Verdant vertical living.

High-rise building may well be an inescapable aspect of the Southeast Asian architectural scene, but Tang Guan Bee's condominium provides an enlightened prototype for tropical high-rise living.

For all its questionable features and side-effects on overloaded infrastructures, high-rise building is now as much a part of the skylines of Southeast Asian cities as it is of Western cities. Given the increasing pressures of development on land values and urban densities it is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. One of the most promising, albeit rare, developments in the evolution of a tropical architecture in both Singapore and Malaysia has therefore been the adaptation of high-rise building types to the special requirements of the climate and to the associated open-air lifestyle.

Like Ken Yeang's own innovative towers, Tang Guan Bee's condominium builds on a few rare precedents to take the tropical residential high-rise further down the evolutionary path. The primary model is Charles Correa's mould-breaking 1980 Kanchanjunga apartments tower in Bombay, with its double-floor recessed hanging gardens and full-width apartments, designed to maximise both views and natural cross-ventilation. But Tang Guan Bee would not have had to travel so far for inspiration. Just across the road, in full view of Bee's new block, stand two apartment towers by Moshe Safdie, who, like many other prominent foreign architects, was invited to Singapore by a status-conscious government, to make his prestigious mark on the skyline. Like Correa's earlier apartments, Safdie's towers both feature double-height recessed terraces or skycourts, making deep incisions in an otherwise solid looking block to provide shaded outdoor living spaces.

The great and immediately apparent difference between Tang Guan Bee's 12-storey tower and these precedents, aside from its modest scale, is the sheer lightness and transparency of the glass-clad and multi-layered design. The layering works in both plan and elevation, and exploits the corner-to-corner views through and beyond the generous apartment spaces, taking in the panoramic views of the Singapore skyline. The block houses just five maisonnettes, each taking up the whole of its two floors, save for one corner of the block where the lift core and stairway are placed, exposed to the open air. The lowest maisonnette is smaller than the rest and is recessed under the main bulk of the building in a three-storey-high base, which also contains the main entrance lobby. The larger four maisonnettes above vary only slightly and are all planned around a two-storey-height open court, bounded on the lower floor by the glazed facing walls of the dining and living rooms and the hallway in between, and on the upper floor by the main bedrooms. The tinted glazed walls of the lower plan afford discrete views from one side of the apartment to the other, sliding open to present a continuous, open living space centred on the double-height court, which is designed as the active heart of an open-air, tropical lifestyle. A glazed, curved circulation space cure family room on the upper floor bridges th rear of the court, and provides a further visual link between the two floors.

The subtle layering in plan is supplemented in elevation with a series of lightweight screens and deep projections every second floor, which shade the glazed walls and provide support for the luxuriant vegetation. The planting in turn will add further verdant layers, eventually shading the entire building with dripping greenery. A roof pavilion and garden top the building out, following the familiar rules of tripartite composition. Down at the other end, landscaped garden and pool on the ground floor provide shared amenities and a suitably lush foundation from which this demonstration in luxuriant tropical living arises.