A green forecourt for a corporate megastructure.

This was one of those projects in which landscape was expected to play a near-magical role: covering a single-story carpark, anchoring the new Mediapolis district, and providing a vibrant public space for the Mediacorp building behind. The immediate challenge was soil volume, which (due to the size of the slab and limitations of budget) was a game of distributing limited volume in a way that could best distribute greenery. Luckily, a large proportion of the park was dedicated to an event lawn, with a view to the vast screen installed on the face of the building. This meant that shady areas—stands of trees and shrubs—could provide oases of dense softscape at points along the path system.

At the same time, the site hosted a large district cooling plant, with a building-sized ventilation shaft discharging at one level above the park’s deck. This is treated as a kind of “swamp thing,” a large and aggressively greened presence within the park. To provide additional focal elements, the stairs emerging from the parking level are covered with elliptical roofs, which playfully echo the geometry of Fumihiko Maki’s rather elegant building behind.

Photosvby Darren Soh/ Fullframephotos