Overgrown

A new skin takes hold of the WAAX building, shrouding the historic structure in a consuming layer of growth. This intervention transforms the existing building into a strategically obscured relic, present, but partially withdrawn from immediate recognition. Much like a strangler fig that envelops its host, the new form grows around the old, consuming it not through destruction but through redefinition. The fig becomes a metaphor for a contemporary architectural skin that wraps the structure, claiming it for a new purpose.

The facade’s perforated geometry deepens this tension. It reveals the original structure only in fractured glimpses, withholding full clarity as though the past is being slowly obscured. Light filters through the skin in controlled moments, illuminating interior spaces while reinforcing the sense of enclosure. The building becomes a shadow of itself, visible, but only through the veil of its successor.

Along the ground level, an Urban Forest Corridor threads beneath the intervention, reinforcing the geometry of the skin above. It acts as an undergrowth, grounding the project in a biophilic framework that softens the threshold between city and building.

On the south facade, the growth pushes outward, forming an addition that increases the building’s capacity while tightening its grip on the host. This new volume reads as an extension born from the skin itself, a continuation of the organism’s spread.

Together, the host structure and the enveloping growth form a hybrid condition, an architectural ecology where the old is preserved only through the dominance of the new. The WAAX building becomes a place where its former identity recedes, the new growth takes hold, and change becomes inevitable.