On a recent trip to Singapore to attend the World Architecture Festival, I managed to spend a day checking out some of the structure the island town has to offer. The recent structure of this clean, safe and modern town of 5.3 million individuals could be described in a few words: big, extravagant and (increasingly) green. Take a look at some buildings and a playground helping to make Singapore a destination for architecture fans.
John Hill
Singapore’s heritage from the British in the early 19th century was strategic — to counter the Dutch transport dominating the area. Likewise, its current flourishing could be attributed to its proximity to China, India, other parts of Asia and Australia. Like important cities in neighboring countries (Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Bangkok, etc.), Singapore is a city of living and working vertically. The gardens are vertical.
John Hill
The Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort (a resort, casino, mall, convention center, movie theaters, museum and promenade covering 38 acres) was finished in 2011 and has become Singapore’s unofficial symbol. The most distinctive formal gesture of architect Moshe Safdie’s style is the resort, which consists of three towers (with nearly 3,000 rooms total) linked on top by the people Sands SkyPark along with a pool for hotel guests.
John Hill
The huge complex is considered the most expensive building in the world, at a price of $6 billion for construction. It might be claimed that it was worth it, given the prominence it’s given Singapore along with the resort’s ability to lure visitors with conventions like WAF, an yearly festival that aims to award the best structure in the world.
In this photo, the resort rises over the clamshell-like museum at the lower-right corner, together with the glass-walled mall in between. In the bottom-left corner is a double-helix-shaped pedestrian bridge that connects Marina Bay Sands into the Singapore Flyer Ferris wheel and other tourist spots.
John Hill
The park and pool bridging the 55-story resort towers follow a theme found through Singapore: making a fresh floor plane raised well over sidewalk level. It is the stuff of science fiction (consider those raised walkways from the silent movie Metropolis), but in Singapore it is a reality — if one predicated on linking and money personal enclaves instead of the public domain.
The rooftop infinity edge swimming pool is one reason people opt to stay at Marina Bay Sands. It offers dramatic views of downtown, though it is not a location for the vertiginous. I was not a guest, therefore in this photo I am shrouded in from the adjoining public deck.
John Hill
Immediately east of Marina Bay Sands is Gardens from the Bay, the initial portion of a three-phase transformation of recovered land to parkland east of the downtown core. The design of this $1 billion, 133-acre park by Grant Associates (landscape architect) and Wilkinson Eyre (architect) showcases tropical plants and horticulture, but it’s the “Supertrees” that steal the show. Clustered in three groves, the 17 Supertrees reach up to 16 stories tall and behave as vertical gardens as well as chimneys for releasing pressurized atmosphere that comes from burning waste material to cool the conservatories found elsewhere in the garden.
A raised walkway joins some of those Supertrees in one grove. At nighttime, the Supertrees become canvases for displays of sound and light.
John Hill
Here would be the Cooled Conservatories, found from atop Marina Bay Sands. The pair of buildings won the “World Building of the Year” award at the 2012 WAF, also held in Singapore.
John Hill
The conservatories are called the Cloud Forest and the Flower Dome; here we are peeking inside the latter. Like botanic gardens around the globe, these buildings work to recreate environments considerably different than what could be found on the opposite side of this glass. Singapore’s heat and humidity are diminished inside the Flower Dome in favor of a perpetual spring. As expected, this human-made climate is geared toward letting flowers bloom, but the power required to cool the large area comes from responsibly burning waste material and purifying it before releasing the exhaust throughout the Supertrees.
John Hill
Given Singapore’s safety, cleanliness and quality of life, it is an extremely desirable place to call home. A range of large residential developments have been recently completed or are underway, some using the names of architects to make their mark. Reflections at Keppel Bay is a huge development designed by Daniel Libeskind. It is situated near Sentosa Island, a favorite destination for tourists and residents alike with theme parks, shopping, hotels, beaches and golf courses.
John Hill
Of those 17 buildings in the evolution, 11 are low-rise six and structures are towers. The towers are linked by sky bridges at several levels, and each is capped by a sky garden. The towers curve as they rise and finish in jagged profiles, a signature move of Libeskind.
John Hill
The towers sit traversed by paths. Reflections at Keppel Bay is Western not only in architectural style and the choice of architects (Libeskind is of Polish-Jewish descent and now lives in the United States), but also since it is a gated community (do not ask me how I got inside to take these images). Tennis, a fitness center, playgrounds, outdoor barbecues and other shared amenities are spread between the buildings.
John Hill
The recurring theme of sky bridges can even be found at the Pinnacle @ Duxton public housing project that plots over Chinatown. Singapore architects Arc Studio designed seven slab-shaped towers linked by bridges at flooring 26 and 50. The general public can pay a couple of dollars to visit the 50th floor sky bridge, which is regarded as the longest in the world.
John Hill
Nearing completion roughly halfway between the Keppel Bay job and Pinnacle @ Duxton is Your Interlace, a hierarchical project made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. As is the trend with Rem Koolhaas and his office, norms are contested. In this case, they reconsidered the typology of vertical towers connected by bridges, instead turning the buildings on their side and overlapping them , such that they become habitable bridges.
John Hill
But a more suitable way forward could be found at the job of Singapore’s WOHA, an architecture firm that focuses on high-density sustainable living from the tropics. For your PARKROYAL on Pickering, a resort overlooking a sizable downtown playground, the company provided two units of green area on the building for every one unit they took by building on the website. WOHA’s aim is generally a 1:1 ratio, but they surpassed it by producing a raised park on the fifth floor (covering nearly the whole footprint of the building and visible here using the vibrant candy-shaped bits) and much more terraces on the top floors. This opinion from the park strengthens the builder’s notion of continuing the green area from this public space up the building.
Singapore’s tropical climate is excellent for vertical gardens (like Solaris, part of an exhibition talked about on ), only one way that big and modern buildings (the norm at the city) can be better for the environment and the people inhabiting them.