YEAR 3 SEMESTER 2

Cheah Kok Ming Design 4 Year Leader, Unit 1 Leader

Fung John Chye Unit 2 Leader

Tian Nan Chyuan Unit 3 Leader “A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.” — Louis I Kahn

In the book Environmental Imagination, Dean Hawkes presents case studies of architects as they contemplate the qualitative dimensions of environment, atmosphere and ambience in exemplary buildings, extending appreciation of these spaces beyond pure technical narrative. He paints the success of these buildings as an outcome of the interplay between immeasurable poetic intentions and measurable technical means.

Imagination is unmeasurable; its application is essential in seeding the conception of an original, beautiful and functional space. Yet that space must be created through measurable means, in the form of technics and technology, encompassing the deployment of materials, construction methods and environmental control, underpinned by architectural science. In design, the measurable and unmeasurable are never in conflict. Architectural science or technology always coexists with the poetic creation and performance of a successful architectural environment. And at the end of the day, the success of a building goes beyond a purely technical narrative, and extends into the unmeasurable realm of experience.

Design 4: The Environment & Climate Envelope, aims to translate these architectural thoughts into the tropical context. The course will examine the design of buildings and spaces that have been conceived for warm and wet climates, and their performative and expressive qualities. There are many ways to understand the theoretical framing of tropical architecture. Tay Kheng Soon describes tropical architecture as utilising a design language of line, edge, mesh and shade rather than one of plane, volume, solid and void. Designing architecture in the tropics for Bruno Stagno is about the treatment of shadows and not light. Meanwhile, for Kevin Low of Malaysian firm Small Projects, such architecture brings about a discourse by engaging tropical counterpoints to temperate attributes. Inspired by this diversity of ideas, students will explore the notion of tropical tectonics, described as the “expressive articulation of structure, skin and space in mediating the tropical climate and its context”.

Ultimately, they will emerge from Design 4 with a practical appreciation of how technics are applied in the service of poetic ends for architectural works in this specific environment, and how tropical architects have brought together invention, logic and heart to achieve form, function, economy and beauty.

Image: Plastic turf cell grating employed as an environmental screen at Masjid Cyber 10, Cyberjaya, Malaysia, designed by Juteras. Image by Cheah Kok Ming

Thomas Kong Design 5 Year Co-Year Leader, Unit 1 Leader

Zdravko Trivic Design 5 Year Co-Year Leader, Unit 2 Leader

Wong Chong Thai, Bobby Unit 3 Leader Architecture and the City in the Age of Pandemics

The COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted our lives on a global scale. Cities are locked down for an extended period, and their inhabitants told to stay home. These unprecedented social restrictions are counter to our urban way of life, and careful considerations now pervade everyday interactions that were once taken for granted before the pandemic.

The Design 5 theme of Density, Urbanism, Publicness? presents a moment to reexamine our understanding of these terms in the age of pandemics. New ideas and formulations of density are emerging as cities grapple with the spread of the coronavirus. Our interactions with each other and with the built environment have also been severely altered, and post-COVID-19, urbanism may never be the same. On the other hand, publicness— the presentation of the public self and the display of belonging and sociability—has increasingly migrated to cyberspace, with interactions fragmented into small groups and conducted at a safe distance.

The power of design to influence behavioural change and improve the health of cities cannot be underestimated. Le Corbusier saw the trinity of sunlight, air and greenery as a solution to overcrowding, poor health and hygiene in cities. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement created a healthy living environment for working class communities in the UK through the design of satellite towns surrounded by green belts. In Singapore, the beloved hawker centres bring street hawkers together in a space with proper cooking and washing facilities to raise cleanliness and hygiene levels.

In Design 5, the studios will research, investigate and design future scenarios for new and modified spatial typologies and experiences at different timeframes, to allow us to live, socialise and thrive even in times of containment and quarantine.

Image: Public space in Whampoa. Image by Thomas Kong

Ong Ker-Shing Design 6 Year Leader, Unit 1 Leader

Razvan Ghilic-Micu Unit 2 Leader Inclusive Figures

Inclusion—making space for—is the architect’s primary skill. The designer is, more than anything else, an integrator of systems, requirements, and experiences. On a purely physical level, the architect is also an integrator of materials and components: framing, machinery, glazing, cabling, metalwork and ducting. The designer may accumulate other specialist skills, or not. But he or she simply cannot produce a beautiful, functional building without an ability to orchestrate, with intelligence and adaptability, the coexistence of diverse and often contradictory contents and requirements within a common, limited space. To make matters more complicated, this space itself exists as but a small region within a natural and cultural field. In the creation and eventual use of such a space, issues as objective or subjective as climate and aesthetics sit alongside norms of private and public, of the beautiful, the sustainable and the socially just.

As the modern building grew in complexity during the late 19th and 20th centuries, a wide array of flexible and adaptable strategies emerged for the modern architect. These included the Raumplan, the free plan and free section, the collage method, pattern, and more recently, new explorations of fluid and non-hierarchical planning configurations derived from cybernetic modes of thinking. All of these took on the challenge of integrating a diversity of contents—often incompatible or contradictory— without sacrificing architectural identity. The craft of the architect as integrator is ultimately to present elegant solutions to the fragmented demands of the human and material world, while still creating a building that represents a clear architectural idea, with a comprehensible language and a meaningful spatial and aesthetic proposition.

Design 6: Systems, Comprehensiveness, Integration will explore the architect’s challenge of inclusion: the art of designing for people and things to function alongside each other, differently but well. It will challenge students to develop robust and tolerant design frameworks, as well as figures that have room for an array of sub-systems—such as structure and tectonics, services, programs, as well as aesthetics, human relations and experiences—within Singapore’s natural conditions. It will explore the twin problems of bringing-together and keeping-separate, in an attempt to produce an architecture of maximum generosity and mutual care.

Image: A 1950s Bürolandschaft office floor plan, Lekker Architects