FormAxioms@SUTD led by Prof Eva Castro was invited to participate in the exhibition ARTIFICAL REALITIES – Virtual as an Aesthetic Medium for Architectural Ideation, a Lisbon Architecture Triennale Associated Project at ISTAR-ISCTE IUL, 14-18 October 2019, Lisbon Portugal.
Featured projects include:
- The digital archive ‘3 iterations’:
- ‘the proto-cemetery_ memory archival library’ (2019)
- ‘the proto-cemetery_ worlds within memories’ (2019)
- ‘the museum of memory_ aquatic life’ (2019)
Made possible by:
Coordinator: Eva Castro
VR/AR : IRL
Digital Humanities : Federico Ruberto
Studios Leads: Christine Yogiaman, Jason Lim, Jane Chua, Deniz Manisali
Students (projects exhibited):- Han Jing
- Lucas Ngiam
- Adler Teo
Project Description
This project(s) pursue the “generic”; a building type without a specific site and time. We do so as a means to challenge preconceived cultural conditions, the “known” and the “appropriate”, to create experimental prototypes whose specificity don’t arise from the regulative condition of a specific place but from the environmental fictions they are subjected to. The building’s temporality is that of a desired future, and as such we prioritized the consistency of a narrative over the ‘real’ constrains of a specific environment. The “time” in which our prototype sits is understood not as mere actuality but as an experimental field where questions are prompted and onto where designs could be experimented without the asphyxiating weight of actual parameters. Hence, to design the ‘time’ in which the building exists requires to understand ‘time’ as a history to be made, one of which we, as designers and as world-makers, must be active participants. We antagonize (pre)existing typologies in order to embark in the adventure of inventing new configurations, and to cater for new building-forms of digital/analogue (co)existence. The program is to organize in space and time, in a crafted narrative, a series of interfaces, material or otherwise, between analog atmospheres and digital environments.
- FormAxioms: ‘the politics of mapping the invisible’ (2019)
Author(s):
FormAxioms: Eva Castro, Federico Ruberto
VR/AR : IRL
Students:- Ho Jin Teck Daryl
- Peng Haonan
- Chow Khoi Rong Clara
- Nabila Larasati Pranoto
- Sim Yi-Ting Michel
Project description
Our testing ground is the South China Sea.
The SCS carries a tremendous strategic importance owned to the fact that one-third of the world’s shipping passes through it carrying over $3 trillion in trade each year; it contains fisheries that are crucial for the food security of millions in Southeast Asia and, it has huge oil and gas reserves -believed to lie beneath its seabed.Being one of the most important slocs in the seas, this site has been subject of historical disputes over its sovereignty. These disputes are increasingly becoming one of Asia’s most potentially dangerous point of conflict, one with a political domino effect that could surpass by large the immediate region, creating new territorial alliances and hierarchies within the worldwide power structures.
This project, through the deployment of AR, reads the (in)tangible lines drawn by geology, energy (resources) and politics and maps the invisible, describing the submerged, uncovering the concealed … attempting – in doing so, to design a future: the fictional context within which these precious 15 square kilometres are contained. Among many possible scenarios based on the hastening events taking place now, ours chooses to be situated within the polemic, evidencing the studio’s provocation, deploying fiction as ecologically driven abstraction.
The projects located within micro sites have utilised infrastructure –and its design, as the main vehicle to introduce new narratives within the territory’s interstices, envisaging strategies that will dwell on issues of connectivity, political and geographical adjacencies and temporal conditions.