Big-scale architecture has evolved from the visionary into a commonplace model of planning and development, especially in emergent global cities such as Singapore. Contemporary living demands a new magnitude in capacities, speeds, climate, construction, and integrated programming that makes the big-scale logical and practical. At the same time, when buildings reach a certain size, they take on new behavioral characteristics, becoming more than cities unto themselves. How can we embrace and critique this transformation to create a new type of urban artifact that is both architecture and the city? This studio will design a healthcare and wellness complex measuring almost half a mile in length and 2 million square feet in floor area and explore how the big-scale healthcare and wellness typology can integrate into the new vision of healthy living in suburban Singapore.

Located along the north-south axis of the city-state’s mass-rapid-transportation network, our site at Yio Chu Kang –a new town built in the 1980s–is a key focus of Singapore’s 2025 Master Plan, which the state has envisioned to shape a “Happy, Healthy city.” The capacity to create a coherent big-scale project presents a unique opportunity to challenge design ideas from developmental, environmental, and ethical perspectives, on both the large and granular scales.

In Singapore, the average lifespan is 84 years, while the average health span is 74. This entails 10 years of ill-health for the average Singaporean. To close this gap, Singapore’s Ministry of Health, announced in October 2023 that healthy living and preventive care will become a way of life in Singapore in the coming decades, embedded in and supported by its built environment. This vision, dubbed Blue Zone 3.0– an accolade bestowed on Singapore as a region that hosts many centenarians–unlike the other five Blue Zone regions, is achieved through forward-thinking policies rather than long-established cultural traditions, in a high-density urban environment.

Our response will be framed by three considerations.

First, the idea of the Blue Zone 3.0 city questions our assumptions of what makes an urban core of a high-density city conducive for a healthy lifestyle predicated on the abundance of open space and sports infrastructure, and programmatic intensity. In other words, what is the alternative vision of a center that is therapeutic, tranquil, and yet engaging and convenient?

The second consideration is typological: the possibility of conceiving a building as an open framework. As hospitals and sports typologies tend to be closed buildings, inverting attention from the exterior to the interior for performance and curative care, their placement next to transport nodes requires them to opportunistically merge and act as an anchor point for an accessible and thriving urban core. To this end, we will draw lessons from the archetypes of “urban condensers” to transform, hybridize, and charged them with intense use, engagement, and repose.

Lean tropical architecture, our third consideration, will deal with the potential of these two typologies pared down to their bare minimum for low-carbon construction and super-low operational energy. We will approach this by investigating the relationship between structures, cores, shafts, and façades as interrelated elements that can induce clear spatial arrangements and are suited for a hot and humid climate.