M ARCH SINGLE & CONCURRENT DEGREE

DESIGN STUDIO : SEMESTER 1 STUDIO DESCRIPTIONS (AR5801)/(AR5805)

AGROPOLITAN TERRITORIES: MATS, RUGS & QUILTS

Tutor: Stephen Cairns

This studio will design settlement types for rapidly urbanising food regions that encircle most cities in Monsoon Asia. It will focus on innovative ways to support high population densities and mixed-use economies based on agroecological principles. The studio will be guided by three general themes:

1. Agropolitan territories: hybrid urban-rural regions developed around decentralised technologies and agroecology 2. Mats, rugs and quilts: horizontal, thick 2D/shallow 3D mat-buildings, combining elements, armatures and landscapes 3. Seeding strategies: transformations catalysed in time (lifecycles, emergence, growth, entropy) and in thick environmental, material and institutional contexts.

POOL PLUS: “A COMMUNITY HYBRID”

Tutor: Cheah Kok Ming

Half fish, half lion — our mascot the Merlion epitomises the concept of a hybrid, an entity produced by a combination of two or more distinct elements, usually with an outcome that is more than the sum of its elements. Public swimming pools in Singapore are no longer just destinations for single use. They have grown from neighbourhood lido or aquatic playground into huge community complex integrating library, clubhouse, polyclinic, food court, gymnasium, sports field or park with swimming pool. One strategic value of hybridisation is land use optimisation. This studio is about architectural hybridisation beyond mere packing or stacking exercises.

POOL PLUS: PUBLIC ACCLIMATISATION

Tutor: Florian Heinzelmann

Pool Plus: Public Acclimatisation investigates sports facilities in response to the existing Masterplan of “Tengah Forest Town’’ with all its aspects of a futuristic HDB town and its implementation of smart technologies, green and sustainability measures, car free district, vast plantations, urban farming, etc. and potential integration of those aspects with the design research on a neighbourhood and building scale.

The design brief encompasses swimming pools, gyms, fitness studios, supporting amenities, back of the house, staff facilities but also additional sports facilities and community programs which should be freely explored. These aspects open the design research for a multifunctional building which h is strivingstrives for synergies between various programs, community aspects, technologies, green & blue landscape but also resilient solutions like passive climatic design strategies which additionally form relations between indoor, semi-outdoor, The studio further investigates the role of public sports facilities within the Singaporean context — past and present; and how these facilities or aspects thereof can be adopted and envisioned for the future.

F.U.N. 4.0 | THE MINDFULNESS CONDUNDRUM

Tutor: Fung John Chye

A hallmark of the 21st century is the omnipresence of information, which overloads and disrupts our mind in an unceasing flux. This pervasive intrusion of the digital exerts an adverse impact on our physical, mental and cognitive health. Humanity needs an attention revolution and a re-enchantment with phenomenological experiences that promote health and wellness. Future Urban Neighbourhoods (F.U.N) 4.0 continues the earlier explorations of architecture and urbanscapes to mitigate the immense challenges of real-world conditions in order to imagine viable futures in 2050 and beyond; through scenarios of sustainable human communities, wellness, urban solutions, and deep technologies. The Mindfulness Conundrum begins with an investigation of mindfulness through meditation in the common’s spaces, to unpack the sacred in the ordinary. The studio unpacks future environments at urban and architectural scales. Students examine the multifarious challenges under the broad umbrella of future urbanism.

HILL WITH A VIEW – THE KEPPEL GOLF CLUB

Tutor: Richard Ho

It has been announced that the lease for two of the 23 golf courses in Singapore will not be renewed when they expired in 2021 and the land was returned to the Singapore Land Authority. It’s timely that we as a nation re-examine our priorities, especially when so much land has been set aside for the recreation of so few. Golf courses are also perhaps the most detrimental to the bio-diversity of our natural environment and not sustainable in the long run for a city-state that purportedly has a shortage of land. But what will happen to these two golf courses? It is the intention of this studio to select one of these, the Keppel Golf Club located at Telok Blangah, to propose appropriate uses for its future. The objective of this studio is to propose an urban design master plan for the site that will address the issues mentioned above and point a direction towards a more sustainable future in urban development.

HERITAGE IN MOTION: TRADITION RE-PRESENTED Tutor: Ho Puay Peng (co-tutor with Tan Kay Ngee)

Tradition is often constructed. People view tradition differently crossing generational or cultural boundaries. Everyone takes away a perspective of tradition when encountering rich culture due to its deep layering. Often time, such encounters challenges our perception of cultural phenomena and our own culture. Heritage is tradition valued. However, in the process of heritage making, we often take a static and narrow view of the tradition. We tend to freeze the tradition. This can be directed to the study of built heritage within the rich traditional landscape, such as in Kyoto. As one of the most traditional of Japanese cities, there is a plethora of cultural forms covering all aspects of life. However, in such a stereotypical construction of Kyoto, we have to cast the contemporary interpretation of tradition aside and focus only on the tradition forms as we see them. This studio questions such an approach and encourages the exploration of a different encounter with the tradition. The point of entry into the Kyoto milieu can be from literature, crafts, rituals, world view, etc. The site is a modernist secondary school not far from the river Kamogawa. You will propose a new use of the school buildings within the urban and cultural contexts of the site, and design new facilities to support the functional programme to enhance the significance of the built heritage. M Arch students taking this studio are encouraged to register for AC5002 Conservation Approaches and Philosophies.

BE MY GUEST

Tutor: Thierry Kandjee (co-tutor with Petra Pferdmenges)

In the last Venice Architecture Biennale, the curator Hashim Sarkis asked, in an age of conflict, ‘How will we live together?’. The exhibition at the Thai pavilion addresses the Tha Tum district in Thailand where humans and elephants have lived side by side for centuries. ‘The architecture is embedded with much consideration for one another, as elephants are considered members of the household,’ says the Thai curators.

Our design studio entitled “BE MY GUEST” aims to respond to the question of the Biennale at the scale of your choice (district, building or installation). It is a call to you, as ambassador of togetherness among humans and nonhumans.

QUANTUMCITY: THE QUEENSTOWN STUDIO

Tutor: Khoo Peng Beng

Our foundational understanding of reality — of what matter is — is totally changed by the quantum paradigm. The ideas of Newton, Darwin and Freud — the basic sources of today’s world views, have been overtaken by new discoveries. In the worldview of the emerging quantum paradigm, the universe is not a lifeless, soulless aggregate of inert chunks of matter; it is instead, a living organism. Life is not a random accident and the basis of the human psyche is more than about survival and self-gratification. We are all a part, and simultaneously a whole in our inter-connected universe. How does this new paradigm affect our wellbeing, our city and architecture?

The studio is interested in exploring the quantum paradigm and the dance of relationships and materials that affect our overall perception and being in architecture. We will adopt a state of un-knowing or aporia, so that we can be open to exploring possibilities arising from the interactions of the multiple contexts affecting any issue. We will start by immersing ourselves in Queenstown — Singapore’s first public housing estate. Museums around the world are working to break traditional stereotypes by revamping their designs to connect to wider groups of audiences. The emergence of virtual museums and augmented reality apps are extending the boundaries of museums beyond their physical walls. In this joint studio, architecture students will collaborate with engineering and industrial design students in designing immersive and interactive museum experiences that address a cause. Topics such as storytelling; virtual, augmented and mixed reality; embodied interaction and haptics; cultural computing and place-making will be introduced to support students in delivering diverse outcomes. Students may design interactive experiences that transform space, create new content and interaction modality, or learn a new language of technology based on three broad museum futures — The Metaverse Museum, The Inclusive Museum and the Distributed Museum.

THE URBAN-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: ORGANIZATION STUDIES & ITS ARCHITECTURE

Tutor: Koon Wee

The original urban-industrial complex theory came about through a study of cities in China, as they were industrialising and urbanising at an alarming rate. Conventional economic wisdom suggests that developing states have to industrialise. Once developed, these cities would rapidly de-industrialise and take on tertiary or service-oriented functions. However, their innate techno-urban rhythms and programs remain highly industrial, and often silently oppressive. Educationalist Ken Robinson, went as far as to suggest that our current education systems is still rooted in 19th century industrial forms — preparing workers with incremental skills for production. Singapore is replete with iterations of an industrial 40-hour work week; such as the sizing of the MRT and highways to match peak hour capacity travel, design of parks for weekend recreation, extolled virtues of punctuality and efficiency, and many others.

Throughout the centuries, industrial organisations have produced not only factories and workers, but they have given form to infrastructure, greenery, housing, education, healthcare, food, cultural production, and so on¬ — in the same way that have given rise to institutions of social welfare, justice and control. This studio seeks to identify the organisational traits behind a number of these industrial firms, that may have since diversified into other entities.

Adopting organisation studies as a design methodology; students would study an industrial organisation of their choice — similar to how they may develop an understanding of a complex client through research. This process will train students to read the territorial and spatial footprints of such an organisation, in pursuit of its production and profit goals. With an understanding of the depth of exploitation and control required of factories and related urban functions, students would further formulate the basis for a new programmatic and formal intervention.