Singapore has long been known for it’s cutting-edge public housing program, dating back to the 1960’s when the nation’s public housing agency the Housing and Development Board (HDB) was formed. Since then, residential conditions in the city-state have transformed from squalid slums into modernist high-rise towers sprinkled across the country, housing 80% of the nation’s population of 5.4 million. HDB has managed to avoid the nightmarish conditions that plague public housing developments in many countries with innovative home ownership & racial integration schemes, along with the provision of community amenities and parks within public housing blocks and estates.
ABOVE LEFT: Skyville @ Dawson ABOVE RIGHT: SkyTerrace @ Dawson
Pinnacle @ Duxton, photo by the Urban Land Institute
In 2001, the public housing landscape of Singapore was radically changed with an international architectural competition held to design the Pinnacle @ Duxton, ushering in a new typology for public housing in modern Singapore. With 1,848 units spread across seven interconnected 50-story towers, the Pinnacle is both the largest and tallest public housing development in the world, contains the two longest sky gardens in the world (both 500 metres in length, connecting all seven towers at the 26th and 50th storeys), and has received numerous international architectural design awards including the prestigious 2010 Best Tall Building in Asia award by CTBUH.
View of Skyville (left) and SkyTerrace (centre) along the Alexandra Park Connector.
Beyond the sheer magnitude and award-winning architecture of the Pinnacle @ Duxton, it also introduced many innovations to the Singaporean public housing typology. This includes varied unit types and facade treatments to allow residents to feel individually expressed within such a large scale development, multiple levels of community spaces at various skygardens, and at an integrated carpark with a green recreational roof. The innovative concepts executed at Duxton were explored further with smaller scale designs at new HDB towns, under the ‘Remaking our Heartland‘ scheme by HDB.
To further expand on the concepts generated by the ‘Remaking our Heartland’ scheme, HDB commissioned two renowned architecture firms, WOHA (third place winner of the Duxton competition) and SCDA to design two cutting edge buildings at Queenstown, one of Singapore’s oldest HDB estates. These new generation public housing blocks have just recently opened to the public to international acclaim and I had to go check it out ASAP.
Skyville @ Dawson
The more reserved of the two designs, WOHA’s Skyville @ Dawson embodies the community of the future. The three diamond-shaped blocks are an exploded version of the point block typology, forming 12 internalised “sky villages” (each of the 3 blocks is 4 villages high), comprising a sky garden and shared by 80 units. This helps to break down the scale of the development and creates sheltered spaces for community interaction within the height of the tower, recreating the experience of intimate neighbourhood settings within a high-density development. The porosity and dramatic framed views from the stacked villages makes the building feel like the vertical city of the future, and demonstrates a stunning new way of dense living without feeling scale-less and sacrificing civic amenities, and feels both culturally appropriate and futuristic.
Skyville’s carpark, planted with lush greenery and community facilities.
City views from Skyville @ Dawson
View of SkyTerrace @ Dawson from Skyville
SkyTerrace @ Dawson
SCDA’s SkyTerrace @ Dawson is the more flamboyant of the two designs, yet fails to revolutionise the public housing typology like Skyville, evoking the feel of condominium living with a point block tower layout. However, the stylish tetris-like facade provides visual interest, and the interlocked configuration reveals the internal organisation of loft units, designed to allow multiple generations to live together with a degree of privacy between flats with separate entrances and internal connectivity. Lush landscaping at ground level creeps up onto a terraced carpark podium, and skybridges at two levels provide green spaces in the sky for residents.
With it’s latest innovative public housing developments, Singapore continues to not only push the boundaries of creating affordable mass market housing in dense cities, but also exploring prototypes for future urbanism (basically, our public housing flats are cooler than your condos).
See Skyville and SkyTerrace @Dawson on my list of cool buildings in Singapore.
