About HDB Void Deck
From the 1970s the Housing and Development Board stopped building on the ground storey of its slab blocks. What was left is the void deck: a covered, column-lined slab of bare cement and terrazzo under whitewashed walls, fitted with letter boxes, bicycle racks, dustbins and lift landings, and nothing else.
The emptiness is the point. Weddings, wakes, kindergartens, football and homework all happen in the same grey room. Colour arrives later and in pieces — mosaic-tiled tables, one marked out as a chess board, green table-tennis tops, and the painted block number that tells you which of a thousand identical towers you are under.
- Origin
- Singapore — Toa Payoh, Ang Mo Kio, Queenstown, Bedok
- Era
- 1970s onward; void decks standard in HDB slab-block design
- Key figures
- Housing and Development Board architects and planners · National Library Board · National Heritage Board
- Movements
- post-independence Singapore public housing · tropical modernist pilotis · state-planned community space
HDB Void Deck design spec
Colors
Typography
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