By Naomi Wong & Benjamin Chong
Active Dunescapes: Sports as a Social Interface
We are designing a community sports landscape for Tengah residents such that sports can be an opportunity for individuals to meet, learn and socialize with one another.
Sports is a unique experience to everyone. It is driven by a variety of motivations, from social to competitive interactions, a way to destress or to keep fit, in groups or individually. This project aims to be a spatial formalization of accessible community sports, an intersection for individuals to interact through three interfaces: spectatorship, training, and competition.
Contextual continuity is achieved via seamless connection through the site, blending the sporting landscape with the surrounding context and blurring thresholds. The design also hopes to produce shared experiences, activating spaces through the interplay of sports with food, education and nature. This creates opportunities for complementary programmes, which support sports-oriented individuals, from budding sports enthusiasts to professional athletes.
The design uses sustainable environmental systems such as natural lighting, ventilation and thermal comfort to inform the use of solid and void layers, a key concept which was brought forward from the mid-term proto-project.
The massing was generated from identifying a node within the key pedestrian flows through the site, and establishing the connections to the four access points along the site boundary. Using the form finding principles established int he proto-project, we generate a series of layers which are informed by connectivity and views.
The programmes are arranged by activation potential and potential crowd sizes, with larger plaza spaces and F&B on the lower floors, and smaller class-based sports such as yoga and dance studios, or quieter library and garden spaces situated at the upper and roof levels.
The sections reinforce the concept of indoor and outdoor spaces, the solids and the voids, which alternate and create interactions between the different sports. It also ties back to the sustainability systems which we want to introduce, allowing for continuous open spaces for natural ventilation and lighting.
The voxel axonometrics show the density of programmes within the various layers of solid and void, creating new opportunities for programmatic adjacencies and vertical interaction. The overall axonometric demonstrates how the massing integrates with the surrounding landscape and neighbourhood, and how its influence of sports and nature creates seamless connections to the HDBs, Jurong Lake District and the Tengah Farmway.
Overall, Dunescapes aims to create opportunities for interaction and sports engagement by using architectural form to generate solids and voids, indoor and outdoor. The layering of spaces and integration with the surrounding context is key to creating a dynamic sports node for communities and the wider Tengah district.
