Studio WYY | The Morpheus Hub

Studio_Wu Yen Yen | Tyler Lim AR3102 Design Studio,Year 3, 2018/19 Semester 2 ( Portfolio )

The Morpheus Hub the M E D I A T O R between E X C L U S I V I T Y and I N C L U S I V I T Y

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The Morpheus Hub

The Morpheus Hub

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The Morpheus Hub

by Lim Hock Siang Tyler

DESIGN STATEMENT Water is Essential for life. It is especially important on site where it holds the power of bringing people together or segregating them like the well and the forbidden spring in the past. However, the development and changes over the year have resulted in the social and physical displacement of the site such as gentrification and the loss of water. Hence, in the attempt trying to memorialize the water like a founding father of the site, it is mandatory for the design of Morpheus Hub to pay attention to these changes so as to appreciate the presence of water and re-enact it in the current context. These changes served as the important lessons learned and the guiding principle of stitching the people on the hill and the people on the ground together as the potentiality of water in the past has been demonstrated in the morphological changes of the site. It would then personifies water as a hub that is capable of shifting the people and the environment around it.

DESIGN INTENTION The perception of water changes the way on how the people utilize the site as there aren’t any physical changes that are leading to the current situation. As such, The Morpheus Hub should be a place where it is able to not just tracing the rise and fall of the water on site like an exhibition gallery but also incorporating the hydrotherapy treatments that use water to form the programs and spatial experiences which would then bring the people from the ground and hill to come together. Besides that, the user can also experience the exclusiveness of the hill and the inclusiveness of the ground within a single piece of architecture.

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The Morpheus Hub

DESIGN STRATEGIES With that, the design strategies are to calibrate the physical form and spatial experience through the use of two binary drums to illustrate the presence of water and the distinctiveness between exclusivity and inclusivity. This allows me to translate the spatial quality of these spaces into a metaphor that illustrates the certainty and nature of the hill being exclusive and the ground being inclusive. For instance, the inaccessible hill segregates people and the ground accessibility brings the community together. As such, the interfaces for the entrance and the treatment rooms of the two drums will be very different where one drum focuses on the exclusive treatment and the other focuses on the inclusive experience.

After all, the design intention is to blur away this disparateness. Therefore, the two drums at the side are meant to encapsulate the “implied central” that represent the “water communal space” in the past. This central space is a “Misty Otherworld” that obscured by the trees and water mist which would then intrigue the loss of the communal space such as the well back then. Although there are multiple entrance and circulation for all the treatment rooms, it will all form an identical axis that leads on to the public plaza which the community spirit in the past can be restored with the presence of water. Hence, the idea of bringing that communal space back in a form of hot spring and distilled water bar is to allow the people to come together as one to enjoy, to play, to hydrate and at the same time allowing their body and mind to heal and relax.

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Studio_YenYen | Tyler Lim, Year 2019 Department of Architecture School of Design and Environment