Kampung Admiralty (Kampung is the Malay word for a village, and Admiralty is a neighbourhood in Northern Singapore) represents a new type of integrated civic development. Designed by by WOHA Architects, the building is comprised of innovative stacks of programmatic elements. This optimises land use in land-scarce Singapore by incorporating a public plaza, hawker centre, medical centre, rooftop park, and public housing for senior citizens within a single development comprising of stacked layers.
A large civic events plaza forms part of a fully porous and pedestrianised ground plane, allowing free shaded & sheltered circulation through the site.
The plaza is well shaded but bathed in natural light through a central skylight.
At the site periphery, a fringe of landscape and Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) features detain and treat stormwater for the development.
An automated bike storage system, the first in Singapore, uses an underground carousel to efficiently store hundreds of bikes.
Within the podium of the structure is the Admiralty Medical Centre, which faces into an internal landscape courtyard and with custom interior design and furniture by WOHA (btw, check out WOHA’s new furniture line!).
Raised one floor above and overlooking the civic plaza is a naturally-ventilated Hawker Centre, open on all sides with balmy cross-breezes.
The building facade utilises productivity-boosting large-scale precast concrete panels, with ‘chocolate bar’ reliefs and integral shading devices, and painted in bright colours which help with way-finding within the development.
Atop the podium of the building is a kind of urban mountaintop, a sloped landscape with playgrounds, community farming, agricultural experiments, and green terraces & paths.
Above the podium, two public housing blocks with cross-shaped layouts face the rooftop landscape of the podium and down into the plaza below.
It’s an innovative new typology for dense, urban mixed-use developments illustrating how unique combinations of building programmes can create interesting synergies. With civic spaces and generous gardens, it also gives back to the public. What do you think? Would you want to live here, and do you want this building as a neighbor?
Images by Jonathan Choe unless otherwise stated.
