The President's Design Award, which honours Singapore designs and designers, has named its three Designers of the Year for 2015. Dr. Colin K. Okashimo (sculptor and landscape architect), Mr. Franklin Po (Principal of landscape architecture practice Tierra Design) and Mr. Siew Man Kok (co-founder of MKPL Architects) were selected from 111 nominations by a 14-member panel, which included British architect Richard Rogers.
After competing with a strong shortlist of firms, which included OMA, MVRDV, West 8, Grant Associates and Olin Partnership, a team comprising MKPL and Turenscape International has been selected for not just one, but two, of the three projects planned for the Singapore Rail Corridor – the Choa Chu Kang affordable housing development and the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station renovation. Read more about the two projects after the break.
MVRDV, OMA and DP Architects are among five shortlisted teams competing to design the Singapore Rail Corridor. Spanning the island south to north, from the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station to the Woodlands Checkpoint, the corridor is the site of Singapore’s previous rail link to Malaysia. With this competition, the Singapore government hopes to develop a feasible plan to transform the 24 kilometer stretch into a public greenway that connects four important urban nodes: Buona Vista, the Bukit Timah Railway Station area, the former Bukit Timah Fire Station, and Kranji.
“The expanse of the corridor running through the centre of the entire country presents an unprecedented opportunity to develop a new typology of landscape with transformative effects for the country as a whole. This is a project that has the potential to improve quality of life for generations to come," says OMA Partner Michael Kokora.
64 teams responded to the government's call for ideas, and now only five have been selected to move onto the competition's second stage. These five teams are...