Oma program diagram8/3/2023 The aim, says Scheeren, was to allow a ‘degree of freedom, places to disappear or hide – something we are losing in our world is the ability to withdraw from the single plane of control.’ ‘There are so many moods that you may have as a human’, he adds, which the multiplicity of The Interlace is intended to serve. There are gradations of privacy – some terraces are exclusive to particular apartments more are shared. It is diversified into such things as a water park, a bamboo garden and a children’s play area with a fire access route that doubles as a jogging track. The gaps between the blocks become portals which frame views of more of The Interlace, and of distant views beyond.Ī landscape runs through the site descending through circular openings into the usually forgotten world of basement car parking, and climbing onto the roof planes such that the green area of the completed project exceeds the amount previously on the site. In so doing he created an intricate void shape between the solids through which space flows. There are 11 at the lowest level, then 10, then seven, and three at the top. Instead he ‘toppled the towers’, and ‘turned vertical into horizontal’, putting the required accommodation into the similar six-storey blocks and stacked them, corner on corner, with up to four on top of each other, making the maximum of 24 floors. The conventional Singaporean solution would be a group of maybe 12 towers, with what Scheeren calls ‘residual’ space left between them at ground level. The homes range from two-bedroom flats to penthouses and ‘garden townhouses’, and from 75 to 586sqm. Planning restrictions set a maximum height of 24 storeys and a gross plot ratio of 2.1, which gives a total area of 170,000 square metres. The task was to put 1,040 homes on an elevated eight-hectare site, located between the Ayer Rajah Expressway, one of the city-state’s major roads, and a 10-kilometre long green zone that stretches between the Kent Ridge, Telok Blangah Hill and Mount Faber parks. According to the uneasy crediting that occurs in such situations it might be considered a creation of both. It started as an OMA project led by Scheeren after he left in 2010 it was completed by his new practice, the Beijing-based Büro OS. Eventually the Singaporean developers CapitaLand, who also have Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito and Moshe Safdie on their books, came up with the opportunity to create what is now The Interlace: it was to be, says Eng Tiang Wah of CapitaLand an ‘urban habitat of the future’ that ‘facilitates social interaction and community bonding’. He wanted, he says, to replenish ‘the idea of communal living’, to make a place ‘where people really live … something which is not natural in economics today, when people often buy things as investments.’ The project started when he was at OMA, with ‘an interest in housing, something which we had not at all dealt with.’ The practice found itself offered commissions to build luxury residential developments, but Scheeren was more interested in the ‘relatively affordable’. Is this any way to make a home, a community?įor Ole Scheeren, in all calm seriousness, it is. With its hexagonal grid of repetitive elements, The Interlace bears a superficial resemblance to the Bijlmermeer, the vast, ambitious and fraught housing complex in Amsterdam, but it also looks as if in the terrible 1992 plane crash that hit that estate its blocks had been tossed in the air and landed on each other with miraculously precise disorder. Thirty-one blocks, each 70.5 x 22 x 16.5 metres and containing 30-plus homes, have been stacked vertiginously and nonchalantly on top of each other like children’s building bricks. Your first reaction to The Interlace, especially if you are looking with a European sensibility, could well be OMG! Possibly WTF! Because here is something that looks like the very thing long considered the worst urbanistic nightmare, the cause of the mea culpa of a generation of chastened architects – a ’60s-style concrete housing megastructure, which, notwithstanding some revisionist tinkering among some of our naughtier critics, is still widely considered (especially outside the profession) The Thing To Which We Would Never Return. If you enjoy reading the AR online, why not consider subscribing to the print edition? This is one of the most read articles on the AR website.
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