Role: Project manager & design lead for project completed at WOHA Architects
Status: Competition (2013)
This brief for this public competition required squeezing a bus interchange, regional library, medical centre, government office, senior care centre, police centre, public food centre and a large-scale commercial office development onto a relatively cramped site adjacent to a major rapid transit station in one of Singapore’s most densely populated public housing estates. Using a conventional approach, the bus interchange and commercial offices alone would take up the entire site, leaving the community stakeholders with undesirable upper-storey facilities and a largely un-activated and disconnected site.
This proposal rejects the orthodox method of dividing the site into mono-functional land parcels and instead stacks a layer of car parking and commercial offices across the entire site as an urban umbrella- providing shelter and shade for the community layer below, and acting as a flat datum upon which to house an extensive rooftop photovoltaic array. This approach provides street level frontage for ALL community stakeholders and the bus interchange, while allowing a variety of open-air, breezy yet sheltered tropical community spaces ranging from convenient passageways to large-scale covered event plazas throughout the site. At every level of the building, the plan is modulated slightly to create step-out skygardens, which along with planted green facades create ample skyrise greenery as an additional public amenity, turning what could have been a typical inward looking air-conditioned suburban mall into a network of civic amenities and climate-appropriate public spaces, acting as the green community heart of this housing estate. (Text by WOHA Architects)
