The shape of ideas in buildings and spaces.

Huaku Sky Garden by WOHA and C. C. Jen Architects & Associates

In northern Taipei, deep double-volume balconies and a tracery of screens and columns create a shaded, elevated garden quality for the residents of WOHA’s newest high-rise residential tower.

The Huaku Sky Garden tower, designed by WOHA with Taiwanese firm C.C. Jen Architects & Associates, is sited at the base of the foothills of the Yang Ming mountain range in the Tianmu district of northern Taipei – an area susceptible to typhoons and earthquakes. This prompted the structural necessity for the 38-storey luxury tower to be stiffened with sizable columns. Capitalising on this, WOHA rimmed the columns along the perimeter so that the interiors could be largely column-free, and further played up the scale of the columns to form the bold outlines that allude to traditional Chinese decorative fretwork.

Internally, cross ventilation is maximised within the apartments with an interlocking sectional arrangement where a double-height entry volume of one unit would alternate over different sides of each single-height unit throughout the tower. “The double-volume balcony creates a deeply recessed outdoor garden quality and it brings out the ‘villa on the mountain’ concept. This double volume also gives the apartments a surprisingly grand view to the mountains,” WOHA describes. As there are only two units per floor, facilities that need to be walled up such as fire escape staircases and kitchens can be zoned within a shared central core, which, while further consolidating the tower’s structural strength, frees the major living, dining and entertainment areas of each unit to be opened to the breezes across the entire width of the tower.

The notion of transplanting the space and porosity associated with a landed villa up in the sky has long been an advantageous proposition by visionary architects, but realising this is dependent on the conviction and commitment of the developer. Paul Rudolph’s Colonnade Condominium (1980) in Singapore has been highly influential to how that vision could be realised in the tropics with double-height living areas, deep inset terraces and cantilevered balconies framed onto a forest of monumental columns.

For WOHA’s own ground-breaking work on The Met in Bangkok (2009), Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell reflected to Deutsches Architekturmuseum how they had pitched the idea to the developer: “We advised the developer of The Met what we had previously advised our Rochalie Drive House client, not to spend the money on gold taps but rather on space. You know, there are different definitions of luxury; the client can have either gold taps or a private swimming pool hanging on the side of their high-rise.”1 The same persuasion can be seen to be at work at Huaku Tower, but instead of a pool, each unit is allotted a double-volume outdoor garden.

In common with many of WOHA’s works, there is then substantial ‘depth’ to the facade, achieved from the manipulation of an outer layering of screen that is here acculturised to the context and to the gradual transition between exterior and interior realms offered by balconies and planters. The tower is thus shrouded in shadows and set apart from the prevalent form of curtain-walled, air-conditioned condominiums where open balconies are rare even in a benign climate, and only lately projected outwards when incentivised to do so by planning concessions.

There is no discernible urban base or podium; a 7.2-metre-high arm of a lobby and pool that branches off to the entrance cul-de-sac is kept to the scale of the surrounding buildings, but the development is largely an exclusive haven set apart from its neighbourhood. This ‘gated’ effect is tempered by lushly planted green walls along the east street and a row of three retail units to its west. While it is firmly anchored in a bustling, eclectic mixed-use district, the presence of the tower offers the larger community a distinctive reference point, the perception of a cosmos out of chaos, while retaining for its residents a secured sense of unbuckling stability.

The notion of transplanting the space and porosity associated with a landed villa up in the sky has long been an advantageous proposition by visionary architects, but realising this is dependent on the conviction and commitment of the developer.