At the northern fringe of urban Singapore, an unconventional structure stands out among the monotonous skyline of Bishan, a neighbourhood dominated by conventional public housing blocks. The atypical twin towers with unusual ziggurat-like silhouettes and joined at three levels by skygarden bridges were completed in April. Archigardener was lucky enough to be invited last Tuesday for an exclusive tour of the complex. The tour was led by none other than the building’s starchitect designer, Moshe Safdie.
Moshe Safdie is a Canadian architect renowned worldwide for his exemplary civic projects, including his almost maniacally iconic local projects, Marina Bay Sands and the upcoming Jewel Changi Airport. He is perhaps most famously known internationally for his first building, Habitat ’67 (an adaptation of his university thesis project) which was built as part of the 1967 World Expo in Montreal.
Safdie describes the original Habitat as a “combination of community and privacy”, trying to “make the apartment as much of a house as possible” by “fractalising the surface of the building to create as many opportunities for interaction with the environment as possible”. This radical departure from the staid Modernist tower blocks being built at the time was a huge innovation in the way that residential architecture was conceived.
I visited Safdie’s seminal work in 2009, while studying architecture at the Mies van der Rohe founded Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Coming from a school where ‘form follows function‘ and usually translates into a Miesian modernist monolith, I was inspired by the way that Safdie used a more humanistic interpretation of function to create an almost unintentionally sculptural building mass. This manifests as an architecture with spaces suited for residents and that fosters community spirit, while imbuing subtle but arresting iconicism.
Speaking about Habitat last week, Safdie underscored the critical acclaim of his earlier work (with regards to architectural theory) with the fact that Habitat ’67 has achieved the longest tenancy of any building in Canada, now hosting second and third generation inhabitants in the beloved structure.
Moshe Safdie has had over 30 years experience building in Singapore, starting in 1985 with an early vertical iteration of the Habitat concept, Ardmore Habitat (which has since been demolished to make way for the Ardmore complex of condominiums. This tower consisted of stacked maisonettes arranged around a double-height outdoor space adjacent to the living spaces.
My first glimpse of Safdie’s latest Habitat project in Singapore was in a lecture last year, where he spoke of a building that used a “fractalisation of the building mass” inspired by organic forms. These forms allow the creation of outdoor gardens in the sky for every unit, open-air sky streets, and to allow permeation of light and air into every unit. He described this concept using a metaphor of a tree- a natural form which has evolved to achieve maximum surface area for light and air to each leaf.
Although much of his time since habitat has been spent building iconic civic structures including the National Gallery of Canada and the Yad Vashem Museum, renewed interest in the Habitat concept has led to a revival of the ideas of Habitat ’67 but in a new way applicable for higher density development. An ongoing research project in his office has led to a contemporary development of this building typology which allows maximum permeability for each dwelling while achieving extremely high densities through stacking and splaying of the building components. This design also allows wider-scale urban benefits through the activation of the ground plane with mixed-use typologies. Enter Sky Habitat, the first time the ideas of Habitat ’67 have been tested in reality at this scale and density.
At Sky Habitat, local developer CapitaLand wanted to build something different to break the monotony of typical condominium towers in the suburbs, and brought in Safdie to see if he could use the Habitat concept to build a vertical version of Habitat ’67 with ‘landed housing’ in the sky.
CapitaLand describes the project as a “three-dimensional matrix of homes with private terraces and common gardens, bringing about skyrise greenery and offering stunning views of the skyline” (CapitaLand is currently also partnering with Safdie on a number of other projects, including the Jewel Changi Airport and Raffles City Chongqing).
On a tour of the complex, Safdie lamented the worldwide proliferation of “cookie-cutter” apartment blocks, saying that “many housing projects these days are very sculptural, formal” but that this building was not generated based on formal concerns but instead sculpted from within to maximise views and light. To Safdie “form is formed from within rather than imposed from the outside”.
“The design here is not to preconceive the form and then see how the units work into it but actually work from within. So the idea of the pyramid stepping structure comes from the idea of gardens, and because I believe they should be open to the sky, they step back. And the two planes play together against each other to maximise the views and maximise the airflow. Too often the exciting looking forms for residential design are also preconceived shapes and within that the designer is kind of struggling to arrange the living environment. I think and I do believe passionately that architectural forms grow from within, from the organisation and spacial requirements of the building, which I think is what this building is all about”.
Safdie stated that “what I wanted to create here is the infrastructure to support community”, and that “there’s a tradition [in Singapore] of being quite generous about the communal facilities. It is a tradition of community living that starts with the HDB [public] housing“.
One key example of this ‘community infrastructure’ is the three iconic exposed-truss sky bridges, which were prefabricated off-site and lifted into place. Resident amenities vary on the three sky bridges: on the 14th floor is a natural landscape, there are playful mounds at the 26th floor, and the 38th floor hosts a stunning infinity pool with panoramic skyline views.
“We developed these balcony enclosures so that they allow the wind to go through but they give you a measure of privacy. You are not too exposed, but at the same time you are not too enclosed”.
Nearly 50 years after Habitat ’67, a new prototype for dense vertical urbanity has emerged on the outskirts of Singapore. This typological innovation shows how dense urban living can be as pleasant as living in houses on the ground, yet encourage more community interaction, and be more sustainable: a civic whole greater than the sum of its stacked parts.
Images and video by Jonathan Choe unless otherwise stated
