WOHA's Pan Pacific Orchard hotel named 2024 CTBUH Best Tall Building Worldwide

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has selected Singapore’s Pan Pacific Orchard as the Best Tall Building Worldwide for 2024.

The new 23-story title holder was completed last year as the city’s 124th tallest building. WOHA Architects was responsible for its design, a 350-key hotel whose program achieves a 300% green plot ratio.

CTBUH CEO Javier Quintana said the hotel was reflective of the best practices in "responsible vertical urbanism." He added: "It does so by considering the question at the very core of this year’s conference — New or Renew? — from a more encompassing and nuanced perspective: this isn’t a building refurbishment; it’s about reimagining entire communities in novel, forward-thinking ways. The significance of Pan Pacific Orchard cannot be overstated — it emphasizes the revitalization of urban spaces rather than relying solely on new developments."

A series of four terraced sky gardens, each showcasing their own individualized "motifs" — Forest, Beach, Garden and Cloud — defines the concept. 

Their presence offers amenities-lined sheltered outdoor spaces for guests while helping cross-ventilate the building's interior, with creeper-wrapped columns appearing at either corner. All throughout the design, a vision for a verdant "hotel in nature" comes to life, topped by a photovoltaic canopy on the uppermost Cloud level. The building's gross floor area is equal to 19,693 square meters (or about 211,500 square feet), and its emphasis on including sustainable features such as an on-site food waste processor helped it to earn a Green Mark Platinum rating from Singapore's Building and Construction Authority after construction began in 2019. 

WOHA’s founding partner Mun Summ Wong said finally: "At WOHA, we believe in creating living buildings that are integrated with nature, as well as the urban fabric of the cities they inhabit, and Pan Pacific Orchard represents our commitment to building for both people and the planet. This project demonstrates that sustainability and hospitality can go hand-in-hand, and that skyscrapers can serve as green lungs within dense urban environments."

The project also won this year's CTBUH’s Space Within category award for its interior layout, user experience, and design. Pan Pacific Orchard follows 3XN's Sydney Quay Quarter Tower (2023), DS+R's new David Rubenstein Forum in Chicago (2022), and KPF's NYC One Vanderbilt Avenue (2021) as the four most recent Best Tall Building honorees.