PARKROYAL on Pickering

WOHA — Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell, working together since 1994 and crediting the work to the office rather than to either partner — has spent its career arguing that density and greenery are not opposites. PARKROYAL on Pickering is the argument at its most literal. Construction began in December 2009 and the hotel opened in January 2013 on a tight site facing Hong Lim Park, and the design gives back to the city more planted area than the plot itself covers: cast concrete podium contours modelled as stratified rock, and planted sky terraces cantilevered out between the guest-room floors, watered by rain harvested on site. The twelve-storey tower over the five-storey podium is shaped so that every one of the 367 rooms looks either at the park or into a sky garden, with services and corridors pushed to the closed side. It won Singapore’s President’s Design Award in 2013 and the CTBUH Urban Habitat Award in 2015.