This response to the local environs as epitomised by River Place and fourteen other architectural works was the theme for Singapore’s exhibition, Second Nature, at the prestigious 9th International Architectural Exhibition of the Venice Biennale held from 10 September to 7 November 2004. Singapore is the first Southeast Asian country to feature in the Venice Biennale architecture show.

This year’s Biennale saw entries from 50 countries and drew 115,000 ticketed visitors and 1.5 million non-ticketed visitors and tourists.

Venice Biennale is one of the oldest and most important platforms for visual art in the world. Singapore’s participation is this event is a milestone for Singapore’s architecture as it signified the belief and faith of the government on the quality and standards of local architectural works.

Second Nature highlighted to an international audience the uniquely Singapore’s urban landscape that resulted from local conditions - the physical, historical, emotional and social factors - and the architectural responses they engendered. It addressed “the redevelopment of Singapore’s urban landscape and the emergence of a design sensibility among Singapore’s architects towards a modern urban tropical aesthetic” according to its curator, Dr Wong Yunn Chii. The fifteen selected architectural works demonstrated this sensibility and awareness of the local conditions.

“River Place was conceived with a conscious effort to respond to the urban context of its unique site…The development straddles the vibrancy of the city and the calm of the Singapore River. The duality of the site permits the development to take on varying architectural forms,” said Mr Chan Sui Him, the architect for River Place.

River Place has three different architectural forms. An “L” shaped high-density 10-storey block forms the perimeter of the development along the two major roads. Mr Chan described this arrangement as allowing for “continuity of the existing urban edge”.

This urban edge is tempered by the soothing calm of the river that permeates the development through openings in the string of low-rise buildings. A semi-circular point block completes the composition by providing the anchor to the two different building scales. According to Mr Chan, these architectural forms mediate between the intensity of city living and the notion of home as retreat.

These architectural forms offer more than a hundred different types of apartment layout. “It also emphasises the fact that the individual apartments are no standard mass produced cubicles stacked in the sky. The design of River Place is aimed to give the inhabitants a sense of individuality and orientation,” said Mr Chan.

The maturing and creative responses of Singapore to its environs as can be witnessed in River Place have created an exciting and uniquely Singapore urban topography. The image of the utilitarian HDB flats in their neat rows will no longer represents to many the sum of Singapore’s architecture.

Venice Biennale started in 1895 as a showcase for Italian art. It has since evolved to include architecture, music, cinema, dance and theatre. Today, it is recognised as the oldest and most important international visual art event in the world attracting hundreds of thousands of participants and attendees.