BEST WESTERN HOTEL

2015
Marina Bay, Singapore
GFA 56000 sqm, $50millions, 50 storeys
Design: Mattia Malavenda in collaboration with Goh Hock Guan & Associates
Client: BWH

The 5-star Best Western Hotel building in Singapore, with its 50 floors, 182 m high and 42 m in diameter, is going to become a truly artistic and beautiful landmark within Marina Bay, togheter with the Marina Bay Sands hotel.

The project occupies a 4000 m2 site, strategically located on Fullerton road, precisely 20 metres from the water, and linked through an elevated walkway to the CBD, the Singapore financial district.

Within its unique structure, it features the following functions: 400 rooms/suites;  all day and specialty restaurant with integrated outdoor seating on the roof-top and lounge club in the night;  business center and banqueting areas;  luxurious health club, SPA and indoor pools;  state of the art gym and other wellness facilities;  coffee-shop and gift shop at the reception hall;  two levels underground car park.

At the urban level, the project is contextually inspired by the prominence of its location and the features of its immediate surroundings.
Its proximity to the water, make the building always in foreground to the other high-rise buildings, erected on the other side of Fullerton road.

This inspired its symbolic cilindric shape, such as a light-house, always the first construction to face the sea or ocean.

At the architectural level, the project aims to break the crystalline mass and sharpness of the CBD towers' volume, with a permeable, airy, organic building.

Unlike the surrounding office buildings, the design of the Best Western hotel in fact doesn't make coincide the glass curtain wall as the net separation between interior and exterior, but a soft transition is designed, a sort of filter, constituted by the outdoor area of each room all around the circular plan of each floor.

The building is in steel and concrete structure, designed to follows a diamond shaped grid that bends along the virtual surface of the cylinder.

The facade use a double skin system.

The exterior skin is composed of horizontal and curved sun-brakes, with funtion of light-shelf as well, all around the perimeter of the circular plans, like a ring, and for the whole high of the building (with a distance of 1 m each ring).

Each light shelf’s profile is designed once, then manufactured in series and through compositive operations of duplication, rotation ad subtraction, is possible to create different “vibrations” of the facade.

The internal layer is a slightly reflective glass curtain with sliding openings that gives access to the small terrace with a panoramic view of Marina Bay and Singapore CBD. 

One of the requirement for the BWH global hotel chain new building program - and Singapore is the first of the four projects in major cities workwide - is to unify and standardize the construction and in the same time creating design differentiation for each single project, in each single location. 

The proposed concept aim to fill this request by using identical structure and floor plans then create variations in the facade through the variety of light shelf compositive configurations or, so called, “vibrations”.