DIANA YEO This portfolio is assembled as a visual display of my creative process, emotions and thoughts. It may appear more personal than it should be. However, I believe one’s ability to articulate is best illustrated when confronted by the intimacy of self.
This portfolio is dedicated to my parents, for their unwavering support so that I may pursue my dream.
BODILY PRESENCE; THE BUILDING’S BOUNDARY (Term 7, Spring 2016) When humans congregate in a significant number, the formation aligns in a linear, dissipated, random or orderly fashion. One wonders if the formation remains stagnant or increase in number. The increment pushes the limit of its formation boundary and blurs the surrounding physical boundary. This project studies the possibility of arranging and melding the bodily presence with architectural structure. When such happens, the human presence and movement within a limited space render boundary and form to its area. As such, the building changes in physicality, depending on human circulation and crowd.
Sitting on the tip of the Singapore Kallang Basin, the structure takes on a general crawling-upshore gesture. The strong directionality from the pyramidal tip brings visual attention to the main circulation passage that draws crowd from the remote access points. The buildings now behave as large “columns” among the big floating plates of the architecture. The inflitration of human presence on the floor plates and the visual formation of crowds along the edges changes the form of the overall architecture. The “columns” and “plates” have been deliberately arranged to blur the boundary of the shoreline.
PUBLIC HOUSING (Term 6, Fall 2015) Set in the Singapore’s earliest public housing estate, Toa Payoh, this project challenges the stereotype of a typical local public housing and debunk the concept of conventional living. This housing model rejects the idea of outdoor circulation to favour the local’s distaste for corridor circulation, which often invades the privacy of the inhabitants. Instead, the idea of corridor circulation is brought into the housing unit. This maximises each unit’s view and allows a highly porous building skin, which is hitherto unseen in Singapore’s housing context.
Inspired by the sculpture “Rape of the Sabines”, the official form takes on the concept of motion and offers view from multiple perspective. The two main blocks create the illusion of pseudo collision while both lean in equillibrium.
HIGH RISE POROSITY (Term 6, Fall 2015) As a high rise commercialised building set at the tip of the Raffles Place green strip, 4OUR aims to widen the visual horizon of the area and eliminate the “wall effect� by introducing high degree of porosity. Such porous outlets create transitional spaces that challenge the conventional commercial meeting venues. They allow a mobile working culture, encouraging a shift of working environment that best suits the office.
Simulacrum, Microcosm and Feelings In-between The question of realism and its value is put to the test in the context of a thriving microcosm. When microcosm fails to stimulate the same user experience as the real, it assumes the role of a simulacrum, hence declaring the death of its role as a faithful imitation. Perversion and conditioning factors then take hold of the environment and render effects that reject all forms of connection to the real. In Ungers’ and Koolhaas’ visualisation of cities, one wonders if their depictions are honest or have they fallen short in their compaction and forced diversification. Their focus on the nobility of isolation is similar yet very differently applied.
Ungers favours a horizontal spread of the irreducible as mini insular cities while Koolhaas believes microcosm exits in a megastructure that serves all programmes and functions, and is capable of existing as an independent city. Whether it is Microcosm or Simulacrum, these cities in the cities will survived beyond their buildings, as geological scars, political tools, psychological impacts and sometimes, false alternate realities. Jean Baudrillard’s five stages of simulacra is a gradual break down of realism and its desire to imitate. A simulacrum started off as a faithful imitation of reality and shows profound complexities in its order of emulation. Following the fleeting moment of “reality”, one notices the flaws and its desperate attempts to mask the imperfections and differences from the original. Such hints the very first revelation of a reality and one with features that the simulacrum fails to capture. The simulacrum now presents a twisted and ominous parallel reflection of the real and the process is known as the “order of maleficent”. The lack of integrity in depiction then escalates and the simulacra seeks to supersede the reality and eventually take on the role of an imitation without copying any actual reality. The ultimate rejection of reality and the desire to represent “reality” in a hyper-surreal manner manifests in the entirety of a simulacra in a mature stage called the “order of sorcery”. In contradistinction to the idea of simulacrum and simulacra, microcosm is an extension of reality in smaller communities. It exists in reality and functions as reality despite having a physical boundary that demarcates and defines realism into tangible spaces. In the most critical sense, simulacra is the death of microcosm and the transformation from a microcosm to a simulacra may be tragically possible but not vice versa.
Don’t ask me to wait Because I have left with a reason for a season And I have seen your plans But please, please don’t be heroic Their scars have yet to heal Among the scattered And your emotions sprawled over the fragments Are nothing A pseudo reality beating in tandem Of what could have been complete.
From Oswald Mattias Ungers’ creation of the Green Archipelago within West Berlin and Neue Stadt, one understands his fundamental obsession with confetti arrangement of irreducible forms. Such forms are stripped bare of their utilitarian purpose in a once-socialist state and given a newfound significance of being the one-out-of-many structures that renders overall harmony to the scattered city. He believes that a “city within city” was not “the creation of an idyllic village” that rejects spaces of nothingness, but to “reflect the splintering form of the city from within the architectural artifacts itself. Green archipelago considers the surrounding and real extremities that the population is conditioned to go through. As such, the architectural response is true and reality of a war-stricken state is mirrored in the stark contrast shown between the voids (bareness) and the buildings. It is a microcosm as sense of reality is not cut off from the archipelago itself. The haphazard mixture of voids and spaces is a reflection of a post-war reality. It does not offend or perverse the true reality of West Germany with its imitation. Ungers has brought urban planning down to the scale of architecture planning through the deliberate placement and design of isolated buildings. Such technique respects geographical and historical background of a site. In the case
of Berlin, it is ingenious for Ungers to actively cushion the impact of depopulation while recognising the infeasibility of re-developing the city in a tabular rasa fashion. However, such focus on the development of the individual architecture has also introduced the danger of “interior conditioning”, where the city becomes a highly conditioned simulation and behavioural responses from users are part of the predetermined architectural speculation. Ungers’ deliberate and sometimes forceful usage of urban planning within the walls of architecture might create drastic and unnecessary diversity in user experience. Such variety in experience intensifies the highly architecturally programmed buildings instead of the overall formal urban layout - splintering form. The nobility of isolation would, then, no longer serve an overall horizontal urban unity, but buried by the feeling of horizontal disparity across the different programmes. The point intervention becomes haphazard and the splintering form becomes a big superficial façade that is conveniently draped over programmes that are driven by explicit architecture, just to create historical links to the context. The splintering form becomes an architectural gimmick when nostalgia assumes its full meaning. This causes the concept of Green Archipelago to lack realism as reality does not flow beyond the surface of the splintering form. Within the explicit projects, users might also be forced into an interior environment of modern living that is ahead of the West Berlin’s hitherto unchanged status quo since the fall of Berlin Wall. As such, the idea of a green archipelago threads precariously along the “order of maleficient” and the architecture may become mere envelopes that shield true reality from the interior. This shows that the scheme, in the architectural scale, does have a latent potential of rejecting the real and substituting the real with a more desired reality.
Ungers propagates a slightly different phenomenon in Neue Stadt. To radically protest against the lack of motivation in the late-modernists to depart from scattered and disparate formal representations, Ungers introduced city as a “single architectural entity”. He claimed that Neue Stadt should serve as “formalised city parts, as finite artefacts that, in their internal formal composition, were evocative of an idea of the city”. In this case, the uniform “negative and positive” architectural composition of a collective buildings defines the sense of community and its unique character as an independent “city part”. As such, this community is specific to the collective buildings and may not be a true reflection of the rest of the city. The co-relation between this local community and the global city hence appears exhausted and stretched, rendering Neue Stadt an arguably unconvincing case of microcosm. As the Neue Stadt does not explicitly distorts and pretends to be an alternate reality, it is also a non-valid case of simulacra. In a general overview, Unger takes on a more cautioned approach to the creation of “cities” within cities. His articulation of “cities” shows a more practical and down-to-earth involvement of ground-truthing. His safe approach in pushing forth a “city” within a city might be a reason why cluster design of buildings results in communities that perform as half- hearted pseudo “cities”. What if, I see you on the other side of the world And worlds are now galaxies apart and we exist in the awkwardness of Not knowing that galaxies Are now streets
apart Then I see you being conditioned By the sight of dust -shedding walls and clinically wiped off like your porcelain environment You know not the threshold and You think I do not think hard enough.
Rem Koolhaas strikes a more surrealistic image in his idea of a city. Both Ungers and Koolhaas share similar thematic concerns, exploiting a stereotypically negative social norm in urban planning and encourages it to manifest in its full glory as a form of alternate living. However, Koolhaas’ projects often involve a spiralling process from a brutally honest imitation of reality to a true blue simulacrum, an imitation that is no longer based on any reality. In the work of Exodus, Koolhaas took on Ungers’s idea of using architectural wall. He revolved his urban concept around a wall’s ability to create spatial and programmatic discontinuity, and using it as a tool for a morally practical conceptual city that embraces exclusion. Exodus involves a very strong theme of “voluntary prisoning”, which echoes all 5 stages of simulacra as postulated in Baudrillard’s theory. The first stage of simulacra is witnessed in the initial geographical segregation of the good and the bad cities based on living conditions. Here, imitation has yet to take effect as both the bad and good cities are rooted in reality and are faithful reflection of social disparity. Overtime, the bad seeks to develop towards the good and its inability to matchup results in an imitation. Such imitation is, however, failed and exposed when leaks of reality constantly injects a sense of falseness and denial-living within its group of people, which results in depopulation.
What renders the Exodus interesting is that the idea of simulacra is carried out simultaneously in tandem within the good and the bad. The bad seeks to imitate the good and loses itself in its pursuit. The good seeks to mask the bad and create physical and psychological segregation from a reality that screams disparity. The act of segregation provided an environment for perversion of the reality. The good develops within the potential of an architectural wall that not only serves as boundary but also a presence that heightens suspense and tension in the bad. When threshold is reached, the first “inmate begs for admission” into this impenetrable fortress. The architectural wall also suggests the rejection of exits. The concept of population outflow seems foreign and offensive to the good. Such egoism set in a context of disparity then empowers the good to programme freely within its wall, withholding liabilities as a “city” and showing no regards to the situation of the bad. As seen from Koolhaas’ Exodus, the good segment of London is so carefully sculpted and programmed into specific places that they seem intolerable to activities that do not fit within its category. This includes spaces such as “The Ceremonial Square”, “Baths” and “Institute of Biological Transactions”, where activities are almost expected to be habitually performed as obligatory rites and rituals. This becomes a form of indirect conditioning that does not occur in the external reality. The walled city moves beyond the “order of maleficent” when it deviates further and further from reality while offering an imitation that is no longer based on any original, hence completing an entire full cycle of simulacra. In the Exodus, Koolhaas’s idea of a city within a city is definitely more revolutionary in terms of its exploration beyond the current and the real. Both the bad and good are detached as microcosms, pretentious as imitations, and real as
simulacrum. There is no reservation in the dynamic interaction between the opposites – good and bad, unlike Ungers’ conscientious play of space and void, which resulted in a seeming neglection of the bare spaces. Oh you know My father said to me That one day the walls would Fall on my reality and I would see things wedged in between Buildings that show poverty And crashed ego That has come to be And great Gatsby isn’t that great When sex has be stuck in void and boundary That is regulatory and made.
In Welfare Palace Hotel and New Welfare Island, Koolhaas further continued his obsession with wall and brought it as a solution to the agonised urbanity of New York. At this point, Koolhaas’ concerns have become more distinctly shaped and Welfare Palace Hotel stands at the peak of his “island city” theory. Koolhaas’ faith in “Bigness” as the new city seems to always involve an apocalyptic setting, which rendered a need for his buildings (or new cities) to possess qualities of resurrection and act as a beacon of light for survival. The new cities would exist in clusters on a podium that suggests strong insularity from the ground and detachment from external environment. Such techniques create a departure from realism, purposely set apart as an outlet that is stripped of any practical reality.
Welfare Palace Hotel celebrates the mentality of escapism and acts as a fantastical relieve to a dystopian urban context that is characterised by frantic living. The rejection of the real is done through alleviating the artificial and honouring pleasure, showing that the project lacks any initial desire to function as an imitation of a real city. Hence, from the very beginning, the Welfare Palace Hotel is a simulacrum of no original, and has existed purely as a physical manifestation of the resurrected pleasure that had been crucified in a previously intolerable urban space. Unlike The Exodus, the Welfare Palace Hotel involves no story of depopulation and “voluntary prisoning”. The intention of the project is more direct and it does not allow room for choices between good or bad living quality. The humankind either perish in an urban massacre or stay within the guarded walls of pleasures. Further, the welfare palace involves a forceful drive to overcome the original and exists as the new reality. The artificial in the palace takes on an antagonistic quality, deliberately and theatrically staged to ridicule the once “real”. This escalated to an embracement of the kitsch and even the quotidian objects are projected as ostentatious display. Despite that the Welfare Palace Hotel is Koolhaas’ salvation plan to urban degeneration, the project itself possesses an inner consciousness that recognises that it is an imitation and its limits do not allow it to go beyond the third stage of simulacra. There is an understanding that the efforts of the project only stay within the stage of counter acting the real instead of being a real liveable space that is not ideologically charged. Hence, the Welfare Palace Hotel could arguably be considered stuck as a midmature simulacrum. The drive to reach the “Order of Sorcery” is present, but the overly saturated and exaggerated “hyperrealism” has diluted the project’s intention to be real. Similar to the New Welfare
Island, Koolhaas’ attempt to redefine city in an island is an unexpected departure from realism. This leaves a paradoxical question, is an island the birth or death of a real city? Either way, Koolhaas has shown that steps to formation of microcosm and eventual real city demands that the artificial must not be conceptually charged so that it does not belong as an object of imitation but the object itself. The idea of realism varies from microcosm to the 5 stages of simulacra. Ungers’ approach has shown to be more down to earth and has reflected a conscientious effort to always bring in the context of the site before his application of theorised decisions. In the case of Neue Stadt and the general Green Archipelago, Ungers sought alternate living forms that thrive and continue despite the state of the site. Ungers brings in a logic of sustainability that Koolhaas has abandoned in the case of The Exodus and the Welfare Palace Hotel. In both Koolhaas’ projects, the concept of living is apart from the original and they show no desire to imitate the reality or allow any influence from the external. As such, Ungers’ projects tend to be categorised at the lower spectrum of Simulacra while Koolhaas’ are recognised as mature simulacrum. Comparatively, Ungers is more grounded in reality and Koolhaas has a more antagonistic demeanour towards the real in his visualisations. Either way, reality is relative to one’s expectations and context. It weighs little if no environment is constrained upon the site. There is no involvement of good or bad in the distinction between microcosm and simulacrum, as such categorisation only serves to depict the threshold humankind is able to push for in the formation of cities for the next generation.
In both their projects, the idea of realism will survive beyond the cities because it shows the feasibility of radical visualisations. After all, both their theories were initially fuelled to achieve a better place for humankind to live in – a peaceful and recovering state for Ungers, and a playful urban space for Koolhaas.
Yes, we will find rooms to grow Before the rising sun That just has begun.
FORCE WITHSTANDING (Term 5, Spring 2015) This building is conceived through the study of structural balance. Originally a paper origami experiment, geometrical turgidity is tested and further developed to create exhibition spaces. Light slits are then added to separate the individual plates, giving the impression of lightness to the heavy physique of the architecture.
INSTALLATION (Term 5, Spring 2015) This paper tube installation consists of 3 main chains that varies gradually in terms of height and placement. The angles of joints are kept constant to allow a more speedy fabrication. 4 main joints are mass produced to connect and carry the weight of the inclined paper tubes. The rotational feature of the joints allows degree of freedom to neutralise any error in placment and achieve accuracy. Placed on an open platform, the installation serves to provide different view to viewers standing at different places. It is at once, orderly, and chaotic, as one transits from one corner to the other.
SPATIAL JOINTS (Term 5, Spring 2015) The joint is designed to create an impression of lightness to a pavilion. As lightness is best expressed through filigree-like structural assembly, this spatial joint expresses a thin outline of a star from the plan view. The edges of the metal star outline overlap in sequence to create a self interlocking joint, holding up the 4 individual blades that seem to continue from the pointed corners of the star.
ART & EXPERIMENTS As part of my exploration on the idea of feminists’ fear in the potential threats of domestic settings, I sought to express the habitually silenced emotions of the female sex through bodily struggles. In this study, the quotidian object (chair) is rendered with a newfound significance. The chair is now personified and culturally charged. The bodily interaction with domestic furniture leaves one wonder if the woman has triumphed over the object or has the object has trapped the woman. Similar to the reality, we wonder if the female sex is often the victim of fears that she has perpetrated herself or the horrors of social constructs.