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Lucasfilm Unveils "Sandcrawler" Singapore Office 159

Posted by samzenpus from the breaks-over-jawa dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The massive, slow moving Sandcrawlers from George Lucas' Star Wars films inspired the form of Lucasfilm's new regional headquarters in Singapore. Designed by Aedas, the Sandcrawler Building will house a 100 seat theater, Lucasfilm Singapore offices, a public podium and other employee spaces. Neither rusty nor slow moving in this case, the glassy and streamlined building will combine a high performance facade with lush gardens and foliage that spills over terraces, resulting in a highly efficient commercial space. With construction already underway, we can look forward to this real life Star Wars manifestation sometime in 2012."
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Lucasfilm Unveils "Sandcrawler" Singapore Office More

Lucasfilm Unveils "Sandcrawler" Singapore Office

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  • Asia (Score:1)

    by ge7 ( 2194648 )
    Asia is in general much nicer looking than western world. They put a lot of thought on how things look, even to the finest detail, and have done so for centuries. This is visible in the old temples and buildings, but also in modern view - like Marina Bay Sands [dailymail.co.uk] in Singapore. As someone who likes to travel and live there I can say it's much nicer than being around the concrete blocks western world has. We have really let ourselves go and forget what's nice in life, and just have shit like wal-marts.

    • I seem to recall that in Singapore the official penalty for chewing gum on the subway is a police-administered beating. Keeping things looking nice is easy when you can flog people with truncheons for messing it up.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ge7 ( 2194648 )
        It's a fine, not beating. Gum is illegal according to laws anyway (and don't start about it. Their country, their laws).
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Because it's a small country and they need to keep it clean. They don't administer canings for possession of gum though, but the penalty for sticking gum anywhere other than in a trash can is pretty harsh.

            I wish we could get a lot more strict about that here, because it's nasty coming across somebody's ABC gum because they were too lazy to throw it away.

            • Last time I was working in Singapore I went out for the evening and without thinking bought a doughnut to eat on the train going home. Bad idea. Two police officers with automatic weapons approached me on the train station platform and told me in no uncertain terms to put the doughnut away. I did as I was told.

              I like to compare Singapore with Penang. Both are Malayian islands with a lot of industry. In Penang pretty much anything goes which might be good for business but there is little public transport and

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Hartree ( 191324 )

            There's a whole wikipedia article on it.

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum_ban_in_Singapore [wikipedia.org]

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by gl4ss ( 559668 )

            because this way the cops only have to keep gum with them if they want to randomly punish someone.

            why the fuck does lucasfilm need a singapore office though? and what kind of a creative person would want to live in singapore?

            • Probably a creative person who is a native of Singapore?

            • because this way the cops only have to keep gum with them if they want to randomly punish someone.

              Um no. If the Singapore cops wanted to randomly punish someone (and from experience I don't believe they do) then they would just fucking do it. No mucking around with entrapment. The real, direct deal. Its kind of the way business is done there. One day at work a co-worker interviewed an engineer. He was hoping the guy would leave his current job and start with us in the same week.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mikael ( 484 )

            Singapore is basically a city state. They are an island on the end of the Malaysian peninsula. Due to the high costs of living, a lot of the population commutes in and out from Malaysia. Imagine somewhere like Manhattan existing as it's own internationally recognized country.

            From experience after World War II, the Singaporeans know that things can do downhill fast if they don't keep a tight grip on living standards - last time they let them slip, the place became a den for drugs and crime. They only recover

        • It's a fine, not beating. Gum is illegal according to laws anyway (and don't start about it. Their country, their laws).

          Gee, I thought gun-control laws were contentious enough... now gum-control laws?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lennier ( 44736 )

        I seem to recall that in Singapore the official penalty for chewing gum on the subway is a police-administered beating. Keeping things looking nice is easy when you can flog people with truncheons for messing it up.

        What's the penalty for bleeding on the sidewalk? Two beatings?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by X.25 ( 255792 )

        I seem to recall that in Singapore the official penalty for chewing gum on the subway is a police-administered beating. Keeping things looking nice is easy when you can flog people with truncheons for messing it up.

        Yes. And if they didn't have the law for chewing gums on the subway (and penalty is not the beating, of course), Singapore would look like Dhaka. Right?

        Maybe you should get a passport and get out of whatever shithole you live in. There is a whole world out there, and it's not working according to your misconceptions...

    • Comparing the most expensive hotel in the world to a local Walmart may tend to distort the "nicer looking" scale. =)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PNutts ( 199112 )

        Comparing the most expensive hotel in the world to a local Walmart may tend to distort the "nicer looking" scale. =)

        Agreed. I couldn't afford a pair of socks from that hotel.

    • Re:Asia (Score:4, Insightful)

      by hedwards ( 940851 ) on Sunday September 04, 2011 @12:05PM (#37302998)

      That's not really true. Had you been around thousands of years ago to see what are now Greek ruins they would have been quite the sight. Unfortunately, due to whether and deterioration you don't get to see the bright colors that were original.

      The main difference is that the temples in SE Asia relied more upon detail carved into the rock than treatments applied to the building materials.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I guess you've never been to downtown Paris. Or Prague. Or Antwerp. Or Stockholm. Or lots of other places in Europe.

      Furthermore, "Asia" covers a lot of ground. Pick a random city in Vietnam or Pakistan or China and you'll find plenty of the usual hellish concrete boxes. Cherrypicking Singapore is a bit silly.

    • Re:Asia (Score:4, Informative)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Sunday September 04, 2011 @12:20PM (#37303064) Journal
      Meh. In Asia, but also in Europe, public spaces tend to look a lot better than in the USA, where they mostly look rather shabby. But moderns buildings in Asia are just as crap as in Europe and the USA, whereas in old buildings on all continents you will find attention to beauty and detail. I did not find buildings in Asia to be all that nicer.

    • i have to agree. their people, dying of cancer, take it so much more gracefully. they dont shout in the streets like those people in syria or tunisia. they just shut up and die, so admirable.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by icebike ( 68054 )

      Asia is in general much nicer looking than western world. They put a lot of thought on how things look, even to the finest detail, and have done so for centuries.

      Actually, the reason they look nice is because they are simply NEW. The west is is still using 100 year old infrastructure. But a much larger percentage of some Asian cities are the result of rapid growth, with most of the large buildings being built post 1960s.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gatkinso ( 15975 )

      Clearly you haven't traveled much in the West.

  • Or some random chome chunk form a 1950's buick

    either way, grats just what the world needs, another monstrosity of an ugly building

  • The sand crawler we all know so well was dirty, weather-worn and perhaps extemporised. In the circumstances methinks they should have gone with a shiny Naboo-inspired design.

  • How Appropriate... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Sunday September 04, 2011 @12:12PM (#37303032) Journal
    If memory serves, the sandcrawlers were the mobile headquarters for the Jawas, a smelly little species known for their skill in picking over and/or stealing the detritus of more advanced civilizations, bodging it up just enough to get it moving off the sales lot under its own power, and then skipping town.

    This seems like an eminently appropriate architectural allusion for the 'late-Lucas' period of Lucasfilms' work...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Phew, okay, thought you were gonna somewhere else entirely with that one...

    • Something that has long bothered me about the Jawas was the idea that Tatooine was littered with serviceable escaped droids just waiting to be picked up and resold. It really is a stupid idea. Wouldn't it have made more sense for the the droids to have crashed the escape pod into Uncle Owen's back yard?

      • Re:How Appropriate... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Sunday September 04, 2011 @01:22PM (#37303358) Journal
        If I remember correctly, the rationalization(most likely a retcon) was that Tatooine was originally a much more ambitious mining colony that, for some sort of convenient plot-related reasons, failed to pan out. The investors said "fuck it" and abandoned all the equipment not worth pulling back out of the gravity well, along with the assorted scum and yokels who were hanging around to either take advantage of the distant location or scratch out a feeble living. That was supposed to explain how they had sandcrawlers in the first place, those being rather above their tech level, and how a lifestyle based on nomadic scrounging and tinkering could possibly make sense...

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by EdIII ( 1114411 )

          You guys are cracking me up... lol. Seriously....

          George Lucas wrote the movie and filmed it in the 70's. Rational explanations? How about how much drugs were done in the 70's? Trust me, there was some rationalization about a lot of things in the movie, but the kind you only understand when you are really really fucked up.

          I heard the guy that played Chewbacca was stoned half the time during the film. It's the only way he could pull off those sounds.

    • This seems like an eminently appropriate architectural allusion for the 'late-Lucas' period of Lucasfilms' work...

      It's telling that the inspiration for this building is an idea over 35 years old. And it came from the mind of Ralph McQuarrie [amazon.com], not Lucas.

  • So, how long till a special edition Star Wars re-release has sandcrawlers that look like that?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      maybe that's why they're locating that office in singapore.

      you know, if bart & lisa try to go to smack some sense to the guys there, they'll get death.

  • I just hope they return to making movies that look half as good as the building.

    Although, what I really mean is writing and acting half as good as the building looks. But that wouldn't have been as smooth an opening line.

  • Not the first sandcrawler corporate HQ. (Score:4, Funny)

    by davebooth ( 101350 ) on Sunday September 04, 2011 @12:33PM (#37303114)
    Exercise a little google-fu and check out the Best Buy corporate HQ near the Minneapolis/St Paul airport... When they built that it seemed so appropriate and in line with their corporate attitude that they'd be headquartered in a bunch of sandcrawlers. We try to avoid buying from them but if we're running out of options, somebody in the family will always say "well, in the last resort we could go look what the Jawas have got... "
  • Too accurate for Chinese people, only imperial storm troopers are so precise.
    • Well played.

      Except when you're watching/being shot at, then they can't hit the broad side of a barn.

      • Well, in the first movie at least, they didn't actually want to hit anyone, because they were going to use the falcon to lead them to the rebel base. Vader probably hatched the plan the moment he sensed Obi Wan, so in a sense, the jedi religion did give him the clairvoyance to find the rebel base...

        They seemed to be pretty accurate mowing down rebels on Hoth in the second film, though.

  • What retarded PR (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sgage ( 109086 ) on Sunday September 04, 2011 @12:50PM (#37303190)

    "Neither rusty nor slow moving in this case, the glassy and streamlined building will combine a high performance facade with lush gardens and foliage that spills over terraces, resulting in a highly efficient commercial space. "

    WTF is a high performance facade?

    • They're bullshit artists, they get turds polished up real nice. I guess PR are the Jawas of the corporate world.

    • A "high performance facade" is something that looks shiny and cool, but underneath is a pile of crap. You know, like a kit car that looks really cool but is really built on a VW beetle frame. Or a movie with lots of flash and SFX but no real substance.

    • Yeah that sounds pretty dumb. But also weird: They're talking about lush gardens and foliage on a building that was inspired by something that existed on a dessert planet with no vegetation... Are they going for aesthetics, or is this the harbinger of a drastic ret-conning of Tatooine's landscape for the next media release? With Lucas, you can never be sure.

  • Larry Ellison (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Sunday September 04, 2011 @12:52PM (#37303200) Journal

    Larry Ellison is following suit by making his headquarters shaped like the Death Star. Coincidentally, it's aimed at Google.

  • ...everyone has to walk single-file in and around the building...to hide their numbers.
  • Right next to the Dulles airport in Virginia there is the CIT Building [flickr.com] that has a similar look. Address is 2214 Rock Hill Road, Herndon, VA 20170.

  • 'Bird Shit Architecture' in Brasilia and Beyond (Score:3, Informative)

    by ipv6_128_lgwb ( 70428 ) on Sunday September 04, 2011 @12:56PM (#37303214)
    Great talk about this type of Architecture http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnq1SvmZUYU [youtube.com]
  • Sandcrawler was rusty box on tracks. Building is horseshoe shaped and sits on poles. If building looks like sandcrawler to journalist, he/she should stop smoking that stuff or pass it to others. Two or three ground floors missing. Public podium available 24/7 for bombing and you don't have to dig anything to put explosives under the building. Interesting design. I hope they don't have earthquakes or terrorists in Singapore.

    • I'm pretty sure that somebody at LA or the architecture firm told them that it's inspired by a sandcrawler. Or possibly the same person that confuses an iPad for a Galaxy Tab

  • If you consider the glass-as-slow-moving-fluid concept.
  • Let alone a whole building? Managing the cheap labor for their merchandizing?
  • And I have the video to prove it.

  • This looks like the antithesis to a sandcrawler.

  • From TFA: "the space, which will be overgrown with foliage, will be a respite from the heat and the sun and cooler than surrounding areas."

    Which will be warmer because of the heat and the sun reflected from the shiny building...

  • So George is following the trend of fucking over American workers, so he can hire overseas slaves.

    Thanks George. American Graffiti... fucko

  • George Lucas is joining the walmart trend of fucking over American workers.

  • No Wheels?

  • Can't you do anything original anymore? Are you such a living dead zombie that you have to base EVERYTHING you do on a nearly fourty year old movie that effectively ended your career?

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