Aqil Haziq Mahmud Channel NewsAsia 3 Sep 17;
SINGAPORE: Birdwatching terraces, butterfly gardens and breezy spaces.
These are just some of the features at Woodleigh Glen, a public housing project that won the Innovative Design Award at this year’s Housing Development Board (HDB) Design Awards.
The Bidadari-based project, comprising 1,000 units across nine blocks, was launched for sale last year and is expected to be completed in 2021. More than 80 per cent of its 688 flats offered for sale have been snapped up.
Woodleigh Glen was planned and designed entirely by HDB’s in-house team of planners, architects and engineers. “We are always looking out for new ways to see how we can push the frontier of urban design and planning,” said HDB Building and Research Institute group director Johnny Wong.
“From Woodleigh Glen, you can see that we continue to harness tech innovations to improve our designs and to give smart, livable and sustainable housing for our residents.”
In a first for public housing projects, the team used environmental modelling software to conduct wind-driven rain simulation studies that help determine ideal locations for rain screens along common corridors. This prevents the rain screens from blocking natural light and surrounding views.
In addition, the team conducted solar irradiance studies to design the slope of Woodleigh Glen’s solar panel-ready roofs, optimising the amount of solar energy that can be harvested. The sloped angle of the roofs allows rainwater to clean the solar panels.
HDB had announced on Sep 1 that all public housing blocks from May this year will be designed with "solar-ready" roofs that enable solar panels to be easily mounted and maintained.
Technology was also used to decide how the flats should be placed and designed. This ensures blocks are arranged for optimal shade from the sun, while void decks at some locations are built higher by half a storey to allow wind-cooling of community spaces at lower levels.
To encourage residents to interact, Woodleigh Glen boasts three levels of green community spaces and a 200m-long sky terrace on the 10th storey. The green spaces comprise community farms, urban verandas and butterfly gardens, while the sky terrace contains sheltered pavilions for birdwatching in the direction of Bidadari Hill Park. These spaces make up make up almost three-quarters of the site.
The innovation continues indoors. The flats at Woodleigh Glen are designed with flexible layouts to allow families to customise the layout of their homes. This is done by pushing structural beams and columns to the edges of each unit, freeing the master suite or living room for future personalisation.
These versatile units were piloted at Skyville@Dawson, which also won an HDB Design Award last year. The design awards recognise HDB’s industry partners for creating quality homes for Singaporeans.
HDB Design Awards jury panellist Yip Yuen Hong, who was also Singapore’s Designer of the Year in 2013, said the Woodleigh Glen project “responded sensitively to nature, to scale and to the environmental elements”.
“The project is skillfully conceived, respecting the topography and making inventive use of the terrain to situate the different components of blocks, parking and community spaces,” he added.
Source: CNA/hz
