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M ARCH SINGLE & CONCURRENT DEGREE
ARCHITECTURE AS A PEDAGOGY
Tutor: Cheah Kok Ming
Almost 20 years ago, Peter Elliot’s Water Recycling Plant in the Melbourne Zoo is a small scale infrastructure but occupies a prime spot between animal enclosures. Recently a controversial waste management project, the Amager Resource Centre was conceived by Bjarke Ingels as a mammoth incinerator plant with an integrated ski slope as its roof. Vastly different in scale comparison, but the common thread linking the two architecture is the idea that buildings can complement its purpose to promote desirable ideas for gaining public advocacy and adoption. “Architecture as Pedagogy” is the framework for the studio to explore meaningful form and programme relationship in a place for Adventure Education.
ARCHITECTURE AS MEDIA
Tutor: Simone Chung Assisted by: Mary Ann Ng
Media, as defined by Hertz and Parikka (2015, 146), “is approached through the concrete artifacts, design solutions, and various technological layers that range from hardware to software processes, each of which in its own way participates in the circulation of time and memory.” The materiality of media, from a deep-time perspective, exposes an extensive matrix implicating the geopolitics of labour, expansionist capitalism, and irreversible environmental damage not only from planetary excavations and energy production but also the long-tail effects of toxic waste. The studio’s ambition is to go deep, in the sense that deep time media is adopted as the ontological framing to interrogate relationalities critically (following Guattari, 2000), with incisive deep dives performed on socio-technical processes coloured by political ethics. Honing a deep-seated awareness not only makes us more responsive architects but responsible practitioners as well.
TROPICAL MARKETPLACES IN BANDUNG, INDONESIA
Tutor: Florian Heinzelmann
The majority of people in Indonesia buy their groceries via local markets (pasar tradisional). Despite management issues resulting in desolate maintenance, sub-par logistics and low hygienic standards, Indonesian markets are vibrant multi-programmatic spaces fulfilling a larger role in society. Due to all problems and the recent surge of COVID-19 in Indonesia, markets need to be fundamentally rethought while keeping the spirit and remain financially attractive for the less affluent. The design-research will look into several aspects like social interaction, community, urban integration, delivery chain, on-site logistics, but also resilient solutions like passive climatic design strategies enabled by an overarching ‘programmatically thick roof’ serving the collective. 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?
CONSTRUCTIVE CONSERVATION: DESIGNING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE FOR THE PAST
Tutor: Nikhil Joshi
The rapid transformations experienced by many contemporary Asian societies have radically challenged their built environments’ cultural integrity and cohesion. Several historical buildings and neighbourhoods are erased in the name of ‘development’ (read ‘economic benefits’). It consequently disinfects the place of its identity and leaves it bland and out-of-date after a while. Wilke argues that “a sense of continuity does not have to stop new ideas —just the opposite. The deeper the root, the greater the range of nutrients”. In this vein, this studio advocates critical thinking and understanding of place/ building, change, and stewardship as part of continuing evolution. Applying conservation principles to assess the scope for a new intervention, students will strategise and deliver innovative ways to actively manage change to our historical urban landscape by protecting and adapting historical buildings/places to achieve a balance ensuring that their significant cultural values are reinforced rather than diminished by change.
WARM DATA, TRANSCONTEXTUALITY AND NOT KNOWING: FUTURE SINGAPORE
Tutor: Khoo Peng Beng
Instead of putting ourselves in a place of knowing, we start by putting ourselves in a state of not knowing so that we can be more open to exploring possibilities arising from the interactions of the multiple contexts affecting any issue. The idea of transcontextuality is that there are multiple different contexts that are interconnected and interdependent behind any single question, issue or thing we look at. Warm data (Bateson) is transcontextual information about the interrelationships that integrate a complex system. The studio will create an alternate Singapore in the future using the Paya Lebar Air Base site with individual projects collectively forming as a whole. Students will explore multimedia presentations— both analog and digital; moving from abstraction to concretisation. Mapping is a design tool, and maps are ‘things’ that inform architectural outcomes. In this studio, students will learn how architects and landscape architects have engaged cartography to both analyse and project change. The studio is framed by a three-kilometre diameter sampling strategy, based on the 110 Community Clubs of Singapore. We will ask, what if the Club’s governance was substantively empowered to support design? The collective outcome of the studio is premised on the notion that a multiplicity of map knowledge can open up space for architectural outcomes that are unimaginable within existing cultures of governance and official representational tropes.
BTTV; “BACK TO THE VILLAGE”
Tutor: Ali Reda
This studio acknowledges that the Urban Fabric will not and cannot continue to function in the same way as it did prior COVID-19. So where to, from here, is the question that will be addressed. People living in cities do not intrinsically know what living in a village means. They cannot fully empathise or understand the charms of village life. To the villagers the world over however, “God made the country and man-made the city”. Whilst Singapore started as a collection of charming villages, it is now a first world sophisticated and busy city. The older generations here often speak about the 乡村, Kampung, the Village. They reminisce about people living in villages who led simple, peaceful, healthy and happy lives. As such, there needs to be a review of how we look at the urban fabric, the way it is designed. It must be people-centric, super sustainable, its form, its function, and a mega mix of programmes. The new, multi-purpose city; where people live, work, play, shop, and entertain, must reflect this, and encompass the new “Circular Economy”; the economies of the villages of yesteryear! The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has upended our daily lives and posed social, economic, and environmental challenges. A high percentage of the population continue to work from home; and for students, a blended ‘learning from home’ system will become the new norm in Singapore. Social life is affected by social group size limits that fluctuates with each phase of pandemic measures. As we move to the next stage of living with the COVID-19 endemic, what is the implication on the design of our future living space and neighbourhood? The studio will envisage a design that can respond in a resilient way to changing circumstances due to the pandemic.
TERRAIN VAGUE: NEW TRANSFORMATION POSSIBILITIES
Tutor: Teh Joo Heng
A shift in usage patterns is being anticipated in the city, supported by hybrid land use, car-lite policies,— with COVID-19 accelerating the state of flux. This transformation allows for the reclamation of land from roads, carparks, and other public infrastructures. A new possibility is emerging within the city that comes with the recalibration of usage for existing buildings and leftover land. The studio is to speculate what the BRAS BASAH BUGIS AREA will be like, when this transformation takes its full effect.
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 Greater One-North are assessed from various viewpoints, including accessibility, integration, visibility, human comfort and other requirements. Shortcomings may be countered through design and planning; with 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 formulate these into actions and operations. Embedding both conditions and parameters for application, design rules operate on the data at hand, and express geometric and semantic transformations. Design rules support computation and the exploration of alternative design outcomes. This studio builds upon last year’s studio, while shifting the focus of attention in terms of both territory and objective.
UBIQUITOUS GREENING
Tutor: Hans Brouwer
This studio will explore the now-accepted paradigm that our urban environments and our building typologies can be reconciled with an aggressive introduction of planting. We will be exploring greening strategies at both the urban and architectural levels. A mini-masterplan will be created as a group effort, with each student going onto developing a building within that context. The studio will examine the gamut of architectural enquiry from the theoretical right down to the practical. The intended outcome is not to create an utopian future worldview, but to develop an aggressively real possible outcome for our habitats and cities.
F.U.N.3 | INFLEXION POINT
Tutor: Fung John Chye
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. “Technology is the Answer, BUT What Was the Question?” (Cedric Price, 1979)
The evolution of machines, AI and hyper-scale cloud computing has challenged the conventional wisdom of current technology-led developments such as real estate, typology, resilience, and economic sustainability. Industry 4.0 will be disrupted by 5.0 technology. Technology-led retail mixed-use developments will face fresh challenges and stress-tested to ‘re-invent’ user-experiences for consumer generations of Alpha and K. It is imperative for the present-day retail-led, mixed-use typology to evolve in the world of virtual reality, gaming, data, algorithms, pattern recognition, machine-learning, automation, advanced manufacturing with innovative spatial and programmatic concepts of the near future 2030 . The studio will investigate Cedric Price’s concept of flexibility and his experimental cybernetic narratives of impermanence , fun and leisure in “FUN PALACE” as catalysts and critical theoretical frameworks. This forms the basis to re-programme and re-purpose an existing urban retail development in Orchard Road, Singapore; to be transformed via a strategic urban design intervention into an experiential 5.0 mixed-use programmatic landscape. Studio and project site discussions will also be coordinated with notable external industry sector experts to stir further research and probe issues in the realm of both human-centric and technology-centric interfaces for both group and individual design vehicles.
LEFTOVER SPACES AND DETRITUS
Tutor: Gaurang Khemka
Our cities produce leftover and interstitial spaces. Spaces under flyovers, disused rail lines, and other unclaimed leftover and negative fragments are some examples. We humans, generate copious volumes of material waste, some of which are incinerated, some goes into landfills, some finds its way to the oceans, while some ends up in these unused leftover fragments of the city. Can architecture intervene at this juncture of waste? This studio shall explore crafting alternate typologies, materials and construction methodologies for a reduce/ reuse/recycle future for the Singapore cityscape. The unhoused population permeates the urban fabric of Downtown Los Angeles, and there are no clear options to help improve this plight. It begs the question: what can architects do to help? There will be a very specific social, political, and aesthetic agenda within the studio. Additionally, we will be telling stories: No Place—an etymological root to the word “utopia”—is not an ideal place. Instead, it is a lens from which a type of journalism can be conducted, and a platform for thoughtexperiments. We will work within No Place for people with no places, and propose possible future scenarios.
SITE, SCIENCE-FICTION AND SUPERTREES, ‘BUILD BACK BETTER’
Tutor: Constance Lau
A new blueprint for a city that is continuously in process requires the formulation of innovative design strategies that amplify these qualities. The users’ participatory processes and new ideas of mapping individual experiences are considered through the Situationist International’s notions of psychogeography where the theory of the dérive, détournements, and plaques tournantes, are employed to generate alternative approaches to document overlooked aspects. These transient, process-driven and shifting ideas of use and site, create new readings and meanings that will further Singapore’s stance as a garden city, and futuristic reputation for botanical constructs like climate altering domes and Supertrees. Utopian references ranging from colonial ambitions for ‘planting the world’ to Metabolist ideas of artificial land, megastructures, and nature will be used to ‘Build Back Better’, and generate visionary, ecological, and inclusive design proposals, conceived to embrace ensuing climate, economic, and social uncertainties. This studio embraces forms of dirtiness as a matter of urgent public necessity. Our public health crisis of inflammatory diseases seems due, ironically, to the eradication of dirt from our everyday lives. We will explore reversals of the values of modern architecture’s resilient cleanliness, aiming for strategic and designed “impurities”. Solutions will expand upon historical modes of interaction between buildings and types of “dirt”—from pre-modern practices, to modern ventilation systems, to domestic animals, and other vectors. These will attempt to restore, in part, a type and degree of organic waste in the spaces, surfaces, and systems of the building, to create an architecture, as hospitable at the microbiotic scale, as it is at the human one.
POST-SPORTS ASSEMBLAGE
Tutor: Tsuto Sakamoto
Why must the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics 2021 be held despite a State of Emergency under COVID-19 pandemic? The symbolic festival, insistently placed in terms of space and time, triggers questions on global capitalism, nationalism, and a substitution of historical memory. Under this critical perspective, the studio will investigate the event and its history—circumstances of the unrealised games in 1940, and the first games in 1964; while scrutinising the possible transformation of the sports event and training process—their space, scale, and operation—by using recent and future intelligent technologies and a pervasive media network. Based on the investigation and placing the projects in Tokyo where the 2021 games will be conducted—the studio ultimately aims to propose alternative forms of sports activities and events that are surrounded and integrated with a variety of non-human objects and living beings in urban and natural contexts.
FUTURE TODs
Tutor: Joseph Lim
Although Peter Calthorpe coined The Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) as a concept in ‘The New American Metropolis’ in 1993, Shaofei Niu, et. al. (2019) argued its existence in the 1971 URA Concept Plan; connecting new towns and the downtown district with urban nodes at MRT stations where compact and mixed-use neighbourhoods incorporated a public central space at a transit station. The planning of a TOD for urban vibrancy is now investigated in the context of a pandemic. How will ventilation, density, and distancing redefine commuting, and the physical form and spaces of a TOD? Students will learn from international consultants—AEDAS, SAA, LTA and URA, in a cross-disciplinary design research studio developing individual Masters projects.
SITUATION TENSE AND READY FOR ACTION
Tutor: David Schafer
Take a deep breath and look around you. How can you design your way out of this? What is within arm’s reach? What is within a day’s walk? How deep are you willing to go? The goal isn’t simply to survive but to thrive… Assess your situation. Center yourself. Test your boundaries. Make shelter, make light. Together we will look at strategies for constructive, forward momentum from a diverse range of sources (alchemy, adhocism, improv, jugaard, preppers, #EDC, #ISRU). We will explore our immediate context(s) and condition(s) by contemplating the dualities of working collaboratively in isolation, working intimately but remotely, working precisely within a space of uncertainty, and fundamentally, we will make; improvising without compromising.
