Joshua Ng Portfolio

NG LEE HAN JOSHUA DESIGN PORTFOLIO selected

works

CURRICULUM VITAE

NG LEE HAN JOSHUA 11/05/1998

joshuang.leehan@gmail.com

+65 8823 8898

EDUCATION

2019 - Present

Bachelor of Arts in Architecture (Honours) CAP 4.42

National University of Singapore

2011 - 2016

International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (IBDP)

Anglo-Chinese School (Independent) 2023

PROFESSIONAL

Research Assistant & Teaching Assistant

National University of Singapore

2022

Architectural Intern (AIP)

Aamer Architects

2020

Undergraduate Student Researcher

National University of Singapore

2019 Graphic Design Intern

Arete Collaborations 2023

Dean’s List, Semester 2

2021

BCA-Industry iBuildSG Undergraduate Sponsorship

AWARDS SKILLS

AutoCAD

Adobe Suite

Microsoft Office

Rhinoceros

SketchUp

Passing Rain

Year 3 Semester 2 Studio: Systems, Comprehensiveness, Integration

The Expanding Duct!

Year 2 Semester 2 Studio: Environment, Climate, Envelope

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Year 3 Semester 2 Architecture Elective Workaround: Alternative sites of labour

Singaporean Home and Neighbourhood (SHN600204)

Summer 2021 Architecture Elective: Singapo-Rediscovers Itself

Passing Rain (Meteorological Service Singapore)

Y3S2 Project Studio Tutor: Chan Wai Kin

The project seeks to express the ecological cycle and its relationships. The tectonic of a ‘naked building’ softens the separation between indoors and outdoors. Water is collected from multiple points and angles and directed through the various building elements from the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the architecture, culminating in the central rain garden. When there is no rain, the building still performs the drama of rain circulation through a grand gesture of its spiral circulation activated by programs which are accessible 24/7.

Sunrise at the foyer

Sunset at the Drain Garden

Left: Changing shifts after a hard night’s work

Right: Bird’s eye view of the central airwell

Section showing the architecture at night.

Iterations exploring form and structure.

1:100 Model

The Expanding Duct!

Y2S2 Project

Studio Tutor: Tham Wai Hon

Studio Partner: Lee Yik Heng

Thinking of buildings simply as a series of stacked plenums, as well as globalized, virtual platforms displacing traditional modes of inhabitation, the Expandable Duct invites you to a world that values mobility, flexibility and transience. It is conceived as a portable, personal, climatic and productivity device that adapts to a myriad of environments. Separating you from noise, smell, sights and most importantly, other people.

Our story follows two characters who just cannot stand living together with each other in the same apartment. Clashing sounds, smells, and sights forces them to seek respite in a portable climatic and productivity device that separates them.

Programmatically, the duct does not suggest or privilege any particular program. Instead, it is programmed by the furniture it consumes. It does not prescribe a label to the combination of furniture within it, such as “Bedroom”, or “Pantry”. The Expanding Duct is neutral and encourages new configurations of furniture, reflecting an increasingly differentiated and personalised notion of domesticity.

We speculate that the duct would free the apartment from walls. This allows inhabitants to fully modulate and control how the plenum apartment is ventilated through openings unburdened by rigid partitions.

Furniture will now be scattered throughout the house, programming the ducts accordingly when consumed. The lack of permanence within the duct makes them extremely flexible and transient.

When aggregated, the apartment will now be a series of stacked plenums, with equal and non-biased distribution of openings (windows/main entrance) to allow for greater adaptability to changing wind directions.

As a non-contextual space, it mirrors the aesthetics of globalisation and digitalisation.

Video available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgHyzPC74T8

A nostalgia for the dynamic architecture imagined in the 1960s (Archigram) led us to use stop motion animation as a medium to communicate the process and trajectory of our project.

The 1:1 model conveyed the atmosphere within the duct, allowing us to imagine living in such a device. The making of the 1:1 facilitated greater understanding of detail, joinery, construction and material treatment of an envelope.

Above: Membrane were split into segments and attached to the skeletal frame using velcro. Allowed for disassembly and each segment to be its own system of folds. Greater degree of control and maintainence.

Below: Wheels were engineered into the base to allow for transportability. Joints were fabricated using readily availabe and easily assessible PVC modules.

The model viewed as a whole, showcasing its scale and ability to consume furniture.

Entering the duct in its insulating position. Greyboard geometries allow the membrane to fold and collapse elegantly in the shape of an accordian fold as the duct is compressed. Flexibility within the envelope was one of the primary drivers for the design.

Documentation of duct being inhabited. Taking precedence from Hannes Meyer’s Co-Op Interieur and Toyo Ito’s Pao Dwellings for Tokyo Nomad Girl, we were intrigued by minimal dwellings and how a plethora of programs can inhabit a given space.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

AR5955G Workaround: Alternative Sites of Labour

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a research project which seeks to represent and situate the invisible labour of a Mother of five, who homeschools her children. It does so in two parts: a representational object, and a discursive essay. The representational artefact takes a form of a toy which is embedded with mappings of the casestudy family. Through interaction with the toy, users engage with a tactile metaphor capturing Mother’s situation. The discursive essay situates the household within scholarship on invisible labour.

The study began with an in-depth documentation of how the apartment is configured to suit the needs of the household. Every furniture and object is carefully drawn to ensure a faithful representation. The dining table is the ‘heart’ of this home. It is a study desk for both Mother and 3 of her 5 children as she juggles their home-schooling curriculums concurrently within the day.

1:50 Plan of Living Room

1:50 Plan of ‘Study’ Room

1:50 Plan of Porch

Alongside the detailed plan drawings, spatial mappings of the family members’ locations during various times of the day give insight to the unseen but experential spacial boundaries and gravities within the household. These abstract forces are codified into the toy, producing a tactile metaphor of the household that can be experienced when interfacing with the object.

Singaporean Home and Neighbourhood (SHN600204)

SHN600204 (Singaporean Home and Neighbourhood + Postal Code) centres around understanding the Housing Development Board (HDB) estate as collections of coordinated clutter. The project is done in two parts: Firstly a video documenting existing conditions, followed by a speculatibve mapping which attempts to codify unspoken rules within the estate.

AR5955D/AR5955E Singapo-Rediscovers Itself

Studio Partners: Lee Yik Heng, John Chew Geronimo Jr.

This video portrays the experience of journeying from the outskirts of an HDB estate into the home. We observed different traces of inhabitation in our journey, starting off with trash left at the park connectors to aunties hula-hooping in void decks. The corridor was really intriguing because of the diverse kinds of objects which occupy it and finally we reach the cluttered home where it is revealed as the source of objects which leak into the corridor. The outsidein structure of the video conveys the increasing encroachment of public spaces as we approach the home.

Stills from the short film.

These drawings were an attempt to discover and derive the unspoken rules, first making more visible the objects that were found in the corridor, along with their positions and conditions. Annotating and searching for commonalities among the corridors also helped as an act of evidence-gathering for these unspoken rules.

Images of the Notice Board in the Void Deck

By designing posters around typical graphic styles used by the government, as well as assembling them within a notice board modelled around the actual ones, we produced a realistic artefact that the residents of Block 204 would definitely encounter in this imagined reality. These are further supplemented by photos we took that situate the notice board in its natural state, in the actual void deck of Block 204, the very heart of our project.