On the first stop of the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2026 Dulux Study Tour, the six prize winners quickly became acquainted with the dense urban jungle that is Singapore – the Southeast Asian metropolis well and truly living up to its famed reputation as “a city in a garden.”
The origin of Singapore’s green identity is as old (or as young) as the nation itself. Sixty years ago, shortly after the nation gained independence from Malaysia in 1965, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew declared an ambition to realise Singapore as a garden city. The vision was to turn the concrete port city and its polluted waterways into a lush, biophilic paradise.
As if evidencing the success of Yew’s endeavour, tour guide Alvin Chia – a retired architect previously employed by Singapore’s Housing Development Board – explained to the tour winners that the city today is home to six million people and seven million trees, the result of a national tree-planting campaign that began in the 1960s. Since 2009, the government has additionally mandated that any ground-level green space lost to the development of a new building be replaced with skyrise or vertical gardens.
As winner Rachel Licht observed, planting is omnipresent on the facades of buildings across Singapore, but “greenery is not decorative. It provides shade, reduces urban heat, supports biodiversity [insects, birds, butterflies and other animals], manages stormwater and improves quality of life. Water is equally important, with wetlands, ponds, pools and waterways integrated into the urban fabric.”
Looking beyond Singapore’s advocacy for urban nature, this year’s tour winners observed aspects of deeper and strategic city-making at play as part of the city’s biophilic endeavour. More than simply mimicking natural forms or an abundance of lush planting, they discovered a systems-based design approach driving everything from the country’s handling of waste management and composting to its plan (approximately halfway realised) to create a 1,500-kilometre network of cycling pathways.
For this year’s winners, the work of local powerhouse WOHA, founded in 1994 by Wong Mun Summ and Richard Hassell, became the architectural embodiment of this holistically minded ethos, with the practice’s contextual and interconnected approach encompassing a multitude of climatic, ecological, social, economic and cultural ambitions.
Winner Jasmine Placentino commented, “They’ve mastered a particular type of architecture that’s very suitable for this place … [focused on] greenery, the integration of amenity, verticality, and creating a system … [whether it be] within a floor level, within a building, within a precinct [or] within a district.”
Fellow Dulux Study Tour recipient Callum Senjov agreed. “The greenery is one of the lesser important things of how they’re designing,” he said, pointing out that “instead of ‘form follows function,’ [WOHA’s ethos is] ‘form follows systems.’”
Across the broad range of WOHA’s buildings that the tour visited over two days, the firm’s approach to creating architecture as a “living system” became increasingly evident. Making a first stop in the north of the city, the tour group visited Kampung Admiralty (2017) – according to Chia, one of the city’s earliest examples of a co-located development, combining residences, shops, a hawker food hall, a medical centre, a function hall, a childcare centre, an active ageing hub and a rooftop community garden, with a central covered public plaza at its heart. A well-used and vibrant vertical village informed by two years of consultation with more than 15,000 people, the project stood out to winners as an exemplar for how architecture could weave together a diverse mix of programs that cater to the needs of and foster engagement between young and old residents alike.
Likewise, Enabling Village (2015) and Punggol Digital District (2025), both designed by WOHA with landscape architecture led by Henning Larsen, emerged as highlights. Despite each project tackling very different briefs and sites – up to 20 hectares in the case of Punggol Digital District – they successfully demonstrated how, with a focus on interconnectedness and systems design, precinct-scale architecture can function meaningfully as a microcosm of the larger city.
During Singapore’s project visits, winners frequently engaged in discussions about the appropriateness of each building’s scale, proportion, and density in the context of its surroundings. What emerged was a sense that many of the city’s iconic buildings felt oversized for the sole purpose of leaving a memorable impression, often forsaking consideration of the fine-grained human scale and thus the potential to engender gathering and occupation. By contrast, many of the humbler, community-oriented projects beyond the central business district devoted much of their energy to facilitating a true sense of publicness, even when their briefs did not necessitate it.
Civic generosity was a defining characteristic of Singapore, both for Licht, who was surprised to find an overwhelming feeling of permeability and spaciousness within Singapore’s dense urban form, and for fellow tour recipient Jack Gillmer, who found a sense of generosity toward the public echoed in the nation’s policies on home ownership, urban nature and more.
“[In Singapore], it feels like housing is accessible, nature’s accessible, good living is accessible,” Gillmer reflected. The power of design to shape not only a building, but a living and evolving system – whether visible or invisible – will surely remain a key lesson for winners as they continue on to the next leg of the 2026 Dulux Study Tour.
Lucia Amies is travelling with the 2026 Australian Institute of Architects Dulux Study Tour. Follow #2026DuluxStudyTour on social media and the blog.
Source: Architecture - architectureau
