Designing the Future of Innovation

Designing new spaces for innovation can offer exciting business opportunities but requires re-thinking how workspace is organised and managed. Architects can help businesses take the necessary steps to create these new types of environments, but how can they help clients navigate these inherent risks and how can architecture inform this process?

The world of work is changing. Previously, science and technology parks were conceived as clusters of inward-looking buildings on the outskirts of cities surrounded by car parks and greenery. Buildings were designed to be purely functional. Efficiency steered the layout of rooms and furniture. Performance and creativity were considered the product of ‘time spent in the office’.

Fast forward to today and companies in the emerging innovation and knowledge economy are increasingly people orientated. They link business success to a broadened space offer that fosters innovation, team-based productivity and knowledge sharing. They want their offices to be more ‘experiential’ and ‘events-based’ with lifestyle elements that place greater emphasis on well-being and collaboration.

A recent example of this type of building is Ascent, an exemplar commercial building in Singapore. For many years, the client for the building, Ascendas has been working with Studio Woodroffe Papa and Lawrence Barth to develop their expanding portfolio of business and science parks by organising multi-tenanted offices, shops, amenities and residential space into mixed-use ‘integrated communities’.

Faced with regenerating one of its flagship science parks in Singapore, Ascendas commissioned Studio Woodroffe Papa to revitalise the masterplan and deliver Ascent to signify the science park transformation and promote new ways of working.

The upper levels of the building provide large areas of flexible, deep-plan office space. Below, a double height plinth accommodates lobby areas, ‘club’ and event spaces, shops, restaurants, creche and pharmacy. Food courts and sheltered gardens provide informal outdoor social settings and working environments.

For the architects, leading their client into unchartered design territory proved to be one of the most significant challenges – but ultimately the most rewarding – as they were confronted with diverging requirements and concerns. While senior executives wanted to ‘think outside the box’ and push the building’s spatial and functional boundaries, the project’s financial advisers felt challenged to accept the existence of ‘third spaces’, considered important for the social impact of the project while being neither pure office nor circulation space.

Multiple workshops and design team meetings were necessary to negotiate these challenges. Relevant exemplar projects from around the world were studied and presented back to the client. This process also helped the client’s marketing team imagine the building being proposed.

Ascent is transforming the way people work and socialise. The variety of high-quality spaces in and around the building are helping businesses to innovate. In fact, the project has been such a success that Ascendas considered re-locating its Singapore team into the building.

The following phases of the masterplan are currently under construction. The ambition is to realise more exemplar commercial buildings that meet the evolving demands of tomorrow’s knowledge economy, inspire knowledge sharing and foster innovation. Adjacent to Ascent, Serie Architects and Multiply Architects have recently completed 5 Science Park Drive. As Christopher Lee, Principal of Serie Architects explains, "The Science Park model of the 1990s, with buildings isolated from one another by unutilised landscape is no longer adequate for today's workspaces that are more social in nature. The first of more than five buildings in the cluster, 5 Science Park Drive is designed to ensure that common spaces are visible, accessible and nourished with amenities". The building features a three-storey extended lobby or ‘city room’ that incorporates a series of cascading platforms incorporating a café, break-out spaces and a small auditorium. This space is focused on collaboration, discussion and networking.

Ascent

Client - Ascendas Land Pte

Programme - 54,400m2 offices, retail, restaurants, amenities

Design Architect - Studio Woodroffe Papa

Executive Architect - SAA Architects Singapore 

Photographs - Jan Bitter, Arsh Pairatana

Sustainability - BCA Platinum Green Mark

5 Science Park Drive

Client - Ascendas

Architects - Serie Architects, Multiply Architects

Programme - 26,000m2 offices, amenities

Photographs - Finbaar Fallon

Sustainability - Greenmark, BSD Building Systems & Diagnostics