Agri-food production in Singapore

More information coming soon.

HQ Ministry for Sustainability and Environment

The HQ Ministry for Sustainability and Environment is conceived as a flagship prototype for Jurong Lake District (JLD) and Singapore, pioneering new frontiers in tropical urbanism, sustainability, and resilience. In addition to realising the masterplan’s aspirations and complying with URA’s urban design guidelines for JLD, the design actively does its part to combat climate change by achieving the sustainability benchmarks of Zero Energy/Carbon/Water/Waste. The development is also nature-positive, regenerative, and biocentric, with biophilic office spaces. It showcases Singapore’s thought leadership in skyrise greenery by giving back more than the site area in landscape replacement, with its lush vegetation performing ecosystem services and supporting biodiversity in the city.

Future City Xicen

Xicen Country City masterplan presents a holistic solution for the upcoming development of a 7.1 km2 site on the southern bank of the Dianshan Lake, which is located in the Yangtze Delta area in close proximity to Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou. The site has rich water network that takes up about one thirds of the total site area. This masterplan is a prototype for more livable and sustainable developments of the future that brings all the amenities and convenience typically found in existing metropoles in a location embraced by nature.

The proposed masterplan adopts a 50/50 City approach, allocating most of the urban development to the northern half of the site while preserving nature and indigenous culture in the southern half. In the urban half, surface vehicular roads are reduced to a minimum and the land is divided into a series of thematic islands in order to tap into the rich green and blue resources of the site, while celebrating the unique waterfront lifestyle of the Xicen region.

The Urban Core Islands have the highest density and programmatic mix with a district transport hub, civic/commercial plaza and arts/cultural center seamlessly connected to the metro and high-speed railway stations. The R&D Islands integrate garden offices, R&D facilities, and business incubators with residences to suit the future need of high-tech industries. The Residential Islands face the water and benefit from a natural biophilic environment. A series of Rewilding Islands are embedded into the urban spaces, allowing regenerative nature to render bioremediation and ecological services to the built environment.

The nature half is grouped into four zones: Eco-Tourism Zone, High-Tech High Intensity Farming Zone, Campus Village Zone and SME Creative Clusters Zone. By enhancing agricultural and energy production as well as inserting anchor industries and schools, Xicen Country City will become a selfsufficient and resilient urban typology wellequipped for all the future challenges and opportunities.

Future City Maqiao

Maqiao Future City is located in the southwest of Shanghai, 35 km away from the city center. It is the 20-hectare core development area of the future Shanghai AI Innovation Zone. The vision of this masterplan is to create an integrated new town as the driving engine for the larger region and a human-centric destination place that celebrates future live, learn, work and play. It will also be a demonstration project that aims to achieve carbon neutrality in phases.

The masterplan adopts the 50/50 City strategy, preserving half of the land for restorative and regenerative green and blue spaces and the other half for high-density high-amenity urban development, allowing a balanced synergy to grow between nature and the built environment. Programmatically it follows the same concept, proposing half of the development as residential spaces and the other half as a mix of R&D offices, commercial and community spaces.

Maqiao Future City consists of eight interconnected clusters, the Urban Core being the most dense and mixed-use. It integrates metro station, district transport hub, retail shops, urban plaza, and landmark buildings to create a welcoming gateway to the city and a vibrant civic center that forges a strong community spirit and sense of place.

Radiating out from the Urban Core are three Garden Office clusters with SOHO apartment blocks and various embedded business incubators that act as a physical and functional bridge between the urban spaces and the spaces left to nature. The waterfront residential clusters offer community spaces such as sports halls, schools, or healthcare centres.

A 3-dimensional planning strategy is introduced to bring things together. Vehicular roads, district infrastructures and services are buried underground, leaving the ground level fully pedestrianized and maximized for nature. Multiple landscaped ground levels are created above to facilitate stronger connection between clusters and further enhance the ecological system.

Wilkie Edge

This project is in Bras Basah – Bugis district, an arts, education and nightlife zone. New zoning allows media facades and advertisements, which are not allowed in the rest of the central district: the intent being to create night time buzz.

The area has a diverse mix of buildings of different eras and scales. To the north-east is a conservation area of 3 storey shophouses. Mt Sophia, to the north, is in transition from old houses and institutional buildings to dense 12 storey apartments. To the west are large podium and tower buildings from the 1980s. On the east are public housing slab blocks in bright colours. Urbanistically, we wanted to address the disjunctions in scale, and contribute to the buzz of the neighbourhood.

The brief and regulations encouraged a podium and stumpy tower, which was out of scale with the fine textured shophouses. Instead we developed a finely textured skin that filled the planning envelope, and carved out volumes that created silhouettes that are in dialogue with the scale of the buildings around them. These volumes open up light and air to the form, and allowed multiple sky gardens and terraces to be created at different levels. The carved out surfaces are aluminium sunshades and screens, which create a vertical proportion and texture relating to the historic shophouse facades. The silvery skin is a folded, perforated skin that changes with the light conditions, from silver solidity to a misty transparency.

The masterplan designated the corner as an “illuminated node”. Rather than a screen applied to the building, the media façade is integrated into the architecture. A unique LED projection system called A:Amp (Advertising Amplifier) was developed by realities:united which creates a soft light like watercolour on the façade.

Punggol North Masterplan

Punggol North Masterplan is part of Singapore’s strategy to sustain long-term economic growth by creating new development areas island-wide, bringing jobs and social amenities closer to residents.

Punggol North is envisioned to be a vibrant and inclusive district underpinned by cutting-edge technology, as well as urban and social innovation which make everyday living more convenient and sustainable. As Singapore’s first Enterprise District, it will provide flexibility for the land use mix and scale to be curated at district-level, enabling deeper integration and synergy of different uses and spaces to realise the vision of the District. The District is also planned to be connected to the greater Punggol area, with a car-lite, green, and vibrant environment.

This is the first district in Singapore to adopt an integrated masterplan approach that brings together a business park, a university and community facilities and transport infrastructure. The district-level planning approach creates synergies, optimises land use and catalyses community building. It also allows us to design and integrate innovative technological platforms and from the ground up, transforming the way people work, live, learn and play in an inclusive and sustainable environment.

Phase 1 of the Masterplan has been completed in 2025 with the Punggol Digital District and Singapore Institute of Technology Campus.

NOMU

NOMU – North of the Museum and University – is an adaptive re-use of an existing 1970s apartment block into a mixed-use development with shops, offices and residential apartments. By exposing the original concrete frame, the interplay of solid and selectively demolished voids serves to carve new, interesting volumes out of the existing structure.

The façade is wrapped in a gauze-like layer of silver screens which alternately conceal and reveal the underlying structure. Elements such as stairs and service enclosures are picked out in striking rust-red metal as functional “sculptures” that punctuate the old grid.

The project is notable for proposing that the commercial quantum be sleeved along Handy Road to enliven the street level. NOMU is an example of how obsolete inner-city structures can be utilised to make the city an exciting place to live and work.

Odeon Towers Extension

This commercial project was designed in 2001 and involves making use of spare floor area created in an existing building by changes in area calculation methods of the planning regulations. A new low-rise showroom and retail element is constructed on an existing open space that is currently under-utilised.

A signage wall wraps the party wall of an adjoining development and creates an eye-catching entry statement that evokes memories of the Odeon cinema that used to occupy the site. A rooftop garden provides a place for product launches for the showroom and gives greenery and shade to this inner-city site.

OCT Kunming

Scheme for a mixed-use headquarters complex with office, residential, hospitality and commercial components.