Picture credit: Li Zhao Yuan, Jevin
INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN FOR EXPERIENCE AND WELL-BEING Tutor: Thomas Kong Interior architecture is concerned with the design of habitable spaces from the inside out, where the principles of architectural design, context, structure and enclosure are considered in proximity to materials, objects, human needs and experience. The studio will focus on the conjoined and symbiotic relationship between experience and well-being in the design of interiors, recognising multiple experiential touchpoints across different temporal moments. Students will design interior spaces that that heal, nurture, renew and enrich people in the course of their daily activities based on the following three themes: Design for positive emotions and energy; Design for conviviality and vitality; and Design for diversity and inclusivity.
Picture credit: Liam Shu-Ling, Rachel
ARCHITECTURE: ACTS OF KINDNESS Tutor: CJ Lim This studio advocates the symbiosis of critical thinking and speculative narratives, with drawings (sometimes two-and-a-half dimensions) as the main creative medium. The discourse, at city and building scales, starts from a chosen work of art or literature. Each student will posit a divergent status quo to establish an intellectual position: researching, translating and synthesising key design decisions to address a world in crisis, resulting in the evolution of resilient architecture and urbanism tailored to the determining factors of climate, nature, resources and the idiosyncrasies of humanity. The heart of this semester’s architecture narratives will be the discovery of the true potential of our human condition.
TISSAGE CELLULAIRE Tutor: Joseph Lim HOT AIR: THE DRAMATIC ATMOSPHERES OF THE EQUATORIAL CITY Tutor: Erik G. L’Heureux The equatorial city’s relationship to climate and atmosphere has become an increasingly complex interface in relation to climate change, population growth, and contamination. Against this background, this studio will research the atmospheric mediums of “hot air” situated in urban Southeast Asia. Three features will guide the work: saturated urbanisms, thick envelopes, and aggregated roofs that modulate and filter the “hot air” of the equatorial city. As the equatorial city evolves from the granular, porous, and informal, to a more formal, conditioned, and hygienic metropolis, it is being transformed with large-scale capital, global aspirations and imported technological systems, often to its longterm environmental detriment. The design research will focus on modes of architectural construction in the region, and the tension between these and the precedent of mid-20th century tropical modernism of the 1930s to the 1980s. The dramatics of heated air, aggregation, scale, vegetation, humidity, heat, rain, and hygiene, and the numerous contagions that compound an atmosphere of “hot air”, will drive the studio’s design and representational research efforts for the semester.
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Designers do not start with preconceptions, code compliance or technological limitations. Instead, the ability to work in the abstract and explore inner subjectivities differentiates designer from technician. Architectural composition stems from within an inner subjectivity, which is appreciated by users but experienced differently. Our work inspires imagination and speculation to challenge what we already know. Ideas in architecture, art and fashion design have inspired each other across history. Each discipline has its own forms of creative expression explored through divergent mediums and processes. While fashion and architecture involve the human body and the embodiment of craft in creative pursuit, designers push the limits in expressing the material culture of a particular time. What if climate and light filtering strategies as well as fabrication were to be inspired by artisanal collections, to provide unusual settings for promotions and events? This studio will empower our inner subjectivities to create form in light within a couture pavilion, using daylight and shadow to modulate space with enclosure. Design of night-time use and conditions would also be planned as part of the entire diurnal experience.
Picture credit: Lim Yan Cheng, Harvey
TOP-UP THE MSCPS! MULTI-STOREY CAR-PARKS IN A CAR-LITE FUTURE: RECLAIM, RETHINK, RESTORE, REUSE, REINVENT, RETURN, REPOPULATE & REDESIGN Tutor: Ruzica Bozovic Stamenovic The second edition of the design studio dedicated to multi-storey carparks will examine the possibility of topping up existing HDB garage structures, turning their uncanny feel and woeful underuse of space into a fertile, resourceful soil for symbiotic architecture to grow atop. The main aim will be to support the well-being of urbanites in a sustainable and resilient way, even as they face more and more pressing challenges in life. Students will individually set their own advanced thinking concepts and future-oriented programmes, to develop the appropriate design methodology. The studio will run in experimental mode, with weekly exercises and “discussion-experimentation-production-application” design processes thoroughly documented in the studio report.
URBAN SPACES OF ONE-NORTH: COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS AND RULE-BASED DESIGN Tutor: Rudi Stouffs (Co-teaching with Patrick Janssen) Through data collection and computational analysis, the urban spaces of One-North will be assessed from various viewpoints, including accessibility, integration, visibility, human comfort and other requirements. Shortcomings may be countered through design and planning, and design actions expressed in the form of design rules that apply to the existing situation in order to achieve a preferable outcome. Reflecting on the desired objectives of cohesion, vibrancy and liveability, design rules would formulate these into actions and operations. Embedding both conditions and parameters for application, design rules will operate on the data at hand, and express geometric and semantic transformations. Alternative design outcomes may also be explored.
Picture credit: Lee Ann, Crystal
SHARING CITIES: NUS-TSINGHUA-DPA JOINT STUDIO Tutor: Zhang Ye The city is the quintessential shared spatial environment. Today, the exercise of sharing is often too narrowly conceived, and perceived, as being primarily about economic transactions. From this perspective, space is solely seen as a resource of economic production and consumption, rather than the foundational reality where our societies and cultures unfold, develop and evolve. While space is undoubtedly a kind of sharable good, space is also a generative reality: many forms of sharing activities inadvertently lead to the creation of new spatial typologies, which in turn can facilitate and foster new socio-economic formations. This studio is part of the NUS-Tsinghua Design Research Initiative for Sharing Cities (www.nt-drisc.org). This joint initiative by NUS DOA and Tsinghua University School of Architecture is sponsored by Ng Teng Fong Charitable Foundation (Hong Kong) and held in partnership with DP Architects. It aims to bring together scholars and students from two top Asian architecture schools, as well as like-minded experts and professionals, in exploring emerging space-sharing practices and new dedicated typologies of shared spaces in cities. In conjunction with this studio, three workshops in Singapore and Beijing have been tentatively planned for the beginning, middle, and end of the semester respectively, to bring together students and scholars for exchange of ideas (subject to restrictions imposed due to COVID-19). Air tickets and accommodations for NUS students involved in this studio would be fully sponsored, should these workshops proceed as planned.
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