06-06-2018

Oasia Hotel Downtown named Best Tall Building Worldwide 2018

WOHA Architects, SHoP Architects, COBE, Heatherwick Studio,

Patrick Bingham-Hall, Rasmus Hjortshoij, Max Touhey, Iwan Baan,

Cape Town, South Africa, Singapore, New York, USA, Chicago, USA, Copenhagen, Denmark,

Skyscraper,

Metal, Cement, copper, Glass,

CTBUH,

The Tall + Urban Innovation Conference is over, and the jury of the CTBUH 2018 Awards has announced the winners in each category. The overall winner is Woha’s Oasia Hotel Downtown in Singapore, named Best Tall Building Worldwide 2018.



Oasia Hotel Downtown named Best Tall Building Worldwide 2018

On May 30 – 31 Chicago hosted the Tall + Urban Innovation Conference of the CTBUH, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, presenting the CTBUH 2018 Awards in each regional section and the award for Best Tall Building Worldwide 2018. The CTBUH presents awards for skyscrapers and their urban environment to promote projects that have made an important contribution to this type of building, also in terms of sustainability and innovation; projects that add value to the city where they are located and the lives of its inhabitants. In the first stage of the selection process, projects compete in a number of categories: innovation, urban environment (taking into account the skyscraper’s impact on its surroundings), construction and, of course, geographic region: the Americas, Asia and Australia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. A separate category, the 10 Year Award, is presented to a building constructed 10 years earlier, and therefore a building constructed in 2007 or 2008 in 2018: a prize specifically intended to assess the results achieved and the impact of skyscrapers on their surroundings ten years down the line.

The overall winner of the 2018 CTBUH Awards, Best Tall Building Worldwide 2018 and Best Tall Building Asia & Australasia, is, as announced, Woha’s Oasia Hotel Downtown in Singapore. This result demonstrates the rise to prominence and impact on tall buildings of the need to integrate portions of nature directly into constructions, a trend we have already seen in buildings such as Stefano Boeri Architetti’s Bosco Verticale. WOHA Architects’ Oasia Hotel Downtown is in fact described as a "tropical tower" in a concrete urban jungle because of the presence of tropical plant species integrated into the skyscraper’s metal façade.

The winner in the Best Tall Building Americas category is the American Copper Building, composed of twin towers covered with copper designed by SHoP Architects in New York’s East River district. It is not only the world’s tallest copper building, but has a skybridge, a panoramic bridge linking the twin towers which is three storeys high and contains an Olympic swimming pool.

The Best Tall Building Europe is the The Silo, a former grain silo in Copenhagen’s North Harbour which the architects of COBE have converted into a skyscraper containing 38 residential units as well as public spaces on the ground floor and a restaurant at the top.

And, in the last geographic category, Best Tall Building Middle East & Africa is a very unusual building indeed, the Zeitz MOCAA, in which architect Thomas Heatherwick transforms a symbolic building in Cape Town, the Grain Silo Complex built in the 1920s, into a contemporary art museum.

The Urban Habitat Award was presented to the Master Plan for the World Trade Center in New York in view of its role as a collective response by the city of New York to the September 11 2001 terrorist attack.

(Agnese Bifulco)

Oasia Hotel Downtown
Architects: WOHA Architects http://www.woha.net/
City: Singapore
Images courtesy of CTBUH photo by Patrick Bingham-Hall

American Copper Building
Architects: SHoP Architects www.shoparc.com
City: New York City, USA
Images courtesy of CTBUH photo by Max Touhey

The Silo
Architects: COBE http://www.cobe.dk/
City: Copenhagen
Images courtesy of CTBUH photo by Rasmus Hjortshøj

Zeitz MOCAA
Architects: Heatherwick Studio; William Littlejohn-Philip http://www.heatherwick.com/
City: Cape Town, South Africa
Images courtesy of CTBUH photo by Iwan Baan

World Trade Center Master Plan, New York © Studio Libeskind https://libeskind.com/


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