d+a | Issue 129 • 2023

81 Park Nova boasts 54 spacious apartments that seamlessly marry indoor and outdoor spaces. – life-centric – and how we make buildings for people to use and to feel comfortable in, is an important part of that. For technology, there’s a real opportunity to, for the first time, combine interesting spatial concepts with technology platforms. Buildings are smarter, they learn more, they adapt to the way people want to use them. They give the occupiers choices on the way they want to use the space as well. And they generate information that can be used to make improvements. In the urban planning work, there’s a big focus on creating spaces and places for people. Singapore has good amenities and is a very fair city. But in many (other) places, we need to start by creating an awareness that there’s a large disparity of users in the urban environment, and real estate can do more to bridge that gap. What more can Singapore learn about sustainable buildings and infrastructure? When you build infrastructure or buildings, it’s traditionally been an extractive process. We extract minerals and other things, and we don’t put anything back. So I think now, the challenge is to extract less. But what you demolish and rebuild… how can you put that back into a circular economy? In London, we’ve just finished what we call a fifth generation energy system project – it involves buildings that share energy between them. And we’re doing it using green energy. So it’s electrically driven, and the electric is coming from renewable sources. I think there’s a lot of opportunities to do that in Singapore. We’re also focused on how we use less carbon to build our buildings. Embodied carbon is a big part of overall carbon and the life of a building, and within that, 60% of the embodied carbon in a building comes from the foundation’s infrastructure. So if you can use a lighter carbon solution, either timber or lower carbon cement and steel or recycled steel – you can start to take the carbon levels down. I think the big focus, especially in Europe at the moment, is on the operational side of carbon. And there are targets on how much carbon is used to build a building, not just how much is used to operate it. Everybody always wants a new building unless there’s an old building that’s been constructed to such a high quality level that lasts for a long time. We have to recognise that the past 50 to 60 years, globally, we haven’t done a good job of building a lot of high quality buildings. We developed a lot of buildings quickly because people needed them and there was a demand for them. I think we will have to demolish a lot of those. So there’s a lot of effort in our studio going into testing the future proofing of buildings, and making sure that they’re built for longevity. The other thing is when we demolish buildings, where’s all the material that you’re demolishing going to? And how do you put it back into the circular economy? So again, the whole process becomes less extractive.