Vision For Creating Vibrant And Sustainable Asian Cities

Woha founding directors Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell share with Hong Xinyi their vision for creating vibrant and sustainable Asian cities.

- Hong Xinyi

What will the future look like? “Blade Runner in the tropics,” says Wong Mun Summ. “Blade Runner meets Avatar,” adds Richard Hassell. The two founding directors of architecture firm Woha have a knack for finishing each other’s sentences and, in this case, they are drawing on two iconic science fiction films to describe a specific swathe of Singapore’s future—the Punggol Digital District, a 50ha development whose construction started this year, and is slated to open progressively from 2023.

Woha designed the masterplan for the district, which will house the Singapore Institute of Technology’s new campus, a business park by developer JTC, as well as community amenities. Touted as an innovative hub for attracting tech talent and catalyzing interactions and collaborations that may just help to supercharge Singapore’s economic growth, the project will also be a large-scale embodiment of the core principles that Woha has been refining for decades.

“A lot of the discussion about architecture in the last 20 years has been about aesthetics. And aesthetics are important,” says Hassell. “But when you approach architecture from a systems point of view, you develop an attitude that looks beyond creating a standard podium and tower, then cladding that with an interesting design. We are basically saying that every construction we make is interacting with all the other systems in a city and the natural world. And we have to really think about how it can perform at a very high level in relation to these systems.”