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Masan Group OUE Bayfront, Singapore 5,500 square feet
FLUID DYNAMIC
The look of Masan’s new Singapore
office seems to shimmer and change
right before your eyes, reflecting
both the company’s fast-moving
character and its heritage.
Seen to the left of this image, an example of one of the
office’s columns – with a section of its contemporary exterior
peeled back to reveal a vista of Ho Chi Minh City beneath
Masan Group OUE Bayfront, Singapore 5,500 square feet
Centred above the reception area’s water feature is the Masan logo –
deconstructed into individual sculptural pieces along an eight-metre depth
so that it ‘explodes’ or ‘reassembles’ according to one’s perspective.
Masan Group OUE Bayfront, Singapore 5,500 square feet
Covering two-thirds of the front-of-house floor area yet only 1mm in depth, the water
feature is a shimmering evocation of Masan’s origins in the Mekong River region.
Masan Group OUE Bayfront, Singapore 5,500 square feet
The office’s boardroom is encased in a simple glass box, and
sits atop a ‘raft’ floating on its stunning water feature.
Masan Group OUE Bayfront, Singapore 5,500 square feet
Fit and finish for this striking design is breathtakingly precise, with just 3mm
separating the reception’s floor surface from the edge of the water feature.
Masan Group OUE Bayfront, Singapore 5,500 square feet
Floor-to-ceiling transparent glass is used for the office’s internal divisions, ensuring visual
connections from space to space, and opening the splendid external views to all.
Masan Group OUE Bayfront, Singapore 5,500 square feet
The workspace is undivided and open, with widely-spaced chevron-shaped workstations
adding an element of visual dynamism to an otherwise minimalist environment.
Masan Group OUE Bayfront, Singapore 5,500 square feet
It is an office where columns peel back to reveal glimpses of a city;
where the conference table floats like a raft on its own lake; where
logos explode and reassemble according to where the viewer is
standing.
In some respects, this workplace – the first international office of
Masan, a Vietnam-based holding company – sounds more
dreamscape than workscape. But get beyond the initial surreal
impressions and a solid logic emerges. This office is all about
connection – to a way of working, to people, and to the soul of the
company itself.
An unusual brief
Masan, whose interests lie in banking, mining and food, conceived
of their Singapore office partly to bring Masan to the world, and
partly to bring the world to them, as well as serving as a showcase
to a world still generally unfamiliar with their brand, the office
would be a first point of contact for individuals aspiring
to join this vigorously young and unconventional firm.
With Masan’s operations becoming increasingly international, the
office would also be a convenient part-time base for the CEO and
partners. This necessitated the inclusion of a conference room and
two smaller meeting spaces in the design. Other functional
necessities in the brief were an open-plan work space for
approximately 10 staff, and a small number of enclosed offices.
The site selected was a 5,500 square feet, 9th floor space in OUE
Bayfront, located in Singapore’s prestigious Marina Bay. Selected to
create the design was M Moser Associates, who began the process
with an intensive collaboration with Masan to discover in detail how
its people worked, and the essence of the company’s background.
Impressions in depth
The finished design makes its impression the moment one steps
out of the lift. The reception area is expansive, with two-thirds of its
area covered by a shimmering water feature. Hovering above it is
three-dimensional rendering of the Masan logo – actually
deconstructed into discrete sculptural elements installed in series
along an eight metre depth. As a result, the logo seems to
‘disassemble’ when viewed from any perspective but head-on.
Also floating on the water feature is the conference room, a simple
transparent glass-encased space atop a timber ‘raft’. The water
feature – as well as the office’s outside view over the bay – refer
directly to Masan’s origins in Ho Chi Minh City along the Mekong
River. Here, the design’s painstaking attention to detail and finish is
at its most impressive: to make a near-seamless transition between
floor and water, just 3mm separating the two elements.
The same origins are literally just below the surface everywhere in
this otherwise contemporary, sharply-defined environment.
Structural columns throughout the space feature ‘peeled back’
sections inset with multilayered, brilliant blue-tinted satellite images
of Ho Chi Minh City. As well as providing a constant reminder
of the firm’s heritage, their vividness also adds bursts of energetic
colour to a palette dominated by the neutral hues of wood and
stone, and the icy transparency of glass.