Exhibit: ‘WOHA—Breathing Architecture’

Renderings of the Singapore hotel Parkroyal on Pickering resemble a scene cut from the History Channel’s Life After People. Trees, leafy shrubs, and overhanging creepers overtake the building, transforming balconies and common spaces into lush gardens. For Singapore-based WOHA, which designed the hotel (set for completion this year), nature serves not as a conquering force, but as a striking and sustainable design philosophy in which structure generally disappears. WOHA—Breathing Architecture, at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt, is the firm’s first monographic exhibition, led by directors Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell. It displays efforts to merge building and landscape, ranging from open, tropical family homes to green skyscrapers. Singapore’s School of the Arts, shown above, is one example. So is the Met, a high-rise apartment building in Bangkok that won DAM’s International Highrise Award in 2010, and that allows light and air to penetrate though its slender forms—a quite literal example of a building that breathes. Through April 29. • dam-online.de