Wing On Life Building
This 20-storey office tower-on-podium is a visually arresting sight in Singapore’s Central Business District. Its facade of twisted concrete fins is a highly unique example of structural expressionism in modernist architecture from Southeast Asia and globally. Not only does the design allow the tower’s internal spaces to be column free, it helps shade the building from the tropical climate too.
The structural concept was a response to insurance company Wing On Life Assurance's design brief for a distinctive building and one expressing “visible solidity”. They commissioned James Ferrie, a Singapore-based expatriate architect who was active in the region from the late 1940s through the 1980s. His team developed a series of “peripheral hyperbolic structural mullions” to distinguish a tower-on-podium typology stipulated by the state. Some 12 floors of the tower are supported by these precast mullions that are structural in quality and alternately arranged to create diamond-shaped openings that simultaneously function as sunshading devices. The load of these stacked structural mullions eventually transfers to six structural columns on the building’s fourth floor.
The office tower sits above a podium block that is topped with a roof garden and terrace. The latter consists of a ground and mezzanine floors and two upper floors. While they have limited slit-like openings to the main frontage, Cecil Street, each of the podium’s upper floor offers a generous interior view of a nestled garden court that is the roof of the ground floor—a highly unusual design then. The office tower was also topped with a spatially unique split-level 7,000-sqf penthouse apartment. Its lower level was naturally ventilated, and included an indoor planted garden terrace and landscaped pool. Each of these spaces flanked the lower floor’s hyperbolic structural mullions. The penthouse’s upper floors housed a lounge, three bedrooms and study room. The penthouse was converted to offices in the early 1990s.
The ground floor lobby of Wing On Life Building houses a 90-feet long mural that is believed to be the longest such example at the time of the building’s completion. Known as “Singaporean Rhapsody”, it depicts colonial Singapore on one end, while the other presents contemporary depictions of the island. The mural remains intact and is a rare surviving post-independence mural—similar in spirit and tradition to the surviving “Skyline of Singapore” mural at Singapore’s Paya Lebar Airport. The mural’s artist, however, is not identified in published material.
The Wing On Life Building also stands as a unique testament to Singapore’s early post-independence aspiration to becoming a regional financial centre. When completed in 1975, it became one of the first modern buildings in the Golden Shoe district belonging to a financial institution. Its ground and mezzanine floors in the podium were specifically intended for banking offices and included a specific built-in strong room. Its developer, Wing On Life Assurance, an insurance company founded in Hong Kong also represents the cross-border flow of capital linked to overseas Chinese families manifested in Singapore. It expanded into Southeast Asia via Singapore in 1954 and acquired the site at Cecil in 1968 to build a regional headquarters as well as to diversify into property development. The company thus became part of a pioneering wave of developers who worked alongside a state-led urban redevelopment of the area traditionally known as Golden Shoe (because of its shoe-shaped appearance on plan) into Singapore’s modern financial and banking district.
In the mid-1990s, Wing On Life Assurance was acquired by French insurance firm AXA who then sold the building. As the company continued leasing the building, it became known as AXA Life Building. The building has largely been kept to its original condition and continues to be used as offices. However, its prime location within an approved redevelopment density higher than what is currently built puts it at risk of being demolished.
Locations: 150 Cecil St, Singapore 069543
Architects: James Ferrie & Partners (Architect-in-charge: Theresa Chee)
Year: 1975
Status: Not Conserved
Last modified on 13 October 2025. Written by Ronald Lim.
