First there was Biopolis; then recently, Fusionopolis was added. Next year, Singapore’s business park at One North will see its Media Park begin the first phase of development.
Details of the park’s masterplan will be released on Wednesday by Information, Communications and the Arts Minister Lee Boon Yang.
The architect behind Media Park @ One North is Bernard Tschumi, a Swiss-French now based in New York who has designed buildings all over the world for the last 25 years. The park is his first project in Singapore.
The 64-year-old first visited the republic in March this year and was impressed by its metropolitan nature, which inspired his design of the Media Park.
“How could one recreate that city feel in a neighbourhood which had a lot of offices and production studios, which is not a very lively place per se. So we invented a street system, a grid, a building, all organised around a loop, a circle, a ring,” he said.
Getting cities to intensify people-to-people interaction is what Mr Tschumi hopes the Media Park can inspire in city planners.
“When cities became settled a thousand years ago, they were not about isolation. They were not about alienation. They were about social exchange. And sometimes, architects or planners or politicians forget that… Here, we are trying to create a new vitality,” he added.
Mr Tschumi’s architectural concept aims to facilitate human communication at the park, located within the highly wired One North facility.
Source : Channel NewsAsia – 7 Dec 2008