From Pinnacle@Duxton to haze mask: 20 years of Singapore’s best designs

[SINGAPORE] You may have gazed up at The Pinnacle@Duxton, walked beneath the Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay, or wondered how Marina Bay Sands balances what looks like an enormous ship across three skyscrapers.

Besides becoming recognisable pieces of the Singapore skyline, all three belong to projects previously named Design of the Year at the President’s Design Award (P*DA), Singapore’s highest design honour.

Now, two decades of award winners are being brought together in P*DA20: Power Of Singapore Design, opening at the National Museum of Singapore on Friday (Sep 18).

Marking 20 years since the award began in 2006, the exhibition brings together the work of 130 Designs of the Year and 47 Designers of the Year – essentially a greatest-hits album of how Singapore has looked over the past two decades.

The P*DA is conferred by the President of Singapore, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, and jointly presented by the DesignSingapore Council and Urban Redevelopment Authority.

The president opened the anniversary exhibition on Thursday evening.

For Dawn Lim, executive director of DesignSingapore Council, the retrospective is a record of a country changing around its designers.

“Over the past 20 years, Singapore design has evolved alongside our country’s progress,” she says, with creations that have helped “transform and improve the everyday”.

And if there is one recurring star in that story, it may be the most Singaporean of objects: the Housing & Development Board (HDB) flat.

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The Pinnacle@Duxton packed 1,848 apartments into seven towers, but connected them with elevated parks and sky bridges, creating communal space in the air and helping redefine expectations of high-density public housing.

Six years later came SkyTerrace @ Dawson, designed by SCDA Architects, where five 40-to-43-storey towers incorporated landscaped terraces, roof gardens and combinations of larger apartments and elderly-friendly studios conceived for multi-generational families.

Other prominent names in the exhibition include Angelene Chan, whose DP Architects portfolio includes Wisma Atria and Temasek Club, and Woha, the home-grown practice behind landmarks including the School of the Arts and internationally influential tropical high-rises.

But P*DA20 also makes the case that Singapore design is considerably more intimate than architecture.

There is Supermama’s Singapore Icons, the charming porcelain collection that turned HDB blocks, construction cranes, orchids and other familiar sights into contemporary souvenirs.

The collection helped expand Singapore’s visual vocabulary beyond yet another Merlion iteration.

Then there is an object associated with a considerably less pleasant Singapore memory: the haze – which is back to torment us again. 

The AIR+ Smart Mask, a 2015 winner, was designed in sizes better suited to Asian faces, and paired with a micro-ventilator to make wearing a respirator less hot and uncomfortable.

Even hospitals enter the design canon. Khoo Teck Puat Hospital turned away from the sterile hospital stereotype, using greenery, daylight and patient-centred spaces to make nature part of the experience of getting well.

Curated by Black, led by designer Jackson Tan of Phunk – himself a P*DA recipient – the exhibition centres on a 27.5 square metre interactive LED atlas, containing the stories of every recipient to date. 

Around it are sketches, prototypes and working materials, some never publicly displayed before, showing the rough beginnings behind these designs.

Twenty years on, some of these ideas have become so familiar that we barely notice them anymore – which may just be the strongest endorsement of their design.

P*DA20: Power of Singapore Design runs from Sep 18 to Nov 1 at the National Museum of Singapore. Admission is free.