Punggol waterway terraces, Singapore

Abstract

Looking to the future whilst also looking to the past, the Punggol Waterway Terraces project constitutes a blueprint for twenty-first century sustainable mass housing and marks a return to Singapore’s original ethos of community pride and identity. The sheer mass and basic design elements of the project are not hidden but presented as an unequivocal response to the challenges and requirements for a sustainable, yet enjoyable, high-density urban lifestyle. Fundamental principles of passive tropical design have been inventively recalibrated and then expressed at a monumental scale, whilst the contextually attuned planning and massing have reintroduced a human scale sense of communal identity. Waterway Terraces is a genuine precursor to the zero-energy mass housing that will be essential for the continued growth of Asian cities and their sustainable future.