Jointly owned by Temasek Holdings and JTC Corporation, the Ascendas-Singbridge Group is a sustainable urban development and business space solutions provider with a global portfolio spanning 42 cities across 11 countries.

The company is headquartered in Singapore’s Science Park Drive, and early this year it has ventured into the coworking business with thebridge.

Occupying the ground floor Ascendas-Singbridge’s office, the coworking space was designed by Space Matrix. Spanning a total 30,000 sqft, thebridge was formulated by Ascendas-Singbridge as a new community workspace that offers additional office space, meeting rooms, and events space for tenants in the office park.

Space Matrix’s scope was, in the designers’ words, “Create a hospitality look and feel and to examine general work practices and bring in new design thinking that was against the grain.”

“Modern work cultures are built on improvisation and collaboration,” states Space Matrix. Catering to this culture, Space Matrix collaborated with Ascendas to develop a coworking model dubbed the Flexible Work Place (FWP), which promotes agility, flexibility and inclusiveness in thebridge.

thebridge has a 50-50 ratio of enclosed suites and open collaborative hot desks.

To reflect this, workspaces have to be designed to be agile, flexible and inclusive. Some of the strategies employed to bring the FWP concept to life include borrowing elements from the retail and hospitality typologies.

Visitors are received into an entrance lobby flanked by interactive media screens that serve as a promotional media and a directory, much like one found in shopping centres.

Throughout the space, diverse collaborative workspaces are interspersed with recreational zones, creating a relaxed, informal setting. These include standing workstations, amphitheatres and themed breakout zones.

“The lack of physical barriers and interspersing regular recreational zones, encourage people to interact. This fosters a culture of collaboration,” says Richard Baker, lead designer at Space Matrix.

The meeting rooms are also themed, borrowing elements from multiple cultures to express Singapore’s diverse cultural identity.

The event spaces and convention centres are fitted with screens that serve as architectural ornaments, and movable partition walls that can reconfigure the room layout based on the size of the accommodated events.

There are no dedicated suites for individual tenants. Instead, thebridge offers fully equipped work-desks within a collaborative space that facilitates maximum space utilisation.

According to Barker, thebridge provides a minimum of 70 sqft of space to each patron, almost double the average 40 sqft space that average companies provide for their employees.

Photography by Caleb Ming/Surround.