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Initiative : Revitalise

Our vision which is to envision Serangoon as a vital hub that will intertwine the past, present and future into one harmonious community. 

SITE CONTEXT

Our proposal is to take advantage of the qualities that Serangoon has, as well as meet the needs of the surrounding community. 


Serangoon was a kampung with rubber plantations, and there were riverine swamps nearby Serangoon river. Serangoon is centralized along the cross road. The location of Serangoon itself between 4 MRT lines, giving opportunity to the site as a nodal point of activities on many levels.

CIRCULATION

To begin, the proposal hopes to improve pedestrian movement, minimize meandering circulation & excessive stairways. 


Secondly, include more programs and public spaces for increasing residents of Serangoon.
Most importantly, it is to revive the mature town through connectivity with existing popular NEX. The existing residential area around our site only has NEX as their only closest option as a new shopping/amenities/facilities/hang out spot and the town yearns for a something new to refresh/rejuvenate it.

 

Introduction
Concept
CONCEPT

From the site observations on day 1, we have a better understanding of the site; the scale of surrounding HDBs and the flow of human circulation. The current site seems to have a lack of clear and easy pathways that connect within the various part of the site. We also observed the importance of the main entry and exit point to understand the usual pathway for people visiting the site. We intentionally introduced a clear and direct pedestrian connector that links the MRT station, NEX, and the HDBs in the North There are also sub- connectors that link to the HDB estates in the east and west.

Community, Commercial, Resiential
URA Cube Challenge .jpeg
COMMUNITY

Activities are needed to encourage interaction, not just proximity. We placed the spaces at nodal points of activity, the plaza and community centre.

The children and elderly would be able to see and hear people having fun, inviting them to in join too. We wanted to keep the childcare and silvercare centres in the same area: with the presence of activities, bonding between the two generations will be far greater.
 

COMMERCIAL

Office towers now have hundreds of workers in isolated cubicles. These may be appropriate for large, multinational corporations, but not for smaller, local startups. 

So, in addition to the office towers, small room sized offices will be injected in between shops restaurants and residential areas.

This unimposing way of bringing businesses to a more human scale, gets people working to move around and network. And, the freedom of choosing where to work makes working less rigid and systematic.
 

RESIDENTIAL

The non aligned layering of floors in the residential block create open to sky spaces for outdoor activity. This brings activities that conventionally would only be on the ground floor, into the upper floors, closer to the housing units.

Communal activities such as urban farming and sport become closer to home, engaging residents in places more accessible and convenient to them.
 

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Cube Challenge Model.jpeg
Ending notes
A VIBRANT GATEWAY

While planning, we thought about harvesting rainwater through the canopies/shelters/roof profile of offices and buildings in our site. This water is then, either stored, use to irrigate the urban farms, or forms a stream along the creek bed along the main path. There are also multiple reflective pools scattered around the site.

These waterbodies commemorate the existence of riverine swamps in Serangoon before all the Urban built-up took place decades ago when Singapore became more prosperous. The placement of buildings along a central creek bed also references the way people in the past settled around water bodies.

Moving on to the present, the building heights are controlled in response to the surrounding, having a section profile that allows wind to flow continuously to the surroundings. The plentiful pockets of greens enhances the green lung, breathing clean air into the surrounding estates.

The future is in urban farming, and these terraced spaces above the residential allow for such activities to engage the community as well as create green spaces. The future is also in redefining the way people work, and move from one point to another, as well as a community that is tightly weaved through programs that can happen in the multitude of public spaces along the site, creating a vibrant gateway in north east.

Gallery: Works
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