is designed as a patchwork of inhabited gardens, giving a foreground  to the views of the owner’s highrise apartments behind. The design is inspired by Chinese screens, palaces and compounds, interpreted in a contemporary fashion. The huge precast concrete screen is an aperiodic mathematical tiling.

The hotel is designed to sustainable principles. Passive energy saving design (large overhangs, natural light, cross-ventilation, shaded courtyards, and planted roofs), use of indigenous seasonal landscape and water conservation and recycling are some of the strategies used.

Singapore Institute of Technology

The SIT-Plot 1 campus is uniquely endowed with an existing secondary forest. The design capitalises on this green site asset by integrating its learning environments with biophilic indoor-outdoor tropical spaces. To forge an imageable “Campus-in-a-Park” identity, the academic blocks are organised as a chain of buildings encompassing the central forest courtyard that is transformed into an accessible Community Park. This serves as the heart of SIT, contributing to a strong sense of place that is characterised by memorable nodes for interaction, recreation and rejuvenation.

The design leverages on the site’s undulating terrain by creating two public ground levels that segregate vehicles from pedestrians, creating a people-friendly, car-lite campus. These fenceless, 24/7 publicly accessible ground levels are interconnected across the Punggol Digital District, linking shared carparks and a series of key public spaces.

SIT’s primary signature library building is strategically located at the prime intersection between New Punggol Road and the pedestrianised Campus Boulevard as a prominent urban landmark.

On the rooftops, photovoltaic panels are arrayed as a banner of sustainability over the entire campus. These serve as a key renewable energy source that powers SIT’s Multi-Energy Micro Grid located within Plot 1. Productivity features include precast facades and structural systems for the academic blocks and structural steel for the long span bridges.

Image Credit: Shiya Creative Studio

Enabling Village

The Enabling Village is a demonstration of heartland rejuvenation through adaptive reuse of the old Bukit Merah Vocational Institute / Employment & Employability Institute (e2i) in Redhill. The site was previously fenced-in, inward-looking and did not contribute to the neighbourhood. The Masterplan conceives the Village as a new community heart and opens up the space as a park to connect people with disabilities, residents and public.

The design removes all physical barriers, extends linkages and creates a variety of shared spaces, gardens and amenities, breathing life between and within buildings. A simple robust palette of finishes and motifs was adopted as a kit-of-parts system to stitch together surfaces and spaces of the new and existing.

The porous and accessible nature of the Enabling Village creates an inclusive environment, integrating people with disabilities as equal in the community.

2019

  • ArcAsia Awards for Architecture - Mention

    Category D (Conservation Projects) category, awarded by Architects Regional Council Asia (ARCASIA)

2017

  • 2017 Design for Asia Award - Grand Award with Special Mention

    Awarded by Hong Kong Design Centre

2016

  • President's Design Award - Design of the Year

    Awarded by DesignSingapore Council and Urban Redevelopment Authority

  • 16th SIA Architectural Design Awards 2016 - Design Award

    Special Categories, awarded by the Singapore Institute of Architects

  • BCA Universal Design Award - Winner (Platinum)

    Awarded by Building and Construction Authority, Singapore

CapitaMall Tianfu

Drawing references from Chengdu’s natural heritage, Capitamall Tianfu adopts a geological metaphor that is inspired by the rock formations, peaks and ridges of the city’s famous Qingcheng Mountains. The integrated mixed use development is conceived as a gargantuan mass of stone, chiselled and sculpted to reveal crystalline volumes and facets with distinctive colours and textures. “Crevices” between the sculpted volumes at podium level read as narrow “ravines” filled with luxuriant vegetation from terraced gardens and cascading waters. Landscaped sky gardens are further extended up into the towers, multiplying greenery vertically throughout its height and making nature accessible to residents and office workers. An extensive Commercial Plaza on the podium roof gifts the city with an urban communal space, which is designed as part of a retail loop connected to the atrium urban spaces below, creating a continuous and fully integrated retail experience.

BRAC University

Sited on an urban lake, the vision is to present an innovative and sustainable inner city campus that exemplifies tropical design strategies in response to the hot, humid, monsoon climate of the Bangladesh region while demonstrating the sensitive integration of nature and architecture.

The design strategy is to create two distinct programmatic strata by floating the Academia above the lake and revealing a Campus Park below, reflecting the synergistic coexistence between mankind and mangrove. Through perforating the building form with breezeways, porous facades and garden terraces, and by sculpting the building section to direct breezes to sheltered gathering spaces, the campus is designed to breathe, with cross ventilation and indirect natural daylighting making tropical learning spaces without air-conditioning possible. Landscaping applied vertically and horizontally exemplifies the potential in multiplying greenery and open spaces within a dense, urban site and sets the direction that must be embraced to make Dhaka a modern, liveable, sustainable and humane city.

2017

  • LafargeHolcim Awards Asia Pacific - Bronze Winner

    Awarded by LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction