DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIO OPTIONS

THE NEW NORMAL? NEIGHBOURHOOD AND HOUSING DESIGN POST COVID-19

Tutor: Tan Beng Kiang

‘’It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair’’. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has posed great challenges to our daily lives, socially, psychologically, economically and environmentally. 83% of Singapore’s population live in public housing across 23 new towns built by the country’s Housing & Development Board (HDB). More housing estates are being planned still. How should we design neighbourhoods and housing to weather future pandemics? How will pandemic response measures, such as safe distancing, work-from-home and selfquarantine, affect the way we expect people to function and interact? What should the design of pandemic-ready neighbourhoods look like, and how do we envision their residents will live, work, play and learn? This studio will research the implications of COVID-19 on the built environment and envisage a design that can respond in a resilient way to possible future pandemics. Students participating in this studio are encouraged to also take the elective on Housing (Pre and Post COVID-19 Pandemic) offered in Semester 1.

BUZZ OFF! PART 1

Tutor: Tham Wai Hon

Architecture and the mosquito have had a particularly interdependent history in the hot and humid climate of the equator. This studio will explore the relationship between the built environment and the mosquito, and reveal the possibilities, at increasing scales—from the human body, to furniture and building facades, to urban planning—of responding to current mosquito-borne disease epidemics. Research will be driven by design and making, with an emphasis on material outcomes in the form of prototypes and models. The studio is part of the Global Studios, a component of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021. The outcomes of this studio, if selected by the Biennale, will be organised, refined and showcased as a built artefact for display at the Biennale in November 2021. The work of organising and building will be organised under a Special Semester 2 Studio as Part 2 to this course.

Picture credit: Goi Yong Chern

Picture credit: Moritz Maier The Programmatic Sculpture studio will focus on one pure geometric form as a basis for design investigation. This form will be a large sphere with fixed dimensions, located on a given site in Singapore. Following a thorough analysis of the site in its greater context, students will be asked to determine their own programme. The design work will then consist of adapting the original form of the sphere to its given site and chosen purpose, in a process that can be referred to as an act of programmatic sculpture, involving the erosion of the initial form with the projected programme.

WORKAROUND: PERIPHERIES, DISTRACTIONS, AND THE UNMAKING OF HOME|WORK

Tutor: Lilian Chee

Work is moving home. We enter this post-domestic situation through a periphery which seemingly obstructs, delays, and unhinges productivity. A child screaming, burnt cake, a dog’s persistent bark, incessant drilling from an ongoing renovation, unstable Wi-Fi, binge-watching of television, a mountain of ironing, long lunches, and hot afternoons. Each constitutes a site of distraction. When intersected with the bubble of productive work, each site has far-reaching implications of space, scale, temporality, and relationships. Workaround challenges the vacuous state of paid work, tied up in the notion of “the office”. Approaching home-work through its sites of distraction, students will conduct fieldwork and archival research, map networks and speculate as to opportunities. The studio will produce and enact a series of countersituations—objects, temporalities, scales, programmes, sites—which challenge the conceptions, forms and experiences of working from home.

AN URBAN DESIGN PROPOSAL FOR MARINA BAY GOLF COURSE

Tutor: Richard Ho

It has been announced that the leases for two of Singapore’s 23 golf courses will not be renewed when they expire in 2021, and that the land will instead be returned to the Singapore Land Authority. It is therefore timely at this point for the nation to re-examines its priorities, and relook the issue of so much land being set aside for the recreation of so few. This is even more in the light of the detriment that golf courses can pose to the biodiversity of our natural environment, and questions as to their longterm sustainability in a land-scarce city-state. But what then will happen to these two golf courses? It is the intention of this studio to select one of these sites, the Marina Bay Golf Course located off the East Coast Parkway directly across from the Gardens by the Bay, and propose and re-imagine appropriate uses for its future. Participants will work on this challenge as a group project, and their ability to work together as a team will be a key requirement.