Submitted by WA Contents

Asia Square by Denton Corker Marshall

United Kingdom Architecture News - Nov 23, 2014 - 11:18   3664 views

Asia Square by Denton Corker Marshall

Above image:The north-east corner reduces scale through its podium glazing.

Asia Square is named not only for the shape of its twin towers, but also for the public arena at their base, a European-inspired urban form adapted to the Singapore context.

The centre of Singapore’s business district has always been quayside at Raffles Place. Its late-1970s to 1980s architectural heyday was marked by the construction of a pair of particularly handsome towers in Kenzo Tange’s OUB Centre (1986) and IM Pei’s OCBC Centre (1976). These buildings are elegantly proportioned, their small footprints – founded on colonial land parcels – and high plot ratios resulting in slender towers; arguably too tight-waisted for modern usage. With remarkable foresight the government anticipated this future constriction and hired Pei (after a pitch fought with Tange) to plan a new downtown to rise on reclaimed land. This land, twenty years in consolidation, has been occupied only in the last five by undistinguished off ices and apartments conceived largely by US architects. It has taken Denton Corker Marshall (DCM), working with executive architects Architects 61, to bring the conceptual and technical quality last seen in Singapore a generation ago to the new district.....Continue Reading

> via Australian Design Review