I’m on one of the dizzying mid-air walkways in the soaring atrium of Conrad Singapore Orchard hotel, located between Orchard Road shopping district and Singapore Botanic Garden. The walkway is vertiginously high – about 60 metres. I’m gripping the handrail to steady myself, but it’s the fantabulous vantage point that roots me to the spot.
Before me is a marvellously conjured optical illusion, an eye-ogling visual enigma of horizontal balconies T-barred by walkways and lit by strips of light that lead the eye in repeating rectilinear patterns. They are intersected by a central vertical tower with domed glass elevators that have an ethereal quality as they quietly ascend and descend in the expansive space. Above, light streams rather gloriously through a glass skylight, the golden rays illuminating trails of leafy greenery hanging from the hotel’s 12 cascading floors.
Way down below, restaurants, bars, sitting booths – even a water feature, extend into the grandiose lobby where the graphic exactness is disrupted by gorgeous spiral staircases. A contemporary architectural masterpiece you might think? In fact, the property, now into its fourth decade, is an example of the famed grand atrium design which sprung into being in America during the 1960s and ’70s. There are architectural precedents, but Atlanta architect and developer John Portman, who died in 2018, aged 93, is largely credited with bringing the unique design – with rings of rooms around four outer wall.
