Barun Roy: Asia's signature cities

Architectural projects underway in Hong Kong and Singapore illustrate how urban living experience can also be uplifting

Come 2011, Hong Kong will unveil the final blueprint of its newest and first decidedly post-modern urban redevelopment project, the West Kowloon Cultural District, on a reclaimed parcel of land west of Yau Ma Tei. And Singapore will open the first phase of its largest garden project, a 101-hectare botanical preserve that will transform Marina Bay into a virtual biosphere.

Together, the two projects will take the “Green City” movement in Asia to a new level of sophistication, a movement that’s beginning to transform cities in the region into integrated living-business-leisure spaces that breathe, sustain and regenerate. It’s a movement that’s changing the entire concept of how different streams of activities within a city should be organised to give its residents a healthy, congenial, and uplifting urban experience.

Hong Kong’s Cultural District will be the centrepiece of the huge West Kowloon reclamation project, which has wrested 334 hectares of new land from the sea to redesign the urban landscape of the Kowloon peninsula. It’s to be the place where Hong Kong would find its soul and freedom. International architects were invited to submit ideas, from which three proposals – by London-based Foster and Partners, Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and Hong Kong-based Rocco Design Architects – were short-listed last August for public viewing and comment till end-December.

In the Foster master plan, which seems most likely to win, a 23 hectare green oasis (including a 19-hectare city park), girdled by a 2 km promenade along the harbour, dominates the 40-hectare development. A colonnaded avenue will provide a landscaped setting for a total of 17 cultural buildings, including a Great Opera House, a museum of modern art, concert halls, and a 15,000-seat arena with an expo centre underneath providing 24-hour shopping and entertainment. All roads connecting the public spaces and places will run underground, freeing up the area above to recreate Hong Kong’s familiar vibrant street pattern in a cosy, diversified, pedestrian-friendly environment.

Singapore’s 101-hectare garden project, conceived by Grant Associates and called Bay South, is next to the Marina Bay Sands, a top-end casino, leisure, and entertainment resort promoted by Las Vegas Sands Corporation that opened last June and has turned the area into an astounding architectural showcase. To that showcase, Grant’s concept of super-tall solar trees wrapped in ferns, vines, and tropical flowers will now add a unique new idea in green city planning, that of vertical gardens, not only to beautify even small urban spaces but also to double as rain water and solar energy collectors.

Actually, Bay South is one of three garden developments – the two others are Bay East and Bay Central – that the authorities have planned across the mouth of Singapore River to give the island’s urban face a bold and visionary lift. All three gardens are to be connected by pedestrian bridges forming a giant loop along the entire waterfront. People walking the loop, as well as a 3.5 km sea-side promenade completed recently, will get a view of the city they couldn’t have had earlier and realise that urban living can be a liberating experience, too.

It’s clear that Singapore wants to become Asia’s foremost eco-friendly city, and that concern will be amply reflected in a new, path-breaking eco-complex slated to come up between Marina Centre and the Civic District. Conceived by Norman Foster, this huge, 150,000 square metre mixed-use project, big enough to fill an entire city block, is seen as a “green” masterstroke. All its facades, slanted to catch the wind and direct it downwards to cool the ground spaces, will be fitted with solar cells, while direct sunlight will be filtered through ribbon-like canopies rising from the base and looking like diaphanous waves. Geothermal heating, chilled beams and ceilings, and an ice storage system for cooling will be its other features.

Coming up on an 8 hectare site between the National University and downtown Singapore is a large-scale residential complex, called The Interlace, which will perhaps count as the world’s first “vertical village.” Designed by Ole Scheeren, formerly with Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and scheduled to be ready by 2015, it will stack 32 horizontal apartment blocks, each six storeys tall, in a hexagonal arrangement to form six permeable courtyards, where the community will meet and mingle. Its cascading sky gardens hiding private terraces and lush ground vegetations embedding extensive communal facilities are meant to capture the quiet of a village within the bustle of an active, modern city.

Two motivating factors are clearly at work: first, to adorn the urban landscape with striking architectural landmarks to enhance its physical appeal; and second, to make liveability and quality of life the supreme urban development benchmark

And out of this concern is emerging a brave new urban world in Asia that others, facing rapid urbanisation, can ignore only at their peril.