When 60 year-old Pei Ieoh Ming received a call from a certain Mr.Tan with the following instructions, ‘Build me a bank that looks solid as a rock’ & ‘Here is the budget. Do not exceed it.’, it was the birth point for this magnificent building facing the Singapore river.
Interestingly, the late renowned architect IM Pei initially declined to design the building for Tan Sri Tan Chin Tuan, until he stopped over in Taiwan and found out that his father knew the Tan family, hence he agreed to be the architect.
IM Pei's vision when designing the iconic OCBC Centre in Chulia Street was to create a building of the future - one that would revitalise and regenerate the surrounding areas of shophouses and old offices. The building too must reflect the strength of the bank and also its transformation from a traditional Chinese bank into a financial institution of national importance and international reach.
To achieve that symbol of strength & permanence, the building was designed based on Brutalist architecture, a popular architectural style in the 1970s. Brutalism came as a natural response to the instruction for the building to be solid as a rock & portray strength and stability.
The 52-storey skyscraper stands at almost 200 metres tall and serves as the headquarters of OCBC Bank. Completed in November 1976 at a cost of S$100 million, the building once held the prestige of being Singapore's tallest building and had lifts that could travel as fast as 366 metres per minute, making them the fastest lifts in Singapore at that time. It’s structure consists of two semi-circular reinforced concrete cores and divided into three sections due to the steel trusses being constructed off-site and put into position. This design also helps to speed up construction. Within the building is a banking hall that was 12.2m high and 1,300 sq m large.
The building is fondly called the "Calculator", due to its flat shape and windows that look like buttons. It is thought that the architect could have chosen the use of a traditional Chinese character for shell, “貝” as the basis of the design to reflect its banking business. (In olden times, people often use shells as a form of currency).
The original building design also planned to use raw concrete for the facade of the building. However concrete was found to be too porous and susceptible to discolouration from tropical fungus. Hence granite was used to face the tower cores. Till today these granite-clad tower looks remarkably clean despite the tropical weather.
To balance the masculinity of the building and to signify the bank’s function as the entry point for the West, IM Pei made 3 trips to visit his good friend, English artist & sculptor Henry Moore, to convince him to build a sculpture to display at the OCBC building. This resulted in a 9 meters reclining nude sculpture titled ‘Reclining Figure’. It is one of Moore’s last & largest sculpture and was an enlargement of a 13-inch maquette he made in 1938. The piece was installed in 1984, replacing ‘Endless Flow’, a sculpture completed in 1980 by Singaporean artist Tan Teng Kee.
The next time you are in the area, do stop awhile to marvel at this gigantic calculator. Images Credit: Fortune.com
Ieoh Ming Pei, was a Chinese-American architect. Born in Guangzhou, raised in Hong Kong and Shanghai, Pei drew inspiration at an early age from the garden villas at Suzhou, the traditional retreat of the scholar-gentry to which his family belonged. In 1935, he moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, but he quickly transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
