“Lord of the Towers” goes horizontal
The German star architect Ole Scheeren wins the Urban Habitat Award.
The German architect Ole Scheeren has been chosen as the winner of the newly created Urban Habitat Award of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) in Chicago for his project “The Interlace” in Singapore. The development is an ingenious complex of stacked residential blocks with 1,040 apartments. Scheeren, who was born in Karlsruhe in 1971, worked for many years at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) of the Dutch star architect Rem Koolhaas. The idea for “The Interlace” dates back to that time. Scheeren started his own company in 2010 and now has offices in Beijing and Hong Kong.
The architect Albert Speer from Frankfurt is an internationally renowned urban planner, and the Hamburg architect Meinhard von Gerkan designs some of the world’s most beautiful modern stadiums. However, Ole Scheeren has been dubbed the “Lord of the Towers”, especially in Asia and since his almost ‘unbuildable’ masterpiece, the headquarters of the state television service China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing. The world’s largest media building consists of two slanting L-shaped towers that are interconnected at the top and the base. This project was also realised together with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The prize-winning complex in Singapore is refreshingly horizontal.
