fAILED STATES

Since the 1970s, Batam has oscillated between trying to rival Singapore and feeding off Singapore’s success. In its admiration for Singapore, Batam copies many models that Singapore itself obtained from the West. One of these is the efficient multiplying of waterfronts, maximizing real-estate values. Possibly the most ambitious of these projects around the region is Coastarina in Batam. Clearly inspired by The World in Dubai, it failed spectacularly in the cycles of speculations and recessions, leaving a vision unfulfilled. Does architecture have a role here? Is architecture only concerned with success, and development? What can architecture do in a failed state?

POST-TROPIcAL

New Modes of Reading

Comfort Routines and Air-Condition Behaviour in Occupants of Public Housing: The Case of Singapore

Tan Jia Xin Jax (Chang Jiat Hwee)

This paper seeks to understand how air-condition consumption of occupants are related to routinised behaviour and environmental design of public housing in Singapore. It aims to evaluate the impacts of passive-design strategies used in public housing on home occupants consumption of air-conditioning, as well as the implication of the socio-cultural contexts on routinised air-condition consumption behaviours.

It is commonly acknowledged that good passive-design naturally cultivates sustainable energy consumption behaviour in occupants. However, I argue that air-condition consumption is hardly so straightforward. Rather, it is complicated by the human factor such as socio-cultural perceptions deeply embedded in their daily routine. In the discourse of sustainable architecture, the human factor has

^ Aerated clerestories and internal airwells in old SIT flats allow for natural lighting and ventilation v Newer and more condensed flats can be found to adopt alterations like wall removals to achieve a continuous and more ventilated space always been neglected and this poses an impediment to the preparation for a more sustainable future in facing the threats of global warming.

The public housing landscape in Singapore has always been designed to facilitate natural ventilation. It is crucial to understand the limits of architecture’s role in the constructs of occupant’s air-condition consumption, and at the same time, anticipate consumption behaviours and their daily routines to better design for housing in the future.

Photographing the Singapore House: The Construction of a Tropical Fantasy

Fu Yingzi (Erik G. L’Heureux)

The Singapore House series, written and edited by Robert Powell and photographed by Albert Lim Koon Seng, is one of the most significant and definitive books in the Singapore architectural discourse. This series of publications showcases contemporary tropical homes produced by notable designers.

The key to the Singapore House series is its extensive use of compelling and striking architectural photography by Albert Lim. Photography functions as a major currency for the dissemination and consumption of architecture, so much so that our understanding of the architecture is in fact, largely mediated by our encounters with these photographs rather than the actual physical building itself. Further, we often mistakenly conflate the experience of the former with the latter, and this error has led to the practice of photography and its particular properties being left unexamined.

This dissertation thus aims to uncover the various conventions and devices that are employed in the construction of the photographs in Singapore Houses. Far from being a transparent medium that simply represents reality, Lim’s photography produces a new reality: One that is highly calibrated and crafted under selective conditions, in order to construct and perpetuate the vision of a tropical fantasy. The idealization of the tropical experience is hence contingent on the rigorous exclusion of undesirable, un-photogenic but very pertinent realities, such as climate, context, nature and colour.

By way of such a mode of enquiry and the interrogation of the construction of a view, this dissertation hopes to question the relatively uncontested normative way of perceiving and documenting Singapore architecture. With a renewed photographic curiosity and agency, the diversification of the discursive parameters can hopefully open up new ways of seeing, understanding, imagining and designing our environment.

< 26 Cable Road by ip:li archtiects v Lim / Shulman Juxtapositions I v Lim / Shulman Juxtapositions II

Thick Envelopes

Ong Wee Jin (Erik G. L’Heureux)

The seduction of the glass box takes form in many masks - transparent, reflective, and translucent. Borne of the temperate amidst the heat of modernism it has nimbly adapted to the constantly shifting trends and standards of culture, aesthetics, and performance. Over time, it has become equated to a standard of quality and excellence and the de facto mode of producing the iconicity so desired today. The legacy of thin, flat, and closed envelopes first perpetuated by fixations with transparency continue to hold true even as representations change. Energy is relied upon to create insular and separate environments from nature with glass providing the illusory connection to it. The domain of the glass box has thus extended to reach to all geological locations and climatic regions today, its possibility in tropical heat and humidity enabled.

While the ability of the glass box to function adequately is proven by its ongoing utility and almost a century of progress, the assumption of it as the default building envelope has greatly diluted the pool of archetypes found in the urban fabric. Major landmarks of the city show predeliction for the glazed envelope and embrace the sculptural outline it emphasises; the projected image of the city now a collective of shiny objects.

Against this grain of the current normative, this dissertation seeks to remove assumptions and search of an envelope more consistent and coherent to the tropics. With Singapore as the site of inquiry, it aims to derive an alternate way of producing the building envelope - one that pans out inversely to the glass narrative and its ambitions. Thick, textured, and open are the properties sought to define this counternarrative; not so much as a deliberate antithesis to transparency but rather for the allowances it makes towards a more optimal and suitable envelope.

The thick envelope consists of several core characteristics but remains open to further intervention and modulation. It returns the envelope to an interrogative state as to the limits of its potentials and the possibility of its definition; and hopes to find sustained validity and ignite a dialogue of the envelope as a site for architectural innovation.