History
The MacDonald House, located a short distance from the Istana, is the last remaining office building in facing brick in the central area. The building was built in 1949, and designed by Reginal Eyre of the architectural firm Palmer and Turner. One of the first high-rise buildings in Orchard Road, the MacDonald House housed mainly British, American and Australian companies. Before the building was vacated in the early 2000s, the building housed HSBC on the first few floors of the building.
In an incident known as the MacDonald House bombing, two Indonesian saboteurs placed a bomb on the mezzanine floor on 10 March 1965, killing two and wounding 33. This was one of a number of terrorist attacks in Singapore during the Indonesian Confrontation in support of President Sukarno's opposition to the merger of Singapore, Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak to form the Federation of Malaysia. At the time of the bombing, the building had also housed the Australian High Commission and the Japanese Consulate.
After years of remaining vacant, the building was put up for sale by tender on 5 April 2002, with a net lettable area of about 78,600 square feet (7,300 m2) over ten stories. While the sale was on-going, the building was gazetted as a national monument on 10 February 2003, with the exterior façade coming under protection. The successful bidder, Tinifia Investment, paid S$36 million for the freehold building in 2003, and closed the building for extensive interior renovations costing another S$12 million, including the upgrading of the ceilings, floors, lobby and lifts, and the introduction of carparking facilities with the addition of a mechanical parking system for 30 cars.
The building re-opened in April 2005 with full occupancy. Mccann Worldgroup occupies the fifth to eighth floors while a beauty/spa operator, Expressions International, takes up the top two floors. The flagship Orchard Road Branch of Citibank Singapore opened on 23 June 2005, occupying 37,000 square feet (3,400 m2) of space spread over the building's lower four floors which house the largest wealth management centre in Asia.
Read more about this topic: Mac Donald House
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)