Dim Sum Towers – Heatherwick Studio’s Learning Hub in Singapore
'We used to go to university because that's where all the books were or all the computers were for accessing knowledge,' says studio founder Thomas Heatherwick. 'There's been a digital revolution and now we all have our gadgets within arm's reach, and you can just stay in bed and get a PhD. I think we were driven by a desire to see if we could make a new kind of university space which was about the social function - how you bring people together, because that's the primary reason to be at university.' Lecturers may take issue with that statement, but this new building is all about bringing different and disparate perspectives together to make new connections and that's where the areas outside the room, but within the building, are just as important.
The internal atrium is open to the elements but has a glass roof to keep out the rain. Photo: Hufton and Crow
In the central atrium are a host of spaces where students can informally interact with each other; where students can get away from the structures of subject and start having those interdisciplinary ideas and relationships, be they educational, entrepreneurial or even physical - at the groundbreaking ceremony Singapore's Education Minister joked that he hoped the building might even increase the birth rate. Nanyang university's senior associate provost (undergraduate education), professor Kam Chan Hin enthused: 'These days a lot of the new things are happening at the intersections between disciplines and by bringing students together like this. We believe it will give rise to a lot more creativity and innovation.'
The atrium is a key focus of the project and has that upmarket-hotel appeal. Photo: Hufton and Crow
What the building's commissioners are trying to do may be innovativeedge-thinking, but in many ways the building itself is quite simple, deliberately so. The curving rooms reflect the brief, which called for no corners. 'The project really evolved from taking these rooms and then bringing them together in stacks and then making lots of nooks and crannies between them,' says Heatherwick. 'We were trying to make a building where you didn't have to have a fire alarm in order to be able to meet people! There are different types of space that can capture and hold you and so the building evolved not as one big structure, but instead as 12 buildings coming together collaborating, I guess.'
This building also had to have the very highest green credentials and, in many ways, that drove the basic idea of the structure and the choice of material. One large, air-conditioned building would not have achieved Singapore's Green Mark Platinum environmental award, which this one has. In fact this building has no air conditioning. The individual rooms do, however, have a state-of-the-art (and very effective) cooling system that uses chilled water piped in from a plant in another building and simple convection using a gap between the inner and outer walls to circulate the cooled air.
This mould was use to create all the facade panels. It can be adjusted to the 10 different radii and allow for different surface patterns. Photo: Hufton and Crow
Continue for more Dim Sum and Thomas Heatherwick's one-on-one with Blueprint editor, Johnny Tucker.
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