Oasia Hotel Downtown

The brief WOHA set itself in Singapore’s financial district was to answer the sealed glass tower with something porous. Built between 2012 and 2016 for the Far East Organization, Oasia Hotel Downtown is a 27-storey mixed-use tower whose structural skin is a red aluminium mesh planted with twenty-one species of climbing plant; as the planting matures the building is designed to read as a furred green column with only specks of its orange, pink and maroon mesh showing through. Rather than a single lobby at the base, the tower is cut by four full-height open-air sky terraces, so that about forty per cent of its volume is communal green space lifted into the air and cross-ventilated by the prevailing wind. It cost around 138 million US dollars, and in 2018 the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat named it Best Tall Building in the World.