The Padang Atrium and the Link Bridges
studioMilou (Jean-François Milou) with CPG Consultants · 2011 to 2015
The two colonial buildings were built a decade apart and never touched. The conversion into a museum turned the narrow lane between them into the gallery's main hall, the Padang Atrium, a tall space open to both facades and covered by a sweeping roof of steel and glass hung with a perforated golden aluminium screen. Sunlight through the screen throws a dappled pattern on the old stone walls, an effect the architect compared to light through the canopy of a tropical forest. From the atrium, bridges cross at upper levels between the wings, and glass floors and lifts let you see the original facades from angles no one had before.
Look at the join. Jean-François Milou's rule was that the new work should never pretend to be old and should never damage what it touched. The roof rests on tree-like columns rather than on the historic buildings; the bridges are light steel structures; the new basement concourse runs under both wings. Where the architects had to cut into the buildings, for lifts and galleries, they left the scars visible. The screen, made of thousands of leaf-like aluminium panels, continues over the roofs of both buildings and unites them into a single silhouette seen from the Padang.
The competition to design the gallery was won in 2007 by the Paris studio of Milou together with the Singapore firm CPG Consultants, and the building work took four years. The atrium is now the meeting point for tours, the location of the ticket counters and the setting for large installations. Stand in the centre and turn around: the rusticated ground floor of the Supreme Court is on one side, the columns of City Hall on the other, and above them the roof that finally brought them together.
Did You Know? The golden roof screen is made of thousands of perforated aluminium leaves that filter the sun like a forest canopy.
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