Located in Sembawang, Bukit Canberra was conceived as a large-scale multi-functional and inclusive civic hub serving a rapidly growing residential community. Integrating healthcare, sports, recreation, lifestyle and communal services within a walkable environment, the development responds to a sensitive site that includes the Former Admiralty House, a gazetted national monument, alongside mature woodlands and varied topography.
Rather than adopting a tabula rasa approach, over 80% of the site is preserved as green, open space with native vegetation restored to enhance biodiversity. A biomimicry-inspired hexagonal grid shaped the master plan, allowing buildings to adapt to existing trees, contours and boundaries.
At the heart of its approach is a synergistic spatial and programmatic organisation that fosters interdependence and benefits from co-location. Programmes include a polyclinic, senior care centre, child care centre, sports facilities, pools, a library, hawker centre, gym and retail, woven into a landscape network prioritising connectivity. The adjacency and integration of diverse community facilities encourage meaningful interactions and strategic dependencies. These are not incidental, but intentional drivers of regenerative outcomes: spaces that enable cooperation, social production and a deeper connection to place.
Passive design, rainwater harvesting and ecological stormwater management advance sustainability goals. Construction employed a design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) approach with prefabricated concrete, structural steel and mass-engineered timber, highlighted via the Indoor Sport Hall with a long-span glulam and cross-laminated timber roof.
Bukit Canberra challenges the dominant paradigm of urban development by adopting a regenerative design approach, not as an aesthetic or add-on, but as a necessary shift in how we shape growing cities in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss. In a context where rapid urbanisation threatens biodiversity and social cohesion, Bukit Canberra sought to reposition the built environment as a partner to nature, rather than its adversary.
Bukit Canberra leverages its relationship with natural systems and components to provide shared, equitable access to green and blue domains, enhancing overall wellbeing. Shared positive outcomes are derived from these synergies, bred under a larger social and environmental framework. This presents an architecture, and possibly urban model, which integrates resilient ecological strategies, intensifying social production of space and transforming the setting of everyday life.
