OPTIONS DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIO: SEMESTER 2

Picture credit: Yee Chenxin, Jonathan

Picture credit: Zeno Lee Pei Rong What should a significant architectural project look like? How can it come into existence within the ecological context of architecture, and a strained economy of attention? In light of current debates on what is— fundamentally—a building, this thesis topic will focus broadly on the issue of form in architecture—a notion so contentious that it is often presented as necessarily “following” particular variables. What these are, and why they surface at specific moments in history, will be investigated, with a particular emphasis on the study of precedents in order to envision architectural outputs that transcend solutionism.

IN PURSUIT OF OPTIMISM

Tutor: Hans Brouwer

Today’s outlook seems to be obsessed with the pessimistic. Our co-dependence on the media has inadvertently drawn us into its worldview and modus operandi: to chase the disaster in order to capture eyeballs (tragedy sells).

If we remove ourselves from the ‘here’, ‘now’ and ‘terrifying future’, and look at our journey as a species, we see that we have always been masters of adaptation and change. Homo sapiens’ success lies in our ability to take adversity and use it as an agent of designed change. It is this insatiable positivism and curiosity that has led us on this amazing journey to where we are today.

The post-pandemic outlook which we now confront, does not need to be one of gloom and doom. Yes, we are confronted with a multitude of deeply concerning problems. From the global issues of climate change, food scarcity and inequity, to the personal ones of identity, screen addiction and social media dependence. This studio is interested in taking these challenges as opportunities to envisage design changes inspired by an undaunting positive belief, that architecture is up to the task to foresee futures that not only address the underlying problems but can go beyond them to create futures that are better in every way.

ANTIFRAGILE FRAMING Tutor: Cheah Kok Ming

When dining-in restrictions hit Chicago-based Dimo’s Pizza shop during the pandemic, they reinvented themselves by deploying some of their ovens and manpower to produce plastic shields for health-care protection. The transformed business thrived for Dimo despite the adversity and constraints. Nassim Taleb describes “antifragility” as an attribute beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same but the “antifragile” gets better. The studio provides an “antifragile” framework to look at crises, problems or threats for thinking about alternative architectural possibilities. For Dimo’s Pizza, it raises the question of how architecture would change to reconcile the production of pizzas and plastic shields.

REMOTE PRACTICES: A MINOR ARCHITECTURE AND ITS DISTANT ARCHIVES

Tutor: Lilian Chee Assisted by: Wong Zi Hao

Remote Practices is concerned with disciplinary boundaries, seen in architecture’s acts of improvising and transposing; the (mis)alignments intrinsic to its distance from the built environment it conceives, and its “promiscuous mix of the real and the abstract.” This studio will further accentuate such distance and dissonance by concerning itself with architecture’s peripheral subjects. It argues for the necessity of a “minor architecture”, founded along the seams of the discipline. Located in tropical Southeast Asia, the studio engages the region’s uncategorised subjects: mythic environments, shapeshifting practices, and/or its often anecdotal knowledge. Students will select one peripheral phenomenon found in S.E.A’s climatic peculiarities of health and environment, post/trans/colonial histories, the rural-urban transition, traditions in the aftermath of modernisation, etc. They are to co-locate themselves in a corresponding archive, a distant site which embeds expert knowledge of their chosen periphery. The studio’s outcomes—“architecture [that] makes its appearance other than architecture” —will further define the boundaries and forms of a “minor architecture”.

EMERGING CIVIC URBANISMS: DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL IMPACT

Tutor: Cho Im Sik

With rising awareness of the impacts of environmental degradation and growing polarisation, various forms of civic urbanisms are emerging as an alternative to the growth-oriented and market-driven urban development. This implies an awakened desire for a new paradigm based on more sustainable ways of life, which contributed to a greater emphasis on wellbeing, social inclusion, environmental consciousness, and active participation of citizens in decision-making. By critically reflecting upon the conventional ways we perceive, plan, and build our cities; the studio will rigorously question established norms, conceptions, and systems—to inspire new visions of urbanism designed for long term social impact.

ARCHITECTURE’S BACK LOOP

Tutor: Simone Chung

Based on ecologist C.S. Holling’s theory, the back loop is the stage in the Anthropocene cycle where hitherto established structures come apart, and individual entities or small groups interact across divides to create something fundamentally original. What undergirds back loop innovation is a spirit of experimentation that is not mutually exclusive to humans or nature. Wakefield (2020, 98) states, “Deciding on one’s own terms where to go from here, can everywhere be a matter of taking infrastructure, architecture, and design in one’s own hands and wielding them as the powers they in fact are”. A recalibration of mindset is essential as we depart from outmoded and limiting ways of thinking and operating in the front loop. The “biopolitics” that Foucault (1997) speaks of cannot be forcefully administered on one level alone. Rather, it invites softer and more plural forms of intervention technologies that stitch together knowledge, practice and design. Fifty years ago, Buckminster Fuller pre-empted the challenges to human civilisations which are now impending. In Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, he posits the criticality of managing the planet’s finite resources sustainably through a systems view for regenerative living. “Spaceship Earth” is at an inflexion point as cities face the convergence of existential threats—climate crisis, ageing populations, resource scarcity, pandemic, and technological disruptions. Third in the series on Future Urban Neighbourhoods, this studio will explore urban planning and architecture that mitigate the immense problems to invent viable Anthropocene futures through scenarios of sustainable human communities, urban environments, and deep technologies in 2050 and beyond.

ADAPTIVE TROPICAL BUILDINGS UNDER LARGE SPAN ROOFS

Tutor: Florian Heinzelmann

The roof—or atap—is an essential element in vernacular architecture, but also in contemporary buildings such as mall atriums, hawker centers, and many others. The interior of large roof structures does not get sufficient daylight and ventilation via vertical facades. The roof surface itself has to manage both. This must be negotiated between solar heat gains versus visual and other requirements. Daylight availability and direction are variables, and apertures therefore need to react by either changing their geometry or material properties. Students are invited to research, simulate, design, and prototype functioning adaptive daylight systems; including other passive climatic strategies for a building typology at a tropical location of their choice.

CITY - CULTURE – CONSERVATION

Tutor: Ho Puay Peng

This thesis offering will look at the social and cultural contexts behind design initiatives. How might a design project form a locus for symbolism, cultural representation, or the expression of identity? In exploring answers to this, students will embark on a journey of uncovering the meaning behind conceptions of society, community, and cultural manifestation. Observation and critical discourse will be essential to the process; these will be applied to questioning students’ views of individual or national identity. Along the way, the juxtaposition of time and space in architectural production would not only be a key factor examined in this journey, but may also be a product of the journey itself. This thesis offering would also complement a research interest in the areas of heritage conservation, adaptive reuse, and intervention in historical buildings and neighbourhoods.

It has been announced that the lease for two of the 23 golf courses in Singapore will not be renewed when they expire in 2021 and the land will be returned to the Singapore Land Authority. The Keppel Golf Club being one of them. It’s high time that we as a nation re-examine our priorities, especially when so much land has been set aside for the recreation of so few, not to mention that golf courses are perhaps the most detrimental to the biodiversity 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?

FUTURES FOR OUR MODERN PAST

Tutor: Ho Weng Hin

Faced with mounting redevelopment pressures, postindependence modernist structures and landscapes in Singapore are at a watershed moment. Today, imageable heroic modern megastructures such as the Golden Mile Complex and People’s Park Complex, built barely four decades ago are threatened with obliteration, through their impending en-bloc sales. On the other hand, following estate intensification programmes, what used to be a substantial and varied building stock of modernist housing heritage—such as the pioneering Queenstown Estate—has been severely depleted. The studio proposes that this paradigm is increasingly environmentally and socially unsustainable, causing ruptures in social, cultural, and urban accretion indispensable to a vibrant, liveable city. Rather than seeing conservation as opposition to progress and intensification, it explores rehabilitation and adaptive reuse as an alternative mode of urban regeneration; one that layers on rather than a demolishand rebuild approach.

Under the guidance by a practicing conservation specialist, the studio will adopt a rigorous researchbased approach to inform conservation design strategies for a site of the student’s choice, during the Thesis Preparation stage. Students will gain new skills and tools for ‘deep reading’ into heritage landscapes, structures, and artefacts that will inform a robust conservation/ intervention framework to guide the Thesis Design stage.

THE MEDIUM IS THE WEB Tutor: Patrick Janssen

For this studio, the medium is the message (Marshall McLuhan, 1964), and the medium is the web application. For your final thesis, you are required to develop an architectural proposition in the form of an interactive web application. People on the web should be able to engage in a two-way interaction with your architectural proposition. For your web application, you can focus on any topic you like, as long as it has a clear and direct relevance to a discourse on architecture. This thesis offering is concerned with examining the concept of the holon and holoarchy in architecture. It starts with the student as the basic unit of the holon—building up the complexity of the system through integrative processes. Students will explore how simple system nests within larger systems, creating a holoarchy. Unlike the traditional hierarchy, a holoarchy does not have a defined top and a defined bottom, but is open-ended and bidirectional. Architecture, therefore, is seen as a complex system comprising autonomous wholes that exist within a larger system. Students will be free to explore this conceptual framework and its implications in any context pertaining to a future Singapore.

FORM FOLLOWS SYSTEM

Tutor: Nirmal Kishnani

We tell ourselves we seek a different paradigm. Then we go about looking for it with the very tools and mindsets that created the problem in the first place. This thesis brief does not promise answers; it asks questions. We will be led by two. First, how do we reconnect the built with the natural? Second (emerging from the first), how to design systems? Here, the very meaning of good is called into question. Is good design a beautiful thing or a profound abstraction? Maybe neither. Maybe it is an act of engagement; many systems—human-made and natural—create positive reciprocity within a wider system-of-systems. Is this architecture with a capital ‘A’? Let’s find out.

TEN MODEST SUGGESTIONS FOR A NEW ATHENS CHARTER (IN SINGAPORE)

Tutor: Thomas Kong

“Every intervention has to be reversible, incomplete, elastic, because what is definitive is dangerous.” (Andrea Branzi, 2010).

In 2010, Italian architect Andrea Branzi envisioned a future city in Ten Modest Suggestions For a New Athens Charter. In the list, the first six points provided a view of the city as an entity of different possibilities as a hightech favela, a personal computer every 20sm, place for cosmic hospitality, an air-conditioned full space, genetic laboratory and a living plankton. Point 7 points to the research models of weak urbanisation. While the last three points explore the realisations of faded and crossable borders, reversible and light infrastructures, and great transformations through micro-projects.

Branzi advanced a vision that is beyond a collection of architectural objects, and proposed continuous territories of porous boundaries that are incomplete, spontaneous, relational, and enmeshed in networks, flows and exchanges of different systems, ranging from social, ecological, economic, and information. He approached urban projects as a critique and reflection of the conditions and crises of contemporary cities. Similarly, the thesis studio is an invitation for critical discourse and spatial speculation beyond the narrow relation between means and ends. Proposals that take on one or a combination of the ten modest suggestions by Branzi are welcome. Theoretical ideas, deep research, fearless material, and spatial experimentation will drive the thesis project, leading to novel propositions at the architectural and urban scale. The equatorial city’s relationship to climate and its territory has become an increasing imperative in the face of global warming and rapid population growth. Against this background, this thesis offering will research the atmosphere of “hot and wet” architecture in dense cities on the equator. The research will focus on modes of atmospheric calibration and representation overlooked by traditional techniques in drawing and photography. Humidity, temperature, breeze, sound, heat and rain—the mediums that produce a hot and wet environment—will be considered to expand students’ visual and design capabilities. Films, photography, sound, and simulation techniques will be mined to develop novel modes of seeing and experiencing atmosphere; these ideas can then be incorporated into architectural design.

This thesis offering will expand on its parallel module in M Arch I while furthering site and representational research outside of Singapore, to the rest of Southeast Asia. Each student will develop a robust and considered design thesis emerging out of discourses on equatorial architecture, so as to extend and produce new knowledge for architecture calibrated to the hot and wet climate of the region.

NEW TYPES

Tutor: Joseph Lim

The sustainability of incumbent forms of retail, production, education, recuperation, and recreation is in question with future pandemics. Your thesis rethinks ways of doing business and living instead of limiting occupancies and contact numbers. What sectional and floor plan configurations for space can withstand changing social distancing requirements and continue business operations? What new cluster advantages and economies of scale can we imagine with new programme mixes that were not previously planned for? Can a cloud kitchen be integrated with restaurants, cafes or food centers? Can a quarantine allow your vacation to begin without incarceration? Can seating reconfigurations radicalise worship, lecture, and cinema spaces? Students will learn from international consultants from AEDAS, SAA, LTA and URA to develop a cross-disciplinary design thesis.

HUMANS, NON-HUMANS, AND NON-HUMAN AGENCIES

Tutor: Victoria Jane Marshall

The focus of this thesis offering is on the intersection of creative-practice research and periurban, built landscapes that are shaped from dense, intergenerational interactions between humans, non-humans and their diverse agencies in Monsoon Asia. Such areas are often problematised as not much more than ‘becoming urban’, yet they are better thought of as a certain ‘kind of urban’. The term “non-human agencies” is used in a broad way, encompassing institutions with their official documents and reports, infrastructural and architectural legacies, as well as the forceful agencies of heat, humidity, wind, water, vegetative decay and growth, and the life of animals. Drawing from a situated, urban political ecology approach, each thesis will start with everyday practices, be attuned to discerning diffuse forms of power, and open the way for a politics of change based on spatial practices of incrementalism. Water covers more than 70% of earth’s surface, most of which is ocean. Surrounded by water, humans inevitably develop intense relationships with the ocean. The ocean supplies moisture to the environment and produces oxygen, regulates the climate, influences the weather, acts as a major carbon sink, supports huge biodiversity, carries more than 80% of all global trade, and is a vital source of protein to feed the world. Closer to shore, humans build extensive coastal habitats and commune with the ocean in countless ways. Yet, it is suffering from pollution, climate change, over-exploitation, and acidification of the ocean—much of which is contributed by human activities. Once considered too vast to fail, our oceans now seem in dire need of rescue. Driven by climatic factors, the ocean is also increasingly hostile with rising sea levels and growing coastal abrasions. Less organised coastal cities that are unable to engineer costly barriers and diversions are experiencing devastating consequences of being strangled by pollution and smothered by the ocean at the same time. With more than a billion people living along low-lying coastal regions, mostly in Asia, the need to address immediate local plights are just as important as any distant global climate fights. Large proportion of these populations have traditionally relied on the ocean for sustenance; but must now either endure the degradation of living environments, or abandon their homes and businesses altogether; some losing lives, many losing livelihoods.

The studio will examine how we search for a new balance, displace or coexist with nature, prioritise economy or environment and/or how relevant are climate agendas in discussions of lives and livelihoods. The practical ambition is to explore a coastal area in neighbouring West Java, Indonesia. Humans used to coexist with the ocean , but are now fighting for survival after losing most of their homes and much of their livelihoods in a futile struggle against environmental pollution and coastal abrasion.

NATURE UNFOLD

Tutor: Shinya Okuda

Contemporary social issues are often complex and intertwined to include financial and environmental issues, which require holistic design approaches across materials, built forms, programmes, and performance. Advanced architectonics designs are to sublime them into innovative multi-dimensional architectural solutions by leveraging essential game-changing phenomena, such as carbon sequestration, and construct them into sophisticated functional advanced architectural compositions and unique sustainable aesthetics. Embracing the power of architecture, the Nature Unfold thesis studio envisions to reveal various symbiotic future relationships including nature and urbanism in Southeast Asia and beyond.

DIRT, FORM, PERFORMANCE

Tutor: Ong Ker-Shing

From early modernity, architecture, through its envelope, plumbing, air-conditioning, weather-tightness and relationship to the ground, has increasingly separated people from the dirty— from natural processes, organic waste, and germs. Human interferences in natural systems have created fractured links, fragmented systems and energies—a multi-scalar context for new alignments and interactions. In this studio, we will explore reversals of the values of modern architecture’s resilient cleanliness, aiming for strategic and designed “failures”. We will explore how new typologies, languages, and material systems may restore or invent new modes of architectural production that combine the architect’s intentions with the input of non-human collaborators; these shift from biome to micro-biome, between building, body and public.

ASSEMBLAGE

Tutor: Tsuto Sakamoto

This thesis studio focuses on an assemblage of things and living beings including animals, plants, and humans. Experiencing disasters, pollution and pandemics, and being immersed in the environment where intelligent technology and pervasive networks enforce a certain lifestyle, behaviour and response; we have come to realise that a variety of non-human entities have as many expressions as humans. Scrutinising these, the studio speculates that alternative environment and architecture consequentially emerges from various assemblages of non-humans and humans that are co-functioning and symbiotic. Although they might be seen as troubles and disturbances from a human perspective, they suggest ways humans can negotiate and coexist with others.

REIMAGINING THE VERTICAL CITY

Tutor: Swinal Samant

The vertical redistribution of multi-speed transportation presents novel opportunities for reimagining the highdensity city and transit-oriented developments. In this context, layered public and green space networks could become continuous structures that organise and redefine hybrid, urban settings through transformative conditions of intersections between nature-mobility-infrastructurebuildings for a renewed engagement with the high-density urban form.

A new taxonomy of layered public spaces and multifarious architectural interventions will aid a more seamless transition from the horizontal to the vertical city. It is speculated that this may lead to a paradigm shift for cities and urban habitation, one where urban life is increasingly stratified and energised, and the ground plane is no longer the most familiar datum and is returned to nature and biodiversity.

Collaborations with industry experts in various disciplines will be explored in this studio: Structures, Construction and Building Services (Peter Ayers – Managing Director, Aurecon Asia), Vertical Transportation and MultiModal Transit Integration (Fanny Lalau – Major Projects Director, KONE, Asia Pacific), Smart Building Design and Services (Stuart Mackay – Technical Director, Ramboll) and Environmental Performance, Natural Ventilation, Super Low Energy Building Design (Sripragas Nadaraja – Associate, Web Earth). Students will also be encouraged to submit their designs for the Evolo Competition.

POSSIBLE WORLDS: AN ARCHITECTURE OF SIMULTANEOUS TEMPORALITIES

Tutor: Peter Sim

The 1960’s collective, Archigram, mixed technologicallyinspired ideas, a new liberalism, and humour, to produce some of the most influential works of architecture. They propositioned architecture not just as space, material, and form; but as a projective medium to imagining possible ways of living, and of critiquing convention and traditional conceptions of the city, and the boundaries of architecture. Their imaginings ranged from flippant and whimsical personal wearables to vast megacities. They did much absurd, yet profoundly provocative and influential work. That was 50 years ago. Architecture has grown up and moved on. But where has it gone and has anything important been left behind? If the cultural revolution, the space race, and British provincial humour combined together to create Archigram’s pulsating visions, what is the age that we live in?

Reimagining a post-pandemic world is understandably a pressing matter. However, the present milieu is rich in contradictions, complexity, and pressing problems: the age of the internet, the drone, the robot, facial recognition, social media, cyber hacking, urban farming, global warming, space X, the mars rover, Trump, Brexit, Airbnb, uber, veganism, hipsters, tiny homes, co-living/ working, electric cars, self-driving cars, floating farms, shrinking ice caps, wind generated power, plastic in fish, liposuction, reality tv, kpop, etc etc etc… We ask: What can architecture become?

This studio is interested in architectural propositions which are not only about the future, but can intimate simultaneously an architecture which encapsulates the dreams, desires and narratives of past-present-future.

ABOVE & BELOW – ALTERNATIVE URBAN NARRATIVES

Tutor: Ruzica Bozovic Stamenovic

As Singapore’s “City in Nature” paradigm reaches its limits, the possibility for formation and coexistence of alternative urban narratives emerges. The Park Connector network is one, but could we envision others? In this Thesis Studio, we are examining alternatives to the current urban “ground zero”, by developing new urban layers along vertical axes in both directions, above and/or below. The hypothesis as stepping stones to strategy development, should refer to the current urban context. From there, however, the new autochthonous urban narratives should develop according to the original and inherent set of rules. This hypothetical framework needs to be constructed upon data from real geo-political, economic, social and cultural world trends that might radically affect Singapore in the future. Main objective is to demonstrate how design could interpret the values of an unorthodox critical urban narrative to support survival, well-being and how cities and its people will thrive in the future.

DATA / PROCESS / EXPLORATION

Tutor: Rudi Stouffs

Computational design processes are largely data-driven, and the elaboration of the process can be considered more important than any single outcome, instead, aiming at the exploration of alternative outcomes. Such exploration serves as a means to achieve better-informed designs. Whether adopting computational methods or exploring alternatives by hand, the objective is to systematically explore a design aspect, issue or component, so as to gain a better understanding of the choices and implications thereof. 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.