It has received accolades from the likes of the President’s Design Award 2020, the World Architecture Festival 2018 and has even been hailed as “a model for future public housing”.1 Yet, Kampung Admiralty by WOHA Architects is not an entirely new idea in Singapore. By bringing together public housing for seniors, a medical centre, a childcare centre and commercial spaces into a single “vertical kampong”, the 11-storey integrated development completed in 2017 fits the podium tower typology introduced by the Housing & Development Board (HDB) some five decades ago.

In 1968, Singapore’s public housing agency completed the eight-storey “Park Road Redevelopment” as a “multi-use” concept “integrated within a single complex”.2 Better known today as People’s Park, the building on 32 New Market Road is made up of a three-storey commercial podium that is topped with a five-storey residential slab block. Between the two components is a void deck with various community facilities. While Kampung Admiralty has many elderly friendly amenities as an experimental retirement village, People’s Park initially had a kindergarten, landscaped play area and even a wading pool for toddlers. After all, People’s Park was built when Singapore had roughly three times more working adults supporting an elderly person than its rapidly ageing population today.

Completed in 1968, People’s Park was HDB’s first podium tower development. The multi-use building combined retail on its first three levels with a five-storey residential slab block.
SOURCE: First Decade in Public Housing 1960–1969. Courtesy of Housing & Development Board

The development was one of the earliest projects in a pioneering urban renewal programme aimed at clearing valuable slum areas for economic development and arresting the decay of the city centre. The scheme divided the 1,700 acres of the old city into nine precincts north of the Singapore River and eight south of it, and People’s Park was part of “Precinct South I”, a 180-acre site that was bounded by Outram Road, Havelock Road and New Bridge Road. HDB envisioned replacing the area’s “old rickety tin sheds and temporary structures” with modern developments that could house three times as many people, and provide room for new enterprises to create employment and raise living standards.

"People’s Park contained many amenities for residents, including a creche (left) and landscaped internal courts in the shopping podium (right).
SOURCE: First Decade in Public Housing 1960–1969. Courtesy of Housing & Development Board

People’s Park achieved this with a podium tower that efficiently combined housing with shops. The design by HDB architects Tan Wee Lee and Peter B. K. Soo had 130 flats, of which 90 were two-room units and 40 were three-room apartments. Its multi-level retail podium re-accommodated all the shops and eating stalls from the neighbouring People’s Park market that used to occupy the land. Not only did its tenants get to stay in the neighbourhood, HDB boasted they offered “essentially the same area but in much better and more hygienic surroundings”.5 The mixed-use development also freed up an adjacent 2.5-acre site that the government later sold to private developers to build People’s Park Complex. Its architects, Design Partnership, adopted a similar typology for the building completed in 1973, which consists of a six-storey podium—then Singapore’s largest shopping complex—and a 25-storey residential block above.

By the mid 1970s, both the public and privately developed podium towers named after People’s Park in Chinatown were joined by similar developments in the vicinity. HDB completed a row of 20-storey housing-cum-retail podium towers perpendicular to its People’s Park, which stretched all the way down to Chin Swee Road. Opposite Upper Cross Street, a privately developed People’s Park Centre arose as a four-storey retail podium with a pair of towers for offices and residences. The retail podiums of these various new developments were linked by overhead bridges and elevated walkways such that pedestrians could stroll through Chinatown’s main shopping centres “without setting foot on the road”.6 Even Park Road, which used to front HDB’s People’s Park, was turned into a brick-paved pedestrian mall with fountains, a clock tower and street furniture to further the segregation from vehicular traffic.7 Years later, People’s Park Square, the lively, well-connected and comfortable space created from this urban design exercise was deemed by urban designers as “one of the most successful urban spaces in Singapore.

People’s Park Complex (centre) was built on a site made available by rehousing the former tenants of a market into People’s Park (centre right).
SOURCE: DARREN SOH

Following People’s Park, HDB built 15 other podium towers across Singapore’s central area, including elsewhere in Chinatown, Jalan Besar, Bugis, Tanjong Pagar and Lavender. But unlike the kind of pedestrian connections made in People’s Park, these newer podium towers largely stood alone.9 The typology also gained popularity amongst private developers during this period. While some combined residential towers with commerce too, for instance Queensway Shop¬ping Centre (1974) and Bukit Timah Plaza (1979), a stretch of office-cum-commerce podium towers arose in the financial area of Shenton Way. They were the result of planning requirements set by the state’s urban planners, and the similar building types linked up on the ground floor for the benefit of pedestrians too. A key difference between private podium towers and those built by the HDB was the latter were never air-conditioned because of costs.

In the 1980s, the podium tower typology lost its relevance as the HDB shifted its focus from renewing the city centre to developing new towns in the rest of Singapore. The agency could afford to separate retail and residential in lower density developments as it was constructing in outlying areas that were significantly less costly. The last two podium towers built in the central area were King George’s Avenue (1982) and Cheng Yan Court (1983).

SOURCE: HDB Annual Report, 1976–77. Courtesy of Housing & Development Board

Almost three decades later, the podium-tower typology was revived for a public housing development in the form of the Clementi Town Mixed Development in 2011. An open-air bus interchange and an old shopping mall next to Clementi MRT station were replaced by a podium tower, which brought together two 40-storey public housing towers with 388 units that sat above a five-storey retail podium with two basements that is connected to an air-condi¬tioned bus interchange. The introduction of a transport function into the podium tower is part of a growing number of “integrated developments” that have arisen with Singapore’s expanding mass rapid transit network.

The renewed interest in podium towers is perhaps an indication of how densification has spread from Singapore’s city centre to its heartlands too. Although Kampung Admiralty is also located next to an MRT station, it offers a broader interpretation of how the podium tower can offer new possibilities of living as Singapore becomes denser. Beyond a means for developers to maximise financial yield and for the state to achieve the productive use of land, the ability to mix specialised uses in a single piece of architecture—retirement homes, healthcare facilities and senior-friendly retail—shows how integrated living can benefit select communities too.

This is an excerpt from Everyday Modernism: Architecture & Society in Singapore (2023), the first comprehensive documentation of Singapore’s modern built environment.