Cool Spaces: Oasia Hotel Downtown by WOHA

WORDS Cheri Morris IMAGES K. Kopter & Patrick Bingham Hall via archdaily.com

Oasia Hotel Downtown by WOHA is a tropical, living tower that rises as an anomaly out of Singapore’s dense CBD, inviting nature back into the city and challenging the cold, sleek metallics of the concrete jungle its surrounded by.

According to WOHA, Oasia Hotel Downtown is “a prototype of land-use intensification for the urban tropics”. Landscaping is used extensively as an architectural surface treatment with twenty-one different species of creepers and their colourful flowers covering almost 90% of the red building’s exterior in an impressive mosaic. Achieving an overall Green Plot Ratio of 1,100%, the tower serves to provide food for birds and insects – creating an inner-city oasis and reintroducing biodiversity.

Interiorly, it boasts a series of strata each with its own sky garden. These gardens function as urban scale verandahs, replacing the air-conditioned enclosures typical of the city with breezy openness and natural light.

Sheltered from above by the preceding garden and with open sides for ventilation, the sky gardens also create unique views that trump reliance on external vistas and solve the problem of being closely overlooked by surrounding towers. On the roof, the skyscraper is crowned with a tropical bower alive with a delicate and diverse harmony of flora.

Looking for more green design inspiration? Check out Green Magic Homes – energy-efficient homes that blend into their natural surroundings.

h/t: archdaily.com