[imagesource: Bookings.com]

Singapore’s gorgeous Pan Pacific Orchard has just been named the world’s best new tall building by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH).

Announcing the award in a press release Wednesday, the industry group described the tower as a “hotel in nature” that demonstrated a “groundbreaking approach to high-density urbanism.”

This new kind of hotel features tropical plants that crawl up massive structural columns and dangle from ledges high above where guests recline around lagoon-style swimming pools hidden from the hot noon heat.

A series of rising terraces nestle within the tower’s structure, like tunnels cut into a hillside, giving the entire building a cave-like appearance.

This is no Holiday Inn. The tower’s distinctive form consists of a series of L-shaped chambers that divide it into four different stacks, allowing room for urban gardens and flora. Each of the four terraces is based on a distinct theme related to Singapore’s tropical environment: woods, beaches, gardens, and clouds, in increasing sequence.

“Pan Pacific Orchard represents the best in responsible vertical urbanism today.”

The ground-level “Forest Terrace,” the only one open to visitors, has a cascading water feature and dozens of plant species, many of which are endemic to the island country. According to Phua, the design was created as a public gesture to distinguish it from more traditional “podium and tower” high-rise hotels.

“You experience the hotel not as a very big building, but at more of a neighbourhood scale,” said architect Hong Wei Phua of WOHA, the Singaporean firm behind the design. “Instead of arriving at a podium — into an internalized space, or a labyrinth of rooms and passages — you enter into a forest space.”

Moving up the structure, the raised ‘Beach Terrace’ has a pool surrounded by palm trees; the ‘Garden Terrace’ has walking trails around a rectangular lawn; and the ‘Cloud Terrace’, in the building’s top reaches, is a verdant event area with views of the city.

Many of the hotel’s 347 rooms include balconies overlooking the landscaped areas. Owned and operated by Singaporean real estate giant UOL Group, the hotel also features a 400-seat ballroom, two restaurants and a “canopy” of rooftop solar panels.

 

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One might think you’d have to break the bank to spend a night here, but according to Bookings.com, a standard two-bedroom suite “featuring a relaxing rain shower and an open vista of the verdant gardens and dynamic cityscape of the Orchard vicinity” will only set you back about R4,918, which isn’t bad at all.

Singapore has recently gained a reputation for nature-inspired (or “biophilic”) design, and the country’s founding father and former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew famously nicknamed it the “garden city” in the 1960s.

Greenery is frequently seen flowing out from buildings, creeping over urban facades, or incorporated into public infrastructure, and the 6-million-person city-state currently boasts Asia’s biggest wood building.

“Skyscrapers can serve as green lungs within dense urban environments.”

Founded in 2002, the CTBUH Awards recognize the best high-rise buildings and their architects. Other recent winners of the Best Tall Building Worldwide prize include One Vanderbilt Avenue, in New York City, and Australia’s Quay Quarter Tower –  dubbed the world’s first “upcycled” skyscraper after architects 3XN retained more than two-thirds of the 1970s tower previously on the site.

[source:bookings.com&cnn]