Integrated Community Hub Typologies

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Photo Credit: Namba Park (Osaka, Japan)

Studio Instructor(s)

Pauline Ang

Program: Community Sports, Library and Park

Scale: 4.3 ha site

Studio Site: Woodlands Central

Land is a precious and dwindling commodity in tiny Singapore. Development guidelines are increasingly pushing architects to rethink conventional building typologies and to envision new ways of integrating them all within the smallest building footprints possible. The impact of such an approach will be felt most strongly in the design of public spaces and facilities, where the overlapping and stacking of large scale, diverse programmes and functions will result in unexpected adjacencies and new types of super-charged interstitial spaces, creating opportunities for an incredibly rich, varied and connected spatial experience within the public realm.

Using landscape as a mediator, the studio explores how community-based sports, library and park typologies can be integrated to give rise to new forms and spaces that will ultimately increase their value and utilisation, and intensify the experiences that they can offer within a given site. The essential programmatic components and spatial experiences that make up each of these types will be examined and defined with a view towards the changing roles, usages and limitations of public sports complexes, libraries and parks in the city.

The site is a 4.3 ha site in Woodlands Central, north of Woodlands MRT Station where the bus interchange is currently located. As part of URA’s 2014 Master Plan, Woodlands Central will be developed into a major transit-oriented regional hub with new residential and commercial developments surrounding the MRT station.

Instead of allowing retail and commercial interests to dominate this prime site, a community sports-library-park hub is postulated as an extension of the public infrastructure core. This would serve as a green respite for Woodlands Central as well as an active connector from the MRT station to the surrounding precinct. The extent to which integrated community hub typologies can achieve a high degree of urban density, connectivity and activity on the site is explored as an alternative to the commercial typologies that are envisaged in the Master Plan.