When WOHA Co-Founder Mun Summ and I were at university in the late 1980s, the world had just been through a massive oil crisis. After graduating, and with the crisis forgotten, we found ourselves in this time of excess and consumption, but our thinking was shaped by our education.
We started WOHA because we wanted to do more projects in line with our values. We started small, just the two of us, doing small projects where we could demonstrate our skill, before actively moving from housing into larger projects.
We were always interested in big ideas and have always thought about the future, aspiring to work on projects beyond individual houses. We felt that only architects could solve issues around how people should be living in the future – that is why public buildings, urbanism, transportation, and infrastructure are the most interesting projects to us. The key thing for architects is how we implement sustainable design strategies for the good of our planet. With the climate and biodiversity crises, and the current pandemic, it’s apparent that a shift in attitude and decisive action are more urgent than ever.
Ending the sprawl
To us, traditional urbanism is too two-dimensional, and in order to give our projects impact we developed a three-dimensional approach. The way cities are designed now, we have different areas zoned for different purposes: residential suburbs, industrial areas, civic districts, business districts. This means people are constantly commuting between home, work, and leisure activities, and many of those spaces are underused for long periods or even days. With the current pandemic forcing many people to work from home, central business districts are like ghost towns.
The problem with urban sprawl is that we spend so much stressful, emissions-generating time commuting that could be used differently, yet cities continue to grow and the ‘megacity’ is on the rise all over the world. We keep pushing our city boundaries outwards, encroaching more and more on nature and creating even longer distances for people to travel. This is why we need to start thinking three-dimensionally so that the city essentially acts as a giant building that allows people to live, work, and play all in close proximity.
If you look at city or urban planning but apply threedimensional thinking – as you would when you plan a building, or you consider ‘urban techniques’ in your design process – then you start thinking of buildings as vertically stacked and multi-functional neighbourhoods; they will be integrated into the public transport grid, be places to live, work, play, relax, and provide services. People will act in the building as they would in a city context.
This three-dimensional thinking would encourage residents to see our projects as we do: components in large social, economic, and environmental systems. We want our buildings to interact with their context, the people, and nature. For that to happen they cannot be seen as isolated objects.
For instance, high-rise greenery is not just for the inhabitants or users of the building – it has a biophilic and regenerative effect for everyone. It performs environmental services such as filtering the air, blocking out noise, absorbing heat, providing habitat for animals, in turn increasing biodiversity. Planting the greenery enables the building to develop positive relationships with its context and those who interact with it. Working in this way requires an important shift in mindset that is vital now more than ever, as we need to find a way of living in balance with the resources of our world.
Designing for density
For WOHA, one of the main strategies to work towards this is designing high-density, high-amenity developments that enable us to give space back to nature, use fewer resources and, as shown by several of our prototypes, intensify nature in an urban setting. Covid-19 has made many people uncomfortable with the idea of living in a high-density environment, but if you look at places like Taipei or Hong Kong, which were able to manage the outbreak of the pandemic well, they are some of the densest cities in the world.
To make megacities liveable and environmentally friendly, we can’t just pursue high density in our designs but must equally pay attention to providing ‘high amenity’. You need a vibrant community on your doorstep with plenty of access to leisure activities, everyday necessities, and nature. We can build more densely but in a smart way so we have an abundance of community, green, cultural, and service spaces to provide people with wellbeing while still keeping the human scale.
These approaches are among many that can help urban development to combat the current ecological issues. We always try to find a solution that fulfils the client’s brief, but also goes beyond that to add something good to its context in terms of social and environmental sustainability.
One simple approach would be to lower a building’s energy and water consumption by implementing passive strategies like cross-ventilation, sun-shading, rainwater recycling, or photovoltaic systems. We often use landscaping as a way to shade the building from the hot tropical sun. The plants absorb the heat and cool the building’s surface, and we don’t need to use excessive air-conditioning in the interior, even less so if we have plenty of naturally ventilated spaces. Studies also show that plants cool down the ambient temperature around the building.
The Oasia Hotel Downtown, in the middle of Singapore’s dense central business district, would be a good example. The entire building is wrapped in a low-maintenance green envelope and its surface temperature measures around 25°C, versus the 55°C of a neighbouring building wrapped in glass and steel. On a normal day, Singapore’s average temperature is around 30–32°C. The hotel is a prototype that shows what could be achieved if more buildings were designed this way. Multiple buildings like it dotted throughout a dense district would be able to combat the urban heat island effect and lower the city’s temperature.
In order to more readily encourage the adoption of some of these aspects into modern urban design, we have developed a ‘systems approach’. This views every project as part of the larger system – be that on a precinct or city-level – and can shape it to create productive relationships between city, people, and nature. Like this, the system becomes more complex, versatile, and resilient. However, all stakeholders need to be on board as this requires a lot of planning and coordination.
Integrated living
If this sounds abstract, an example is our Kampung Admiralty project, which won the ‘World Building of the Year’ in 2018 at the World Architecture Festival. Primarily a public housing development for senior citizens in Singapore, it is also a prototype the government wanted to explore for how we should live in the future. The development integrates seniorfriendly residential units, healthcare services, child and senior care, food and beverage options, retail, as well as a sheltered public plaza, a public rooftop park, and an urban farm. It provides all the services for your daily necessities, no matter what age bracket you fall into, and is designed to draw in the neighbourhood to create a vibrant, intergenerational community. It plugs seamlessly into the existing neighbourhood as well as the public transport network and has become the new heart of the community. The project shows how great things can be created if everyone sees the big picture.
One of our most recent projects – and smallest in terms of scale – has a lot of potential to offer a tangible view of that big picture. The Singapore Pavilion for Expo 2020 Dubai is a prototype that demonstrates a self-sufficient, lush oasis in the desert that can be scaled up to a district or city level.
Additionally, the Punggol Digital District in Singapore will be the first district to adopt an integrated masterplan approach that brings together a business park, a university, community facilities, and transport infrastructure. This planning approach enables collaboration between the different usecases, optimises land use, and fosters community. It also allows us to design and integrate innovative technological platforms from the ground up, transforming the way people work, live, learn, and play in an inclusive and sustainable environment.
When working on a municipal level, it is necessary to be able to give data-driven analyses of projects, so we developed a ‘good’ building rating system that counterbalances ‘unpleasantness indices’ – how many people can share the fewest windows for a high surface area to volume ratio, for example – with elements that people value such as green plot ratio. We have widely shared our scoring system, including with the mayors of London, Paris, and Istanbul, and the feedback has been that things like green/community plot ratio or civic generosity should become requirements for our industry.
One building or city doesn’t make a huge impact in the grand scheme of things, but once you have multiple places that fulfil sustainability criteria and perform ecosystem services, then you start to see a difference. Adopted on a large scale, the comprehensive incorporation of nature into buildings in a functional and meaningful way could have a huge impact. This contact with nature, no matter where people live, forms a custodial mindset that makes people strive to take better care of our planet.