OMA released the pictures of Ole Scheeren’s new design, The Interlace, a large-scale complex of thirty one blocks in stacked hexagonal configurations. Developed by CapitaLand and Hotel Properties Limited, The Interface claims to be a new residential typology for Singapore, through communal spaces and the feeling of interconnectedness.
The “sustainable” architecture of Singapore is marked by isolated vertical buildings. However, as Koolhaas says, Bigness generates its own logic. Ole Scheeren, partner of OMA, followed such a logic in The Interlace: “The design addresses concerns of shared space and social needs in a contemporary society and simultaneously responds to issues of shared living and individuality by offering a multiplicity of indoor/outdoor spaces specific to the tropical context.”
OMA, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, has a unique approach towards urban design. Instead of denial of complexity, lack of control, opposition, contradiction, and bigness, they declare them as the key to their projects. The tabula rasa, the void, the grid, and contingency are acknowledged as the new instruments of urban architecture, and are throughly conceptualized in The Interlace Residential Complex for Singapore.
Reminding of Habitat 67 in Montreal City, The interlace covers 170,000m2 of gross floor area amidst an elevated eight hectar site, completing a green belt that stretches between Kent Ridge, Telok Blangah and Mout Faber Parks. Blocks, six-storeys tall and identical in length, form eight large open and permeable courtyards . This innovative use of the available space enables housing maximum number of people while maintaining a open and airy feeling. the continuous landscape is projected vertically, almost like a vertical village with green areas in open-air basement voids, cascading sky gardens and both private and public roof terraces.
The Interlace incorporates sustainability features through careful environmental analysis of sun, wind, and micro-climate conditions on site and the integration of low-impact passive energy strategies. Water bodies have been placed within wind corridors for evaporative cooling.
The main thing that concerned me when looking at the pictures was that a significant number of those apartments look like they will always be cast under a shadow of the block directly ontop of them. This can be a drawback in terms of the principles of green design.
Moreover, some critics in forums claim that Tthe Interlace, falls into the modernist problem regarding context for far removing residents from each other in modern boxes located in undifferentiated space.
