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4 winners in design competition boast features such as terraced buildings, ‘floating’ blocks

IT’S been a hazy vision up to now but the first stunning proposals for the Marina South Residential District, unveiled yesterday, indicate that a design revolution is brewing on Singapore’s waterfront.

The four proposals - picked from a design competition that attracted 30 entries from India to Australia - promise an intoxicating cocktail of architectural flamboyance and ecological innovation in what has been touted as Singapore’s future No. 1 residential hot spot.

It is the first time a design competition has been held as part of the planning process for a residential district here.

And the ideas thrown up have not been seen here before: They include elevated condominiums, terraced buildings resembling cascading gardens, and ‘floating’ housing blocks with Amsterdam-style canals.

The winners, who each get $10,000, include local architecture firm Surbana, Hong Kong’s Compass Studio and national serviceman Khoo Teik Rong, an architecture graduate from Melbourne’s RMIT University.

The designs remain just suggestions at this stage and may not be part of the final plan, but they serve as a striking starting point for the ambitious project.

The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) will now compile a final plan for the 60ha site, which will be developed over 15 to 20 years and will have up to 11,000 homes.

The competition, organised by the Singapore Institute of Architects (SIA) and the URA, asked entrants to unscramble what amounted to a Rubik’s cube of design challenges.

At the basic level, 11,000 housing units had to be incorporated with commercial, hotel and community facilities on a prime site near the upcoming Gardens at Marina South and Marina Bay Sands integrated resort.

But proposals had to show how high-density living could be achieved while retaining the ambience of a waterfront garden.

The judges also looked for environmental sustainability and a sense of community, while calling for designs that would allow Marina South to showcase the City in a Garden vision.

Mr Khoo, 23, drew on inspiration from a visit to Amsterdam and opted for canals to run through the site to make the area more intimate.

‘I didn’t want a site that would have only large-scale buildings,’ he said.

The Surbana team had a ‘green and blue’ strategy. Green in the form of plants on the roofs of low-rise buildings, which would be terraced to give the appearance of gardens sloping to the marina.

Blue covered their housing idea - 30- to 50-storey-high blocks placed on shallow pools, making them appear to float on water.

Compass Studio, meanwhile, used hills as its inspiration - it wanted high-rise buildings to resemble hills that meet the lower plains. It also proposed a low-rise eco-village.

The fourth winner was SKPS-Project, a group of five architects, mostly from Singapore. They proposed lifting residential blocks 30m above the ground and planting trees underneath.

Reacting to the designs, Mr Mink Tan of Mink Architects said they were visually evocative, with ‘a mix of everything’. ‘If done successfully, this can be a…shining example of Asian urban living.’

Ex-SIA president John Ting of AIM & Associates was encouraged by the designs, but said more refinement was needed. He suggested the land can be split into smaller parcels and various architects let loose: ‘Then we can learn how to work the land better.’

Property developers and consultants were more hardheaded, telling The Straits Times that it was too early to judge if the designs were commercially viable.

The 30 entries are on display at City Hall until Dec 8.

Source : Straits Times - 1 Dec 2007

Finland Gardens deal ‘not done in good faith’, say minority owners.

ANOTHER en bloc sale has been thrown out by the Strata Titles Board (STB), after minority objectors claimed — among other things — that the sale had been rushed and was not conducted in “good faith”.

The board on Thursday dismissed an en bloc application by the majority owners of Finland Gardens, without issuing any written grounds of judgment.

The dismissal puts a damper on Sing Holdings and Eastern Summer, which had formed a joint venture company a year ago to make the acquisition.

Eight out of 48 owners at the 98,309-sq-ft development at East Coast Terrace and opposed the sale and started legal proceedings.

In their final submissions, the objectors’ solicitors argued that there was no 80-per-cent majority as three owners in the majority did not agree to sell at $49 million, which was the agreed sale price of the majority owners.

The three had only agreed to sell at $52.7 million. However, the solicitors pointed out, the three owners were later asked to sign documents that lacked reference to any reserve price, but instead “set the individual price that each of the three was to receive”.

This, it was pointed out, had allowed the sale committee and sale agent Credo Real Estate to “sell at a price that did not concern the three owners, so long as they are paid their agreed price”.

The objectors also alleged that the prices were not arrived at competitively and that the sale committee had rushed the sale of Finland Gardens when there was no reason to — since real estate prices were escalating.

They pointed out that when a competing bidder, RV Capital, upped its offer from $46 million to $49.5 million, Credo executive director Karamjit Singh had asked Sing Holdings — which had offered $49 million — to match this price, and then closed the deal “without giving any opportunity” to RV Capital to better its offer.

Indeed, another bidder had later tried to offer $50.5 million, the solicitors said, describing the sale committee as being “in dereliction of its duties to the owners who had given it the mandate to secure the best possible price in the market”.

When contacted, the lawyers for the majority owners could not comment as they are awaiting the grounds of the STB’s decision.

In a filing with the Singapore Exchange, listed company Sing Holdings said the application was dismissed on the grounds that statutory requirements had not been fully complied with.

It said it and its partner in the acquisition, Eastern Summer, were deliberating on the STB’s decision and reserved the right to direct the Finland Gardens owners to appeal against the decision.

Despite the prospect of an appeal, minority property owner Valerie Chia is optimistic.

Describing her mood as “ecstatic”, Mrs Chia said she had opposed the sale as she had bought her four-bedroom apartment during the peak of property prices in 1996 for $1.22 million. She would have received just $1.268 million in the sale, she said, and after forking out legal and stamp duties, would have lost out.

The case follows a string of en bloc tussles, including the Horizon Towers deal, initially thrown out because of irregularities and now awaiting a High Court decision.

Source : Weekend - 1 Dec 2007