This building is now under construction in the city of Singapore, ten minutes walk from the sea and five minutes from the river of the same name that flows into it, between a small park Hong Lim and Singapore's Chinatown. This place is motley: brightly painted two-story new builds, creepy glass pencils in the Sberbank style, giant living plates - a nightmare of the "Marseilles unit" from Corbusier, are interspersed here with abundant tropical greenery, charming Asian bustle, and in some places with quite decent architecture.
The building, which is due to be completed by 2012 (the frame and one freestanding tower of the first stage have now been erected), contains a hotel, offices, parking and shops. It is high, about 30 floors; but this is not surprising, there are exactly the same ones nearby, and there are higher ones. Surprisingly, it is green not only in engineering, correct and environmentally friendly (solar panels and gray water are taken into account here in the best way), but also in the literal, philistine sense. That is, everything is planted with greenery - fortunately, in the local latitudes, it grows easily and constantly.
Most of all, its lower part is covered with greenery (about 10 floors). Imagine that the building, which looks like the "house on Mosfilmovskaya", about which so much talk is now, was raised above the ground on very high round supports, 25 meters high. On these "legs", long like those of a flamingo, they put several layers of layered rock with smoothly curving edges. The layers, of course, are concrete, but the edges are uneven, and standing on the sidewalk and looking up, you might think that you are under the canopy of some large seaside cave. Inside these layers, there are shops in the lower two tiers, and above, in the third and fourth floors of the parking lot.
But the main thing is that the layers of "rock" are terraces raised above the ground. A variety of greens will be planted on their surfaces: hanging grass, familiar to us from flowerpots in children's libraries, will hang in huge quantities at the edges, forming green anti-balustrades. Bushes with large leaves will give shade; flowers dizzy, and palm trees amaze the imagination. The same will be done by the pools with water to the edge of the terraces: the main thing for the bathers is not to fall down, but for this, they probably also thought of something. Entrances in terraces containing parking lots (there are no underground parking lots here), this cultural jungle will mask, at the same time letting in daylight and absorbing carbon dioxide.
The upper tiers of the building are a little more prosaic. Looking at them, you can see that it consists of three short plates, spaced: one in the middle, and two at the edges of the long section, and strung on one more, thin and longitudinal; as a whole it looks like a graceful letter E. At the top, they are quite rectangular, covered with blue and green glass, forming a metaphor for a waterfall - a geometrized image of a water wall (the color is like the Singapore River flowing nearby). Open courtyards are formed between the buildings, every four floors joined by the same smooth outlined terraces and planted with vegetation.
The architects are not limited to this, letting nature inside: corridors, lobbies and even public toilets are designed as greenhouses - you will have to walk along stone paths in the jungle; even waterfalls are conceived, not to mention the pools. In a word, working in such offices is like in the Garden of Eden. And if Turkish multi-storey hotels rather sadden tourists, then such a hotel is being built here, in which, in many respects, it will be better than on the beach.
The total area of greenery in it is 15,000 sq. meters, this is twice the building area and is equal to the area of the neighboring park (in total, the amount of greenery in the quarter only doubles from construction). In addition to greenery, large aviaries with birds are planned on the terraces. The only alarming thing is that the architects have gathered in an ecological impulse to breed local insects among tropical plants … However, tourists traveling to Indochina, in any case, will not hurt a couple of vaccinations.
The project has already received platinum certification from Singapore's premier Green Mark award, the country's most important environmental award. The Singaporean WOHA, headed by Singaporean Wong Mung Summ and Australian Richard Hassel, generally specialize in eco-fiction, and, unlike Europeans, in its hysterical-cinematic variety: instead of single-family houses under windmills, they tend to overgrow greenery with greenery. In 2009, at Singapore Design Week, they showed a playful (and maybe serious) master plan for the city's development by 2050, very, very bold - there all of Singapore is covered with mountains of high-rise buildings, they are overgrown with palm trees and vines, and above the trees on iron legs solar panels stand like a solid carpet, competing with tropical greenery for light. Absolutely fantastic, like in an ecology comic.
However, the new green house WOHA, when it is built, will show us a completely real step towards utopia - a lot has been given to the jungle in it. This is some kind of specifically Asian approach to ecology, Europeans should associate such a building with Kipling, with an abandoned city in the jungle, large, overgrown and inhabited by whom we remember. However, the famous Moshe Safdie, the author of Habitat-67, only in pictures shows the house in the form of a green mountain. And the Singaporeans are already building one.
