Asia Square brings conceptual and technical quality last seen in Singapore a generation ago to the new district of Marina Bay. The development is notable in its effort to overcome master-planned limitations in local circulation. A destination is created at level one, pulling the focus of city business away from Boat Quay and towards the ‘Cube’.

Opportunity has been sought within the constraints of the planning guidelines; a rigid envelope of almost square podium with a crowned tower over. The result is a dark, folded façade suggestive of the inherent weight and quality of its fabric. The towers are each a gathering of nine shafts drawn up to different heights to articulate the top, then further dissolved by a random patching of spandrels in shaft-specific grey shades.

Tower One is an entirely commercial office; Tower Two has 25 percent of its floor area assigned to hotel use. This has occasioned an alternative articulation of the peak of the second tower, four of the shafts flatten to a pool deck and the hotel is then accommodated within an L shaped plan extruding 11 additional storeys.

At the base of the carbon-black towers is The Cube; a brilliant external surface of crystal white glass, faceted by setbacks at the corners. Its lower edge is a floor above the footpath allowing an undirected flow of pedestrians through the lift lobbies, around retail outlets and into a 17 metre high ‘city room’.  This public forum, its insulated volume melted from any icy glass ‘Cube’, is at the urban scale the most important contribution from a very significant project.