MIPIM AR Future Projects Award for Gustafson Porter

The design team led by Gustafson Porter includes Arup, Davis Langdon Seah, ICN Design International and Hamiltons (now BFLS), with PMLink and CPG from Singapore. The client is National Parks Board Singapore. The Award’s ceremony was held in Cannes on 9 March 2011. The MIPIM Architectural Review Future Projects Awards are for unbuilt or incomplete projects spanning across eight categories. They showcase schemes that are examples of fine architecture, but have also responded to the client's development brief, and considered the way in which they will impact and contribute to the community around them.

The Gardens by the Bay form an integral part of the strategic development plan to promote Singapore as a ‘City in a Garden’. Gustafson Porter addressed not only the environmental concerns within the site but worked collaboratively with Government agencies to understand how the Bay East Gardens can enhance the future development of Singapore. They will be a visitor attraction centred around the relationship between the plant world and the human body. The architect’s response to the brief was to develop a series of large tropical leaf shapes each with its own specific garden environment, landscape character and theme. In developing the design for Bay East, the ancient wisdom of wind and water has been given a contemporary interpretation.

The Gardens aim to capture the essence of Singapore as the premier tropical Garden City with the perfect environment in which to live, work and play. It will complement and complete the attractions that have been planned for around the Marina Bay. At 101 hectares, Gardens by the Bay comprises three distinctive waterfront gardens. Bay East is a 32ha linear garden that embroiders a stretch of the Marina Channel promenade, providing landscaped access to a strategic portion of Singapore’s waterfront. Encapsulating a water theme, the Gardens will have water gardens with terraces that cascade down to the Bay’s edge – giving visitors an intimate relationship with its shorelines and wonder views back to the skyline. Another key theme is food gardens and water sports. A perse range of dining options will be available among food theme gardens, while water sports facilities and spectator stands will enable the Gardens to host aquatic sports and waterfront recreation such as canoeing, non-motorised sports such as sculling and dragon boat races.