The Singapore Pavilion at the 2020 World Expo in Dubai is located in the Sustainability District and brings an oasis of lush trees, verdant shrubs and vibrant orchids to the desert. With its theme of ‘Nature, Nurture, Future’, it encapsulates Singapore’s story of overcoming its physical limitations as a small island city-state and adapting itself to become a liveable and biophilic city of the future.
The Pavilion integrates abundant landscaping into its design, showing that the built environment can help to intensify nature in an urban setting. Buildingslike this prototype can help to increase biodiversity by offering habitats for animals andplay a pivotal part in combatting climate change by providing ecosystem services like solar heat reduction, CO2 and NOX sequestration, a reduction in other pollutants like PM10 particles, releasing oxygen and rainwater remediation.
The Pavilion operates entirely on solar energy and solar desalination systems, maintaining a net-zero energy footprint over the 6-month Expo period. It uses passive strategies like natural cross-ventilation,sun-shading and planting to create a comfortable climate for visitors to enjoy and plants to thrive in.
The ground levelgarden is a landscaped park, welcoming visitors from an arid and hard-edged environment into a biophilic, voluminous 3-dimensional green space that is flanked on both sides by forest trees and capped with a spectacular hanging garden comprising of an array of pots with a mixture of draping vines. The garden paths lead visitors across an undulating terrain with water streams, planted knolls and 9-metre-tall vertical thematiccones, emphasising the experience of a lush, tropical and refreshing Singapore.
A meandering canopy walk brings the visitors around and through the threethematiccones at different levels. The first cone is an artistic multimedia experience of Singapore's solutions to global issues s. The secondcone showcases Singapore's multitude of orchid species in a vast spectrum of colours. The finalcone is a sensory green space that spirals around fog, rainbows and a spinning dipterocarp sculpture. Walking through these cones, while supplemented with QR-linked information, the visitors quickly gain a good understanding of Singapore's unique DNA.
The canopy walk opens up to a sky market, an open deck for a curated food menu, exhibition and programs, sheltered under the solar canopy made of 517solar panels. The experience concludes at the ground galleria with a display of Singapore's design stories and a shop.
Despite the heat of the desert, the visitors’ journey through the Singapore pavilion is comfortable and enjoyabledue to shading, the evapo-transpiration cooling of the surrounding vegetation and the strategic placement of fine mist fans that cool the air by about 5-10 degree Celsius.
The Pavilion not only demonstrates the seamless integration and co-existence of nature and buildings, it shows a captivating and forward-looking Singapore that is sociable, sustainable and liveable.
