Combining megastructural drama with intimate communal ambitions, Ole Scheeren and OMA’s Interlace housing has a scale and abruptness typical of Singapore’s urban milieu, but it also recasts and reframes it

Your first reaction to The Interlace, especially if you are looking with a European sensibility, could well be OMG! Possibly WTF! Because here is something that looks like the very thing long considered the worst urbanistic nightmare, the cause of the mea culpa of a generation of chastened architects – a ’60s-style concrete housing megastructure, which, notwithstanding some revisionist tinkering among some of our naughtier critics, is still widely considered (especially outside the profession) The Thing To Which We Would Never Return. Thirty-one blocks, each 70.5 x 22 x 16.5 metres and containing 30-plus homes, have been stacked vertiginously and nonchalantly on top of each other like children’s building bricks. With its hexagonal grid of repetitive elements, The Interlace bears a superficial resemblance to the Bijlmermeer, the vast, ambitious and fraught housing complex in Amsterdam, but it also looks as if in the terrible 1992 plane crash that hit that estate its blocks had been tossed in the air and landed on each other with miraculously precise disorder. Is this any way to make a home, a community?

For Ole Scheeren, in all calm seriousness, it is. He wanted, he says, to replenish ‘the idea of communal living’, to make a place ‘where people really live … something which is not natural in economics today, when people often buy things as investments.’ The project started when he was at OMA, with ‘an interest in housing, something which we had not at all dealt with.’ The practice found itself offered commissions to build luxury residential developments, but Scheeren was more interested in the ‘relatively affordable’. Eventually the Singaporean developers CapitaLand, who also have Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito and Moshe Safdie on their books, came up with the opportunity to create what is now The Interlace: it was to be, says Eng Tiang Wah of CapitaLand an ‘urban habitat of the future’ that ‘facilitates social interaction and community bonding’. It started as an OMA project led by Scheeren; after he left in 2010 it was completed by his new practice, the Beijing-based Büro OS. According to the uneasy crediting that occurs in such situations it might be considered a creation of both…