Nature-Inspired Pan Pacific Orchard Wins Best Tall Building Worldwide
- October 9, 2024
- By: Ar. Priyanshi Shah
- NEWS
Singapore is a city committed to sustainability and innovation and has grown a prominence for biophilic architecture. In the 1960s, the country’s former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew famously called it a green city. The evolving future of urban architecture blends construction materials, natural elements, and sustainability to create a greener vision.
The Pan Pacific Orchard won Best Tall Building Worldwide
The Pan Pacific Orchard, a 23-storey skyscraper designed by Architect Hong Wei Phua of WOHA, the Singaporean firm won the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat's award for the world's best new tall building. Located on the bustling street of Orchard Road district, the 350-room hotel with its innovative plant terraces and balconies is rooted into the building’s rectangular form seamlessly. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat(CTBUH) represents the award in a press release, the Pan Pacific Orchard as a “Hotel in Nature” that illustrated a “groundbreaking approach to high-density urbanism.” - Best Tall Building Worldwide supporting Singapore’s vision.
Sustainability and Innovation in the Crafting of Urban Forest
“Pan Pacific Orchard glows as a symbol of Singapore's commitment to sustainability with shopping malls, tree-lined boulevards and mixed-use towers expressing the concept of nature inside - out and transforming the traditional style of high rise into a vertical skyscraper with multiple-level terraces and water elements blending into the building, achieving green plot ratio of more than 300 per cent,” said CTBUH
Building Interiors
Completed in 2024, the spatial play of the building was formulated with four elements – forest, beach, garden and cloud with each six-storey division overlooking a terrace. The shaded areas have various luxuries for the guest to rest and enjoy the view and allow to cross-ventilate the interior spaces. To boost the city’s biodiversity, the column-structured grid is covered in dense planting, creating a living experience for the users. The holistic design incorporated green spaces in the Pan Pacific Orchard to unfold the boundaries of sustainable urban development in an urban setting.
Incorporating Green Space - Raised Terraces and Water Elements
WOHA believes in creating spaces that are alive and integrated with nature as they represent the urban fabric of the cities, committed to both people and places. Owned and managed by Singaporean real estate giant UOL Group, the building comprises of 400-seat ballroom, two restaurants and a solar panel roof at a neighbourhood level scale functioning as the green core within urban settings.
As you enter into the structure, the conventional idea of a podium or tower fades into a forest environment accessible to the public, with a variety of native plants and water elements as an open invitation for community engagement, away from the hustle and bustle of Singapore's vibrant shopping street.
Walking through the building, the raised “Beach Terrace” offers a pool to relax surrounded by palm trees and “Garden Terrace” paths along the way around the rectangular lawn. While at the highest level, the “Cloud Terrace” acts as the lush green event space fading into the views of the vibrant city. “Pan Pacific Orchard represents the best in responsible vertical urbanism today,” said CTBUH’s CEO, Javier Quintana de Uña, in a statement.
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