YEAR 2 SEMESTER 1

François Blanciak Design 3 Year Leader, Unit 1 Leader

Federico Ruberto Unit 3 Leader Design 3 will investigate how architectural form can emerge from the combination of basic geometric elements. It seeks to provide students with a better understanding of how units can be aggregated, thus creating living environments that offer occupants equitable access to light, air, and water. It also requires students to reflect on how these particles can be articulated into an overall form that engages in a meaningful dialogue with the city.

While the studio will involve the design of housing, this programme will be used as a mere vehicle for exploring architecture as an aggregation, or a collection of parts, looking at the interplay of repetition and singularity. Starting from the careful definition of the requirements and internal logic of each unit, what will be endeavoured is the creation of coherent wholes wherein units respond to each other, as well as to their boundaries (ground, ceiling, walls, site limits). Not unlike the concept of Existenzminimum that flourished in 1920s Europe, the studio proposes to rediscover the basic elements of living spaces through the examination of their form and location within the built environment, and to experiment with their careful organisation in urban space.

An emphasis will be placed on structure, inquiring how different arrangements of units can be devised with an eye to minimising the need for construction elements, without sacrificing architectural concepts. Formerly concerned with drawing lines, architectural culture has recently shifted its focus to a visual environment based on pixels. What are the implications of such a radical shift for architectural form? Should it affect architecture at all? How can we design buildings that foster communities made of bits, without falling into a literal transcription of this novel condition? Such questions will pervade the different units of this studio, which will revolve around the themes of the relation between micro and macro, the cube as a basic element of composition, and the void as a driver of architectural form.

Image: “The Third Gift,” from Frances Post Van Norstrand, Royal Gifts for the Kindergarten: A Manual for Self Instruction in Friedrich Froebel’s Principles of Education (Boston, MA: J. Q. Adams & Co, 1896)

Florian Heinzelmann Design 4 Year Leader, Unit 1 Leader

Fung John Chye Unit 2 Leader

Tiah Nan Chyuan Unit 3 Leader Design 4 will be a hands-on studio where students will research, design, build and especially evaluate envelopes or parts of it as a response or in dialogue with tropical climatic conditions. The pedagogical aim is for students to develop an understanding and gain experiences on several levels.

Firstly, students should learn about certain environmental practical issues and tectonics in combination with material and geometry properties, directly leading to performative results, be it structural, durability, or microclimatic. Secondly, by building a prototype which (re)acts on, or alters the internal and external climatic conditions, students will obtain first-hand feedback for further design iterations. It also creates credibility through proof of concept. Thirdly, it is important to learn how to mediate between quantitative—the measurable performance aspects; and qualitative design aspects. As there may be some instances whereby the outcome may clash with the design intent, through a conflict of design parameters. At other times, it might be that an unintended and not preconceived design quality, will emerge solely from experimentation through ‘thinking by doing’—which once discovered can be synthesised and become part of the larger design system. Last but not least, strategic planning will be an important skill set to train; which helps in knowing how to source materials, how to manufacture the prototypes, how to transport the prototype to location, and finally how to disassemble the prototype after final presentation into different material streams for later material re-use. After all, we are living on a planet with limited resources where economical, societal, and environmental sustainability should be practiced.

The studio brief intends to focus on the physically obtainable and verifiable while discovering qualitative aspects through the process of design exploration. After all, if the quantitative fails, a building does not perform and might become unusable; the qualitative aspect cannot shine, and the design intent becomes meaningless. Therefore, architectural design is always about quantitative and qualitative aspects, and the question for this studio is: How is one able to achieve a result via a bottom-up design exploration within a top-down project planning process.

Image: Microlibrary Warak Kayu by SHAU. Image by KIE