2 minute read
ISLAND FABRIC
Koh Ai Ting Aileen Masters in Architecture (Design) National University of Singapore
The fabric island is an extension of the city, delicately draped across the waters. Land and water amalgamated into one, inhabitants from across the straits continuously gravitate towards this city – an escape from their own packed, fast-paced, oppressive and overbearingly dictatorial land.
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Through a strategic masterplan designed to preserve the land for its own people, this thesis displaces tourist accommodation offshore onto a floating island fabric, thus enabling the calibrated control of resource expenditure and growth. An alternative location for pleasure sited on Singapore’s periphery, it is every foreigner’s fantasy. Yet it simultaneously allows for the creation of productive communities that can grow and evolve, all with the vision of Batam’s survival.
The fabric island is amphibious. It treads on the fine line between reverie and reality, building dreams yet grounded in its existence.
Chua Gong Yao
Masters in Architecture (Design) National University of Singapore
This thesis is a study of Singapore’s manifestation as a garrison state in the Straits, following a unique history of creating an autonomous city-state from its neighbours. By embracing Singapore’s independent history of transformation through engineering and “practical” problem solving, the logical consequence of sea level rise, storm surge and environmental change are taken both as crisis and opportunity.
These consequences are played out in the design proposition as both absurd and real; a pinnacle of infrastructural might, made manifest in a storm surge barrier of realisable proportion is imagined. An underground third link providing footings for the barrier above, connects Malaysia’s eastern coast to Singapore’s northern settlements, while a mangrove Bi-National Park mitigates threats, both real and perceived.
Through protecting many of Singapore’s most valuable assets — Changi International Airport, Sembawang Shipyard, and New Towns of Punggol, the infrastructural proposal at once ensures Singapore’s own survivability by damming herself within, yet ironically opening herself to Malaysia — her often contentious neighbour to the North. A series of operable flood protection barriers are arrayed across the waterscape, intertwining infrastructure, engineering, water, shipping and nature.
In an uncanny but entirely logical design, infrastructure, ambition and engineering prowess merge with the natural hydroscape and landscape to solve Singapore’s future threats in an architecture that is seemingly contradictory, yet entirely necessary for Singapore’s future.
Track 2 – Highest surge level of 0.64 - 1.6m
Basis in simulating a possible Tropical Cyclone
Radius of Maximum Winds – 50 km
Wind speed – 55 knot
Pressure drop – 2200 Pa
*Numerical model investigation obtained from Delf University of Technology: Coastal & Marnine Enginnering Management
Surge: 0.64 - 1.6m (exclusive of existing tidal level)
Simulation result: 2 of the worst-track scenarios & 16 other extreme paths
A Garrison State in the straits
Manifestation of Garrison State | Tropical Cyclones
While Singapore romanticizes her relationship with nature, she secretly tries to subdue it.
On the verge of crisis, Singapore is more than well-prepared. A state-of-the-art defence system.
