Parkview Square

Parkview Square
百威广场
General information
Type Commercial offices
Architectural style Postmodern / Neo Art Deco / New Classical
Location North Bridge Road, Downtown Core, Singapore
Coordinates 1°18′0.5″N 103°51′27.48″E / 1.300139°N 103.8576333°ECoordinates: 1°18′0.5″N 103°51′27.48″E / 1.300139°N 103.8576333°E
Construction started 1999
Completed 2002
Owner Chyau Fwu Development
Management Chyau Fwu Development
Height
Roof 144 m (472 ft)
Technical details
Floor count 24
2 basements
Floor area 39,145 m2 (421,350 sq ft)
Lifts/elevators 11
Design and construction
Architect DP Architects
Developer Chyau Fwu Development
Website
www.ParkviewSquare.com
References
[1][2][3][4]

Parkview Square is an office building located in the Downtown Core Planning Area, Central Region, Singapore. It is situated along North Bridge Road, and is near the major commercial hub at Marina Centre. It is next to Bugis MRT Station, Bugis Junction, and The Gateway, and straddles the Rochor Road and Ophir Road corridor.

Parkview Square is one of the most expensive office buildings in Singapore.

Parkview Square houses the embassies of Austria,[5] Mongolia,[6] and the United Arab Emirates.[7]

Design and architecture

Parkview Square was designed by the US firm James Adams Design, together with DP Architects of Singapore.

It was built as the last major project enterprised by the late Mr. C. S. Hwang, a Taiwanese tycoon chairman of Chyau Fwu Group.

The office space on each floor is column-less so it can be reconfigured according to the tenant's wish. Although it is a modern building, having been completed in 2002, it is specially designed in the classic Art Deco style, following New York City 1929 Chanin Building as an inspiration. The exterior surface of the building is clad in brown Granite, bronze, lacquer, and glass.

The lobby is also designed mainly in the Art Deco style and features a 15m-high ceiling with hand-crafted details. The bar in the lobby of the building has a unique 3-storey high wine chiller from which a female bar tender dressed as a fairy retrieves bottles on request by means of a flying wire apparatus.

The open plaza of Parkview Square is reminiscent of Piazza San Marco in Venice, with sculptures and statues surrounding the open plaza. There are many bronze effigies of some of the most famous figures in world history, including Sun Yat-sen, Abraham Lincoln, Salvador Dalí, Mozart, Chopin, Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein.

The building also has widespread use of motifs, sculptures, and ornamentation. The building is "guarded" by eight gigantic fiberglass statues of men holding a light ball in their hands, four of them standing on each broad side of the building's crown. Another example is the gargoyles decorating the building’s exterior, which are said to be hand-crafted.

Locally, the building is often referred to as "Gotham building", due to its Art Deco architectural style that resembles the fictional Gotham City of Batman legend.

Golden crane statue

Signature crane sculpture at Parkview Square

In the centre of the plaza is a statue of a golden crane with its head lifted, pointing towards the direction of Mainland China, its wings in pre-flight mode. On the pedestal, a Chinese poem is written:

黄鹤楼

故国旧有黄鹤楼
北望神州几千秋
黄鹤展翅飞万里
伟哉狮城见鹤楼

The poem refers to a mythical crane looking towards the direction of its temple (a place of worship in Hubei, China) and eager to fly the thousands of miles back — Depicting the homesickness of the owner. The poem also appears as an Easter egg in Original illustration of the Chinese version of StarCraft 2.[8]

The statue is supposed to bring wealth to the building.



Gallery

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Parkview Square.
  1. ↑ Parkview Square at CTBUH Skyscraper Database
  2. ↑ Parkview Square at Emporis
  3. ↑ Parkview Square at SkyscraperPage
  4. ↑ Parkview Square at Structurae
  5. ↑ "Österreichische Vertretungsbehörden".
  6. ↑ "Embassy of Mongolia in Singapore".
  7. ↑ "Embassy of UAE in Singapore".
  8. ↑ "星际2官网更新三张原画 废墟中惊现"黄鹤楼"". tgbus.com. Retrieved 21 November 2011.