The Interlace, a residential tall building project in Singapore by OMA and Ole Scheeren, has been chosen by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in Chicago as the winner of the inaugural worldwide Urban Habitat Award 2014 in recognition of its groundbreaking contributions to the urban realm and social sustainability.

The Interlace is a 1,040-unit apartment complex consisting of 31 apartment blocks, each six stories tall and 70 meters long, stacked in hexagonal arrangements around eight large-scale, permeable courtyards. The design was by OMA and Buro Ole Scheeren. The stacking of the volumes creates a topographical phenomenon more reminiscent of a landscape than of a typical building. An extensive network of communal gardens and spaces is interwoven with amenities, providing multiple opportunities for social interaction, leisure and recreation - both on the roofs of, and in between, these stacked horizontal blocks.

Instead of following the default typology of housing in dense urban environments – clusters of isolated towers – the design of the Interlace turns vertical isolation into horizontal connectivity and reinstates the notion of community as a central issue in today’s society.

The scissoring, overlapping forms suggest innumerable possibilities for changing perspective, meeting new neighbors, or finding a longer way home, within one complex. Taken apart from their stacked positions atop unseen axes, the relatively straightforward, balconied rectilinear forms reveal the immensity of past missed opportunities to orient International-Style regiment towards, or better yet, to render it part of the landscape.

The CTBUH Urban Habitat Award is newly established this year to recognize that the impact of tall buildings extends far beyond the buildings themselves. The award recognizes significant contributions to the urban realm, in connection with tall buildings. In particular, it highlights projects that demonstrate a positive contribution to the surrounding environment, add to the social sustainability of both their immediate and wider settings, and represent design influenced by context, both environmentally and culturally.

“The Interlace creatively realizes the potential a tropical environment provides for inverting the ‘towers in the park’ typology in favor of the tower as park,” said Awards Jury chair Jeanne Gang, founding principal of Studio Gang Architects. “By integrating horizontal and vertical living frameworks, it becomes much more than the sum of its parts."

Sustainability features are incorporated throughout the project through careful environmental analysis and integration of low-impact passive energy strategies. A series of site specific environmental studies, including wind, solar, and daylight analysis, were carried out to determine intelligent strategies for the building envelope and landscape design. As a result, the project has been awarded the Universal Design Mark Platinum Award and Green Mark GoldPLUS Award from Singapore’s Building and Construction Authority.

CREDITS.-

Architects.-
Design.- Office for Metropolitan Architecture; designer & partner-in-charge Ole Scheeren (now at Buro Ole Scheeren). Associate.- Eric Chang.
Architect of Record.- RSP Architects, Planners & Engineers Pte Ltd.
Collaborators.- Structural Engineer: TY Lin international. Arup / RSP Architects, Planners & Engineers Pte. Ltd. MEP Engineer: Squire Mech Private Limited. Other Consultants.- Acoustics: Acviron Acoustics Consultants Pte Ltd. Civil: TY Lin international. Landscape: ICN Design International Pte. Ltd.; Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Lighting:Lighting Planners Associates (S) Pte Ltd. Quantity Surveyor: Langdon & Seah. Facade.- Arup. Landscape architect.- ICN Design International Pte. Ltd.

Main Contractor.- Woh Hup Pte Ltd

Owners/Developers.- CapitaLand Singapore Limited; Hotel Properties Limited.

DATA SHEET.-

Height.- Architectural     88.7 meter / 291 feet.
Height.- Occupied     80.1 meter / 263 feet.
Height.- To Tip     88.7 meter / 291 feet.
Floors Above Ground.- 24.
Floors Below Ground.- 1.
# of Elevators.- 43.
Tower GFA.- 170,000 m² / 1,829,865 ft²
Development GFA.- 170,000 m² / 1,829,865 ft²
# of Apartments.- 1040.
# of Parking Spaces.- 1183.

Dates. Proposed.- 2007. Start of Construction.- 2010. Completion.- 2013.

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Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is an international practice operating within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism. AMO, a research and design studio, applies architectural thinking to domains beyond. OMA is led by eight partners – Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, Ellen van Loon, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, Chris van Duijn, Jason Long, and Managing Partner-Architect David Gianotten – and maintains offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Doha, and Australia. OMA-designed buildings currently under construction are the renovation of Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) in Berlin, The Factory in Manchester, Hangzhou Prism, the CMG Times Center in Shenzhen and the Simone Veil Bridge in Bordeaux.

OMA’s completed projects include Taipei Performing Arts Centre (2022), Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Los Angeles (2020), Norra Tornen in Stockholm (2020), Axel Springer Campus in Berlin (2020), MEETT Toulouse Exhibition and Convention Centre (2020), Galleria in Gwanggyo (2020), WA Museum Boola Bardip (2020), nhow RAI Hotel in Amsterdam (2020), a new building for Brighton College (2020), and Potato Head Studios in Bali (2020). Earlier buildings include Fondazione Prada in Milan (2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), De Rotterdam (2013), CCTV Headquarters in Beijing (2012), Casa da Música in Porto (2005), and the Seattle Central Library (2004).

AMO often works in parallel with OMA's clients to fertilize architecture with intelligence from this array of disciplines. This is the case with Prada: AMO's research into identity, in-store technology, and new possibilities of content-production in fashion helped generate OMA's architectural designs for new Prada epicenter stores in New York and Los Angeles. In 2004, AMO was commissioned by the European Union to study its visual communication, and designed a colored "barcode" flag, combining the flags of all member states, which was used during the Austrian presidency of the EU. AMO has worked with Universal Studios, Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, Heineken, Ikea, Condé Nast, Harvard University and the Hermitage. It has produced Countryside: The Future, a research exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale, including Public Works (2012), Cronocaos (2010), and The Gulf (2006); and for Fondazione Prada, including When Attitudes Become Form (2012) and Serial and Portable Classics (2015). AMO, with Harvard University, was responsible for the research and curation of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale and its publication Elements. Other notable projects are Roadmap 2050, a plan for a Europe-wide renewable energy grid; Project Japan, a 720-page book on the Metabolism architecture movement (Taschen, 2010); and the educational program of Strelka Institute in Moscow.

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Published on: July 2, 2014
Cite: "The Interlace by OMA. CTBUH Award, 2014" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/interlace-oma-ctbuh-award-2014> ISSN 1139-6415
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