architecture

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Singapore Bio-utopia

"In 2001," the entire island city-state of Singapore spontaneously "realised that the rest of Asia was starting to rival it for low-cost manufacturing and electronics, so prime minister Lee Hsien Loong announced that the way forward lay in nurturing its science. Hey presto, an R&D park called Biopolis was built and staffed within two years" – and it has some freaky building names, like "Proteos" and "Chromos" and "Nanos," the latter of which houses the so-called "Singapore Tissue Network." (They rent Meg Ryan movies together).
Check it out:

[Image: From New Scientist, which is also the source of the quotation, above; click on the image for larger version].

Thomas More's Utopia meets the biosciences, in a city once described by William Gibson as "Disneyland with the death penalty."
Yet Biopolis is already "a major new bioscience hub that has rocketed up from nothing" – and if anyone has more information on this thing – or if you've been there – whether that's the architects involved, the future development plans, or especially some image, just let me know...
A kind of Lonely Planet Guide to the world's purpose-built bioscience cities. The Rough Guide to Biopolis. Written by BLDGBLOG. Dedicated to Ovid.
Anyway, if you've got images... send 'em in.

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