wild places | wild happenings | wild news
make a difference for our wild places

home | links | search the site
  all articles latest | past | articles by topics | search wildnews
wild news on wildsingapore
  The Straits Times 9 Feb 06
Singapore scours the world for park ideas
by Kwan Weng Kin

TOKYO - SINGAPORE has launched an intensive search for ideas and partners to help plan and design three new downtown parks on its waterfront, with three teams of officials now visiting well-known design companies around the world, including Japan.

To promote the international competition for the Gardens by the Bay project, National Parks chief executive Dr Tan Wee Kiat gave presentations to five Japanese design companies in Tokyo and Osaka over the past three days. He said he hoped to find the talent capable of creating world-class tropical gardens 'that can capture the essence of Singapore in the future' and can rival the world's finest parks, such as New York's Central Park and London's Kew Gardens.

Besides Dr Tan, NParks' chief operating officer, Mr Leong Chee Chiew, is heading a team that is looking up design companies in New York, Boston and London. Some members of this team will also go to Sydney. A third team led by director for parks development, Mr Yeo Meng Tong, is visiting Munich, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Paris and Madrid.

Japan's involvement in Singapore's greening programme goes back a few decades, with Japanese gardening and urban designers visiting Singapore in the 1980s and 1990s to help bring the Garden City concept to life.

Given their unqualified success, it is only natural that Dr Tan should look to Japan as a source of creative talent in the Republic's latest quest to create three stunning new parks. 'I am particularly keen to see some of the Japanese firms short-listed because they have such a finely-honed sense of aesthetic. They have an appreciation for nature and its use in enhancing the environment for man,' Dr Tan said.

Without disclosing the names of the firms, he added: 'They are all very passionate in their work, as reflected in the body of work that they have done. I am very gratified to see that they were all very immediately engaged with the idea of what Singapore is trying to do.'

Seeing that one of the planned parks is a narrow promenade, one Japanese designer has suggested expanding the 'footprint' and integrating the garden with adjacent urban areas.

Japan's pantheon of world-class architects and landscape designers includes such luminaries as Mr Kisho Kurokawa, and the avant-garde team of Ms Kazuyo Sejima and Mr Ryue Nishizawa of the Tokyo-based partnership SANAA. Mr Kurokawa was responsible for the Fusionpolis and Republic Plaza projects in Singapore. Ms Sejima and Mr Nishizawa, rated the most original and influential of a new generation of Japanese practitioners, designed the new state-of-the-art building for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, due to open next year. Another Japanese architect, Mr Yoshio Taniguchi, was behind the redesigned Museum of Modern Art, also in New York.

Dr Tan, who relinquishes his post this month but will continue as director for the Gardens project, also encouraged Singapore companies to take part by aligning themselves with bigger companies if they have not done projects of equivalent size.

He said Singapore companies can impart an advantage to their foreign partners because they know Singapore, thereby 'shortening the learning curve'. At least two of the five Japanese companies Dr Tan visited are known to have already sounded out their counterparts in Singapore on the competition.

The first phase calls for the submission of a master plan to provide design strategies and the designs of key features for the three parks. Interested parties have until Feb 28 to express their desire to participate. They will need to show a good track record in projects of a similar scale and will be expected to field a team of designers that includes at least one urban planner, a landscape architect and a horticulturist or botanist.

Dr Tan was excited to discover three of the companies he visited had Singaporean staff. Their bilingualism is believed to be valuable to their employers when pursuing projects in China.

'I hope eventually these people will go back to Singapore because we will need them. It is good that they are getting experience in excellent firms,' said Dr Tan, who left Tokyo yesterday to visit design companies in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
links
Related articles on Singapore: general environment issues
about the site | email ria
  News articles are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes.
 

website©ria tan 2003 www.wildsingapore.com