Picture credit: Seetoh Hui Yi
Picture credit: Megan Gwee Su-Lyn, Wang Anxin, Lyu Mengjie
THE SEA-CITY INTERFACE Tutor: Rudi Stouffs
ISLAND PEOPLE Tutor: Tiah Nan Chyuan
MAKING CONNECTIONS Tutor: Wong Chong Thai, Bobby
This thesis studio relates to Singapore’s sea-city fringes and its current threat of increasing shocks and stresses induced by climate change and excessive CO2 emissions. It aims to contribute to the Sea-City Interface research project in one of two ways. The first is to explore (computational) generative approaches to building design at the urban scale allowing for a lowcarbon neighbourhood, focusing on building form and its contribution to the surrounding urban fabric. The second is to explore biophilic approaches for water-sensitive design. Either way, the elaboration of the exploratory process can be considered more important than any single outcome, instead aiming at achieving multiple, alternative outcomes. Exploration is data-driven and serves to achieve better-informed designs. The act of considering performance as a guiding design principle defines the architectural object not by what it is or how it appears, but instead by what it does or how it performs — by its capability to affect, transform and serve a given function. Identifying both the parameters and boundaries of the exploration defines the design space under consideration, guiding the exploration toward the desired performance.
Across different cultures and time, the island condition has been described historically and mythically as the experience of an outpost that is defended, surrounded, contained, isolated, quarantined or hidden. The inherent vulnerability and siege mentality of islands imbue their inhabitants with both a deep awareness of their identity and their relationship with the surrounding externalities.
This thesis offering examines architecture as a matrix of pathways, networks and connections — both existing and emerging. Architecture is often about making connections; it is in making connections that significations occur. These are moments where thoughts or actions are virtualised or actualised. Like a throw of the dice; diverging and converging forces collide, producing singularities. At that point, the old is refreshed, or morphed into new emergence. For Nietzsche, this emergence represented the way to truth. We will examine architecture through this lens, putting aside notions of pre-existing cultural values or preconceived perfect absolutes, and look instead at the production of sense prior to language, codes or identities.
NEW TRANSFORMATION POSSIBILITIES Tutor: Teh Joo Heng Interestingly, much of natural resources and human efforts are used to create our built environment. Indiscriminate demolition and rebuilding should be reexamined. Our built environment should be viewed as a resource, to be valued and treasured. Rethinking our built environment as resource will provide a significant insight to address the sustainability issues we are now facing. The studio would like to investigate how the existing built environment in the city, consisting of building, road, public infra-structure, urban spaces can be transformed, re-structured, re-program to invent new strategies to ensure long term resilience and sustainability.
This thesis will explore the “island condition” through both physical and abstract notions, looking at operative conditions from isolation to protectionism, access and rights, equality and equity. Non-linear enquiries would be conducted across multiple probes, to unravel deep mindsets that define the unique behaviour of “islands” and their people. The hope is that these insights will suggest alternative strategies to engage geopolitical issues related to collective identity, shared responsibility and ownership over contested territories, space and time.
WAIT, IS IT A CITY IN NATURE OR NATURE IN THE CITY? Tutor: Tham Wai Hon This studio explores the city, as the man-made environment par excellence, teeming, infested, populated, ridden, thriving with different species (humans included) — loved and loathed, seen and unseen, cherished or extinguished — intermingling and entangling with us humans. On a planet ravaged by human activity, a shift away from the anthropocentric order of human/ nonhuman, civilised/ barbarian, urban/ wild ways of living are needed. Prioritising coexistence and cohabitation, the studio seeks out new materials, architectures, environments and practices emerging at the encounter between humans and animals at the structural and cultural urban context of Singapore.
CLIMATE SENSITIVE DESIGN: LIVABLE AND SUSTAINABLE CITIES Tutor: Yuan Chao With the rapid urbanisation and climate change, the key challenge in front of architects is clear: it is a difficult balancing act to achieve between unstoppable human desire for development and the finite environmental carrying capacity of cities. This design studio engages students to explore ways to conduct climate-sensitive design to create buildings that are more human centralised and environmentally responsible. The studio emphasises the impact of environmental analysis on design. The knowledge delivered in this studio allows students not only to develop climate sensitive design concepts and ideas, but also to practice the corresponding design strategies and skills.
THE CORPOREAL PERIPHERY Tutor: Wu Yen Yen Architecture is rarely predicated on discourse and ideology. Rather, it reacts to metaphysical, natural and societal constructs. This studio offers space for counter-anthropocentric investigation into unfamiliar corporealities, where they exist and thrive unseen. Starting from outside of architecture, we will give empirical form and language to these matters. Materialist ontologist Manuel De Landa suggests that geology, biology, economy and linguistics, steered the growth of cities. Historian Mario Carpo says contemporary form can be generated by computation and science. Architect Philippe Rahm designs with invisible, meteorological aspects of space. A new kind of intelligence in architecture, and how we think about it, is upon us.
The studio hopes to speculate what the BRAS BASAH BUGIS AREA will be like when this transformation takes full effect.
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