Architecture History | Kampung Admiralty — The 2017 Stack That Joined Housing and Care

In May 2017, an eleven-storey complex stood where a car park had occupied a compact site beside Admiralty MRT, but its most consequential space was not one of the 104 public-housing flats above. A covered, open-sided plaza passed beneath the housing, while a hawker centre, medical centre, care facilities and planted terraces formed a vertical sequence between street and home. Singapore’s Housing & Development Board began design work in 2013 and coordinated a steering group representing seven public agencies. WOHA’s credited project team included Wong Mun Summ, Richard Hassell, Pearl Chee and colleagues; Ronnie & Koh Consultants handled civil and structural engineering, AECOM the mechanical and electrical systems, Davis Langdon KPK quantity surveying, Lum Chang the main construction contract, and Ramboll Studio Dreiseitl the landscape. The constraint was organizational as much as spatial: services normally built on separate plots had to operate safely on about 0.9 hectares without turning the ground into a private lobby. WOHA’s “club sandwich” section placed the public plaza and shops at the base, the hawker centre above it, the medical centre through the middle levels, and a community park and senior housing higher up. A nine-metre structural grid and precast-concrete walls helped keep the residential floors flexible, while the lifted building plate sheltered a civic room from sun and rain. Landscape was part of that section rather than decoration applied afterward. Terraces, rain gardens, planted courts and an urban farm linked the care and housing levels; the water-sensitive design collects, cleans and stores rainwater for irrigation. These elements separated public, shared and residential zones without isolating them, giving nearby residents a route between the neighbourhood and station while protecting the homes and specialist facilities above. Completion was not the same event as opening. HDB dates completion to May 2017, while the government’s formal opening took place on 12 May 2018, after the agencies and operators had begun turning the stacked rooms into working housing, healthcare, childcare, eldercare, food and community services. The architectural consequence lay in this combination of building and governance, not simply in the later awards it received. A 2022 post-occupancy study identified multi-agency collaboration as central to the project’s age-friendly planning. A 2024 movement study found that vertical circulation acted as the building’s network backbone and that gardens and plaza spaces influenced route choices. The authors also cautioned that their sample was small and gathered during the pandemic recovery. Kampung Admiralty remains occupied public housing within an operating mixed-use complex. The community plaza, hawker centre, retail areas and designated public routes can be used without treating the residential towers as an attraction; medical areas require their normal patient access, and the homes remain private. Bianca Maria Rinaldi’s 2019 photograph records the planted court between the housing blocks after occupation, not an opening-day view. Photo: Bianca Maria Rinaldi, 2019, Figure 4 in Ri-Vista, CC BY 4.0.