Building Office

SG Promenade

Marina Bay, Singapore

2005

Half of the Marina Bay is manmade like most of the Singapore Island. There is a lower-manhattan size residential development planned on the manmade lands on the east side of Marina Bay. The existing business district is on west side of the Marina. The north is used more as a cultural, leisure area. West and south sides are completely empty but we know that there is going to be a lot of houses there and they won't be cheap.

First question was, how do you build a city from a scratch? or do/can you build cities from scratch? Did Brazil, Ankara work?

Who doesn't love Manhattan? There was no doubt in my mind before I go to Singapore to see the site, the developers had already proposed a tropical-Manhattan life for this empty site. When we first watch the advertising videos, we were not surprised at all. There was one Gehry style culture center, a Libeskind like museum placed on two focal points pointed out by the developers. Rest of it was a singapore style scaled manhattan grid with lots of condos and lots of happy people.

Scale is a problem in Singapore. Some roads are too wide, some are too narrow while the island itself is very small. I was interested in the completion of the circulation circle around the bay. Ok we know there is hotels on south, residential on east, culture on north west, business on west side. But you have a 300m gap between residential and culture on north west. On the north east you have a dead promenade area which is only used in Chinese new year celebrations by thousands of people.

I shaped my brief over this problem, how do you fill in 300m gap in this area of massive pavements, wide roads and huge buildings. The best solution would be to do what any cook does before cooking, slice the big pieces into little pieces. Having studied generation of space in sections in the first two terms in the school, I decided to put a free spending time area for the workers who needs a shade, joggers, fishmans, tourists and lovers just on the edge of the bay. Five types of users would use the site for different purposes. Tourist would like to take the best photo and be proud to be in Singapore, someone who needs a shade would just like to relax and take a nap for some time, joggers would like to have as less obstacles as they can, fishman would love to just relax and don't talk to anyone except their old fellows, and lovers would just like to be alone.

The last thing you would like to do as an architect on a promena-dead like this is dictating spaces for these five type of users. There should be a balance of flexibility for the five type of users to spend time without disturbing each other at the same time, while having the quality of public park, relaxing without paying any money.

partners in charge:

Aras Burak

technical advisor:

Nikolaos Stathopoulos

SG Promenade

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Building Office was founded in 2006 and the Reading Office was founded in 2009 in London.

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