Undergraduate Portfolio
Singapore University of Technology and Design Architecture and Sustainable Design Sam Tang
2017
T5.
Cairnhill Artificial
T6.
Delta
2018
T7.
Remote University Communities
T8.
Social Infrastructures
T5. Cairnhill Artificial The brief calls for a proposal of an Artificial Design Gallery along the intersection between Orchard and Cairnhill Road. As an unbuilt plot of land along one of Singapore’s busiest roads, the site is almost an anomaly in a stretch dominated by a series of largeness. While not untouched - it was previously the site of Singapore Tourism Board’s Visitor Center - the site as laid to rest provides a soft relief from the characteristic hardscape of Orchard Road, where natural elements (when they appear) become objects of the street - no different from a fence, a sculpture, a wall. Consecutively, the site as a junction transitions between the front and back of Orchard road - the former is iconic, the ‘face’ of Orchard, the latter is more reserved, where service roads run, and employees escape to in between shifts.
Context / Approach Based off current conditions of traffic, texture and topography as pretext, the proposal splits the site into levels in order to intensify moments of height with depth, hardness with softness, exposure and shading into a compressed space. Differences in terrain elevation are dramatized by the creation of a main entrance that is pushed underground, creating a cavern-like atrium that is further isolated from the street by the insertion of a metallic container, alluding to the superimposition of the manmade into the natural.
Ground Floor Plan Section A - A’
Basement Plan Section B - B’
External View
Internal Section
A Gallery In Orchard On a street already saturated with displays and imagery, Cairnhill Artificial urges a shift in experiential focus from the visual to the tactile, using fundamental indicators of spatial reading such as materiality, enclosure and scale, to create transitions and zones. Without trying to overcurate what belongs to the natural realm of the environment, blocks of interior spaces are concealed below, opting to adapt from the existing ground as opposed to dominating over it with complete disregard.
Elevation
Axonometric Drawing
T6. Delta Traditional urban planning in Singapore divides the city into residential districts and zones of office and commerce. With the implementation of park connectors and, more recently, the development of Singapore’s Blue Network, public communal spaces increasingly form a part of the country’s pedestrianpublic network linking circulatory spaces with public activity, creating avenues for community fostering and informal recreational spaces. Including the more recent integration of public bicycle sharing and personal mobility devices, mode of transport becomes less of a limiting factor in determining travel distance, and programmes that were once only contained within the Central Business District are made more accessible from one’s home.
Clementi
Central
Canal-Park Connectivity With the increasingly commonplace use of personal-mobility devices, Singapore’s park and canal connector network no longer serves residents the purely recreational purpose of providing access to park spaces, but extends direct access from one’s home to their work place. Originating from the site, the rings track in consecutive size the extent that one can reach via walking, running, cycling or on automated PMDs within 5 minutes.
Park Connectors
Vehicular Paths
l Business District
Programmatic Map
Public Access
Site Response: Topography, Landscaping, Buffer Zones and Climate The site’s location along Alexandra Canal sits along a branch of park connectors and water paths stemming from the Singapore River, implying some connection between the residential district of Bukit Merah to the town center. While the park connector from the city to the site crosses multiple individual programmes and sites, the project attempts to create a public destination that becomes a part of the park connector itself. While a lot of the surrounding sites have been flattened as a result of construction, the project first counters against the concretized environment by manipulating its current topography to create a natural soft edge that intensifies the green belt alongside the park connector. With reference to the Bishan Park project, the canal is converted into a natural water landscape that is made accessible for public use through the adoption of bioswales and plantations along the water edge.
Forming from Ground, Park & Residential Floors The overal form of the building is informed by circulation on the first two ground levels, creating an elevated connector that also connects across the canal, while views and porosity primarily determines how the residential floors weave around each other.
Structural Systems Floor Plates Elevated Parks, Glass Column Layout Vertical Circulation Cores Ground Canopy
The first and second levels form dedicated public spaces of parkscape and commercial facilities, designed as a branching of belts that bend into the site and link pedestrian and cyclist travel nodes. Like a series of floating canopy clouds, the residential units are lifted upwards to maintain privacy from the ground level while oriented towards the park, weaving through the site such that courtyards and informal openings can result from the form, allowing us to create an ambience of lightness while dealing with an otherwise dense urban housing.
Unit Agglomeration Strategy and Residential Floor Plans In a nod to the park connection routes below, shared spaces are connected to form a continuous path on the residential floors. Each home is connected to another through a continuous balcony where, when open, can combine joining units under a singular household or facilitate encounters between neighbours. Adopting modules of Living Room + Bedroom(s), this allows multiple configurations to be set up by simply determining the boundary of one’s home along the balcony space.
Site Plan
Elevated Park 1st Floor
Park Connector Ground Floor
Apartment Catalogue Level Fourteen
Shading Simulation & Facade Treatment Alternatively, the balcony as a shared semi-private space between residents is joined as a chain of backyards, incentivised by a larger width to allow for different activities to take place along the balcony. For the facade treatment, we opted for a white mesh facade with moveable screen panels to allow for both shading and privacy within the apartments. Based on sun and thermal simulations, the porosity of the shadings are varied between apartments.
Environmental Simulation for Selected Unit An iterative process towards the exterior treatment of the unit levels, through testing the outcomes of different materials, porosity and shading on ventilation, heat gain, thermal comfort and solar irradiation on a singular unit.
T7. Remote University Communities The island of Inujima is located south of Osaka prefecture, commonly associated alongside Naoshima and Teshima as a part of the Setouchi Triennale art islands which play host to a series of art and architecture exhibitions showcased every three years. Unique to Inujima is the fact that this tiny island of 1sqkm, once a heavily populated iron and metal industry in its yesteryears, is now home to a predominantly elderly population of no more than 90 persons who have continued to live on the island. Aside from food brought in from the mainland, gardening and fishing are common ways that the elderly on Inujima have adopted as a means to support themselves. As the mean age of the residents slowly increases from 70 to 80 years old, concerns over health and welfare inevitably become more severe. Since 2010, SANAA and Benesse has been managing various art exhibitions on Inujima, alongside them the Seirensho Art Museum, formerly used as a smokestack for industrial activities.
Distribution of Educational Institutes and Residential Areas Inujima is directly accessible from Hoden Port off mainland Japan, and Ieura Port off Teshima Island, about two hours away from Okayama Station. Although motorised vehicles may be used on the island, it is mostly unnecessary as the entire island is traversable by foot within half an hour.
Among efforts to revitalise Inujima, the island has formed new relationships with various universities who have come to the island for study, such as Milano Polytechnic, KIT and Yokohama University. If further developed into a long term investment by both the university communities and the Inujima community, Inujima could provide a unique common ground for these universities to learn and collaborate, while the universities become a vehicle for the prolonged survival of the Inujima community. Through shared experiences on Inujima, the island no longer exists in isolation, but globalised as an international community.
The proposal calls for a shared campus on Inujima between these international universities. Due to the scale of existing buildings on site, it would be more site-sensitive to translate the traditionally large scale campus model into smaller parts that could integrate with Inujima’s unique characteristics. 7 physical typologies on Inujima were identified, mapped out and abstracted into spatial types that could be translated into campus programs. These spatial types were broken down into parameters in order to map an existing Inujima typology to a campus program that requires similar spatial settings. Campus programs such as the studio and classrooms are then mapped to physical qualities of Inujima that could fulfil the fundamental needs of these campus programs while retaining its local character.
This campus development takes place over three phases. The first phase forms a tight loop around the village as a central location to facilitate interaction between current residents of Inujima and the universities, allowing current residents of Inujima to play a role in developing the campus’ culture during its formative years. The second phase connects the east and west populated regions of Inujima, linking the campus to the art sites along the spline, such that campus activities could also potentially become a part of the island’s art tourism. The third phase creates a loop connecting the northern pier and southern quarries. Taking a walk along this loop will bring one through all the programs of the campus, thereby also experiencing the different physical qualities of Inujima. The canteen is a key node of the campus, introduced in phase one. During the campus’ early stages, the canteen acts as a common hub for current residents of Inujima and the university students, tapping on to Inujima’s strong food culture and the domestic nature of its village as a medium for social interaction. The Kampo Lab, or traditional Japanese medicine lab, taps onto the forest quarries of Inujima in phase two. Given the shortage of medical facilities on site, medicine and health are of high interest to the community. The lab provides an avenue for the cultivation of locally-grown plants into medicinal herbs that locals could use. Phase 3 sees the completion of the studio, which forms a part of the final pier and extends into the sea. The studio acts as a concentrated site for architecture and design students from the different universities to come together and work, and potentially collaborate. The workshop doubles as a space for local craftsmen to practice and pass on their trade. The studio also extends the existing port of Inujima outwards, to enclose a larger area to accommodate for future logistics and water based activities that the campus could host. Homes in Inujima are connected through a series of gardening plots. In a campus setting, these plots take on the role of the decentralised campus lawn - instead of having one large lawn for social activities, the plots form a connective tissue to link activities that spill out from the classrooms and circulatory pathways at a human scale. These plots become a series of clustered common activities that form a part of the shared experiences on Inujima, in which the new community of Inujima, consisting of these universities, can grow.
Shared between four universities, Inujima becomes a melting pot in which an experience of campus life is an experience of the island itself. Classes are decentralised throughout the existing pedestrian network, giving abandoned houses a new life, while major hubs - the Studio, the Workshop and the Lab latch onto existing land features, becoming a part of Inujima’s industrial and natural landscape. As common working spaces for the universities, there hubs act as catalysts for cross discussions and collaborations to occur.
The Canteen Located near the main port of Inujima, the Canteen is situated along one of the most prominent areas of the island between residents and visitors coming in from the mainland. Using this to its advantage, the potential of the Canteen as a community living room is built upon by the island’s food culture as a catalyst for creating and facilitating social encounters and relationships between the island and university communities.
The Laboratory Labs play a dual role in plant research and production of food. As food production slowly shifts from the current residents of Inujima to the campus, the labs tap onto the rich soil and water of the quarries to grow food for the campus.
The Workshop Along the coasts where leftover materials such as granite rocks from Inujima’s former industries are left behind, the workshop also acts as a part of Inujima’s industrial recycling point, recycling left over material for reuse within Inujima and beyond. The Workshop is located along the coast for transportation of materials within the island and for shipping out, and contains machinery for heavier industrial work.
The Studio Used for individual working spaces, crits, and discussions, the studio uses the uneven terrain of the coast to demarcate areas requiring different levels of privacy or containment. There are spaces included for light craftwork like woodworking.
T8. Social Infrastructures
Against the thematic branding of each HSR stations marketed by the HSR Corporation, our project seeks to recognise the station, at its core, as piece of infrastructure that regulates flows of people, flows of commerce, flows of goods and services. Instead of glorifying the insertion of the station as a solution to suburban town development, we propose that the relevance of the station lies in its ability to serve the needs of both existing and future communities. The station therefore becomes a contested entity between rooted locals of Batu Pahat and hypermobile citizens, in which peripheral conditions of the town is compressed into varying degrees of owned and shared spaces.
Kuala Lumpur
Seremban
Melaka Muar
Ba
Proposed HSR Line Proposed HSR Station
atu Pahat
Jurong, Singapore
The High Speed Railway The HSR network that spans between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) was designed to connect towns located on the western coast of Malaysia, reducing its geographical distance while driving economic development. The identity of the 8 towns located along the HSR has been thematically branded by planners, determining the town’s unique characteristics and developmental prospects for the future. The disconnect between the portrayal of small towns such as Batu Pahat through a top down branding approach instead of responding to current societal conditions challenges the station as an entity alienated from the existing town, particularly through speculations by mega companies such as Genting Plantations who purchase adjacent land and transform existing agricultural land into industrial and mega real estate development. The HSR introduces another community into the towns - a community no longer grounded by geographical location, but tied together by the increasingly eminent hypermobile culture (perpetuated by Malaysia’s reliance on the automobile and promises of the planned HSR network connecting across to Singapore’s Jurong Town). The resulting development around the station is an enclave that is largely detached from the existing town.
Batu Pahat HSR Station Design
Singapore (Jurong)
Iskandar Puteri
Batu Pahat HSR Station, myHSR Corp.
Batu Pahat
Muar
Ayer Keroh
Seremban Putrajaya Kuala Lumpur
Seremban
Melaka
Muar
Batu Pahat
1:300 000
“The city is a complex but incomplete system… If you have massive projects, massive densities, you are losing urbanity, you’re losing city-ness. In a way, the large cities are one of the few places where those without power get to make history, they get to make a culture, they get to make an economy… where actors from very different worlds can have an encounter... And one property cities have… at various times of the day, the city reduces us all, or makes us all, urban subjects. Not religious, not class, no, urban. And these are very precious moments, but cities enable that.” - Sakia Sassen
Productive Peripheries In her ongoing work on urban studies and sociology, Saskia Sassen notes how cities traditionally played a pivotal role in the creation of chance encounters between members of different class, occupation, and social status. In such a case, architecture in an urbanised setting becomes infrastructure, facilitating flows between humans, vehicles, utilities, communication. As infrastructure, it is necessary, but indeterminate. Instead of judging cities by how dense or built up they are, how urbanised a city or town is is therefore based on its ability to connect and form encounters. Peripheries are often understood as a scalar entity defined by a geographical condition, one that lies away from central urban growth and economic development. The project challenges our understanding of periphery, interpreting it as a conditional entity dependent on its social context. Social Peripheries exist between different communities, and in the case of Batu Pahat, with the introduction of the HSR station into the existing town, provides a scenario in which an external community brought in through the HSR station into the town and surrounding districts creates a tension between the residents of Batu Pahat and the hypermobile citizens of the HSR community who make up this social periphery to the existing town populace. Our reinterpretation of productivity within the context of an urban settlement stems from its ability to engage communities, and its relevance to the existing local context. Tapping into the HSR station’s potential to become a platform for economic growth and development, its location within the outskirts of Batu Pahat provides us with an opportunity to bridge a no man’s land to surrounding occupied spaces by activating nodal developments which in turn would serve multiple communities around, facilitated by the growth of transportation networks. Communities are engaged by the ability of the station, in this case, to provide a space that can serve the needs of the locals, complementing the unique characteristics and behaviour of the existing town communities. For this project, this would translate to how the station is able to adapt to the lifestyles of existing and incoming communities - those currently in Batu Pahat, and those from the result of the HSR station. By becoming a space that serves both communities, the station could become a kind of social node that condenses the distance between these groups of people.
Batu Pahat Traditional settlements are defined by physical boundaries such as rivers and mountains, and usually grow along a transportation infrastructure like a highway. While these natural markers of separation seem like hard boundaries on the urban scale, analysis on the architectural scale reveal a threshold region where residents have appropriated these regions into informal everyday spaces. Considering used spaces as a marker of development, social nodes can become a starting point for development, and a space for congregation. We started our analysis on spaces of social encounter with 2 models, analysing the mosque and malls in Batu Pahat. Both represent typical markers of social nodes - the mosque as a religious space where people go for friday prayers, and malls as contemporary spaces of commerce where people gather. Mapping out the locations of these markers suggests that each mosque takes up a 2km sphere of influence, with it placed rhythmically around the city. On the other hand, malls are located close to major highway junctions to tap into vehicular traffic. Looking into the usage of the mosques and malls however, we found that while the mosques - largely accessible by foot to locals residing in Batu Pahat, had a steady flow of usership, the malls were largely vacant in comparison to their street-based counterparts as commercial social spaces. We moved on to consider dispersed smaller spaces in Batu Pahat, where we went down to 9 such spaces. We observed that these spaces of encounters are largely regulated by time - at different times of the day, different parts of the town are activated. At the end of the day, these spaces were reappropriated. While we typically think of social spaces as religious places like the mosques, which serve a cultural purpose, the mosques serve a specific catchment area, in this case a 2km radius. Likewise, contemporary social spaces like malls, which have a larger catchment area.
Yet when we look around BP what we observe is that what binds people together are not these stable official spaces but these unofficial unstable spaces such as these temporary markets and the structures that support these temporary markets These informal spaces are more successful in creating gathering spaces as opposed to ordered spaces, even spaces such as Mosques and Temples as each serve a specific demographic based on religion. But these informal spaces are created as the result of certain shared needs and desires for commerce, food, and market from the ground, facilitating encounters between people from different backgrounds. How we traditionally view the city is through these very stable, very deterministic spaces yet the reality tells us otherwise, where spaces that bring about the most urban life are in relatively informal spaces where individuals, regardless of what community they identify with, are able to appropriate the space through objects or the creation of soft boundaries to demarcate boundaries between owned and unowned space. When we look into the residential districts of the town, we observe a clear differentiation between what is considered the front and back of house, be it a shophouse used for commercial activities or a residential house within a newer development. The front of the house as the most public circulation route, used also as vehicular access. The back of house, even though technically publicly accessible, is read as a semi-private area due to its size and proximity to domestic zones. As an owned space shared by residents/tenants living along that stretch, neighbours start to appropriate the space through personal objects, resulting in a corridor where lines of ownership begin to blur. Comparing it to a residential area on a architectural scale, we realised that, social spaces for appropriation exist in a compressed state between houses. This back of house, which is the area between two rows of residential units become public spaces for appropriation and have been nested in the city. It is in these spaces where local communities start to form, spaces of common use that allow for appropriation of the individual’s will, where encounters are facilitated on the individual level.
Geographical Boundaries
Territorial Conditions at the River Boundary
and Mountain Boundary
Threshold Conditions at the Shophouse Lots
and Residential Developments
Mosques
Pasars (o) and Malls (+)
Roads
Topography
Batu Pahat Station The mega settlement is no stranger to Malaysian real estate. Precedents such as KL Sentral Station and Genting Pura Kencana located beside the proposed Batu Pahat station already signify similar optimism ushered in by plans for the HSR station. In response to these conditions, our project proposes to redesign the station, considering its relationship to Batu Pahat and neighbouring towns beyond the HSR district. The station is largely surrounded by plantations, primarily accessible by a vehicular highway connecting Batu Pahat to Yong Peng in the north and Sri Gading to Kluang in the east, crossing through the North-South Expressway. The introduction of the high-speed railway creates another access point, reaching commuters from Singapore up to Kuala Lumpur. The premise for the design stems from the belief that the station can perform a greater function by responding to the needs of the residing communities of Batu Pahat and their urban habits. Finding the existing culture as one of spatial appropriation, manifested as car parks turned into ad-hoc markets where vehicles may also become stalls from which wares are exchanged, or backlanes transformed into kitchens or service areas by the placement of various domestic or commercial objects, we opted for an architecture that has been reduced to its bare minimum - a line of infrastructure that facilitates flows of goods, services, and people. Without turning the HSR station into a massive sculpture dominating the periphery, the focus is shifted to the performative function of the station, its ability to regulate various degrees of vehicular, railway and human traffic, and its potential as an urban space that can create conditions for encounter. The scheme is defined as a series of structural scaffoldings that organises flows of utility, traffic and activity across various human and infrastructural scales. Without preconceived representations of what Batu Pahat is, the structure supports these indeterminate urban activities whose temporal nature is reinforced by the
presence of the automobile and the high-speed railway. Functions and programmes with different levels of accessibility are reflected horizontally and vertically, along with the social thresholds implicit in them - foreigners and locals, consumer and producer, commuter, employee, public. Flows of people are increasingly regulated as one moves up towards the platform from the ground floor. While the ground floor is largely public, and the top floor restricted to commuters of the railway, the middle level divides interior and exterior into bands of private and public. Within the station, the concept of settlement gains a transient character in the form of a capsule hotel, plugged into the station for services such as water and electricity. Moving towards the central band, activities become increasingly public, from built-in stalls to temporary blocks of shops occupying lots along the scaffolding. Materiality - whether tiled flooring or the bitumen of roads - becomes the primary indicator of boundaries between zones. Navigating through the station, circulation is guided by the reading of public and private spaces negotiating as their most primal forms - a narrow corridor is perceived as one of higher privacy, but when flanked by openings into owned spaces, it becomes a shared space between specific groups of people. Drawing back to our analysis of the city as something that is no longer defined by spaces of stable civic institutions, such as mosques and malls, infrastructure - the basic physical and organisational structures required for the operation of a program - becomes the predominant language that defines access between private and public, domestic and commercial, shared and owned. If the goal of the high-speed railway is to facilitate growth between the interconnected HSR districts by stimulating commercial exchange between the two major metropolises of KL and SG, our response for the station, rather than mimicking a form of the city, is to reveal the station as nothing but a piece of infrastructure that compresses the threshold conditions of a city into a singular space where encounters between new and existing communities of Batu Pahat and its surrounding districts are facilitated.
Neighbouring Townships
Circle of Commerce
To B a
tu P a
hat
Tow n
Batu Pahat HSR Station
Peng To Yon g
To A yer H
itam
Second Floor - Station Platform
First Floor - Comm
mercial and Hotel
Ground Floor - Vehicular Interchange
First Floor - Temporary Commerce
Ground Floor - Temporary Activities
Second Floor - Station Platform Blue - HSR Passengers
First Floor - Comm
mercial and Hotel
Ground Floor - Vehicular Interchange Red - Local Residents
Acknowledgements. Kee Wei Hui _Artificial Design Gallery Thomas Schroepfer _Urban Housing Asami Takahashi _Remote Aging Communities Calvin Chua _Productive Peripheries