Sailing Skyline
Professor designs world's 10th tallest residential complex
An artist's rendering shows the pair of buildings that resemble sails of a ship that has docked in the bay permanently.
The vision of a KU professor is going to change the skyline of Singapore.
Peter Pran, professor of architecture, is the lead design principal for NBBJ, the architecture firm for "The Sail @ Marina Bay" tower project, which will be the 10th tallest apartment building complex in the world.
The buildings will have the appearance of sails in the Marina Bay. One tower will stand 70 stories tall, and the second will be 62. A view from the bay will show the futuristic buildings, slightly angled toward one another, standing alongside the tallest buildings in the Republic of Singapore, a city-state.
"Most of the buildings (in Singapore) are rectangular, and some are triangular" Pran said. "This the first project that has a curved sculptural appearance; the towers look like sails of boats that have anchored there permanently."
The client that is developing the buildings invited Pran and NBBJ to submit designs. They weren't competing with other firms but were working against the clock. They only had about six weeks to submit design proposals to the chairman of the company, CDL, and to their joint developer, AIG.
"We had to compete with ourselves. We showed CDL/AIG three schemes, and the chairman immediately picked this one," Pran said of The Sail @ Marina Bay.
The original designs were made about two years ago. Construction work on the buildings started early this year. The foundation is being put in place now, but the building will begin to rise above ground level in January, Pran said. The towers are scheduled to be completed by early fall 2008.
That hasn't stopped people from staking their claim to The Sail. All of the apartments in the first tower sold out in about three months. When apartments in the second went on sale about six months later, they were snatched up just as quickly, with one-bedroom units selling for about $313,000. People who are not residents of Singapore purchased many of the units. And numerous individuals bought multiple units, keeping one for themselves and others as investments.
The Sail @ Marina Bay is not Pran's first international effort. The Oslo, Norway, native designed Telenor International Headquarters, a 7,000-person office complex in his hometown, with the architecture firms NBBJ-HUS-PKA. The complex was designed as the "office of the future," with two main, boomerang-shaped buildings facing each other, slightly offset, with the facade of one leaning slightly forward, as the other leans slightly back. Both overlook a central plaza and have numerous office wings protruding from the backside. For the project, he and the team received the highest American Institute of Architects National Design Honor Award in 2004.
With NBBJ, Pran is also designing a 10-story office complex that will be erected in downtown Oslo in the spring of next year. However, not all of his buildings are overseas.
He designed the 505 Union Office Building in Seattle for Vulcan Northwest, which is owned by Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, and who has his headquarters there.
Despite the time, effort and considerable travel he devotes to his architecture, Pran still considers teaching his top career. He said that continuing his work in the field of architecture helps him pass along valuable knowledge to his students.
"I feel I work full time at the university, and at the same time the architecture students can benefit from the fact that I'm a practicing architect," Pran said. "I try to be very considerate about attending all or almost all of my classes. I love teaching here at the University of Kansas."
Print this page
oread@ku.edu