Studio Instructor(s)
Program: Social Infrastructure
Scale: –
Site: Blk 876-886, Tampines Spring. Estate start lease in 1986-1988
The studio positions students as agents that negotiate, with playfully intuitive and spontaneous attitude, to transform conflict into opportunity for novel engagements. The context of this mediation lies within the potential recurring social demographic composition that manifest approximately in the mid-range of Singapore’s HDB estate’s 99 year lease. Within this observed time frame, the estate’s social demographic makeup shifts to encompass a widening of social demographic sampling of the nation state, prompting a sudden change in the diversity and density of social infrastructure needed within the estate. To rise above the discomfort of extreme adjacency, resource incompatibility, and diverging spatial priories, the Strategic Research group within Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore conducted a workshop to facilitate conversations between various social service vendors, URA, MSF, HDB, MOF, PA.
Embodying the accumulated conversation from the workshop as background, the studio asks students to establish contingent common grounds that will be used to author a series of social encounters and interactions. Written first as “scripts”, the students are then asked to develop their own graphical language and narrative of the social encounters within the setting of architecture disciplinary specific abstractions, figuration and formations. The product of this investigation will be strategic spatial relationships/organization driven by desired social engagement. Armed with this relationship/organization and their specific rules, the studio will liaise with the Strategic Research group within Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore to act on three types of urban sites within the HDB estates in Singapore.
The studio collectively produces a series of strategies to develop social infrastructures that co-opt the ground (void-deck) of HDB point blocks, soon to be obsolete low rise parking structure, and in-between open ground conditions. These calculated augmentations to the urban fabric will strive to create a condition of living that support the freedom of multiplicity but simultaneously foster mutual recognition.
