Master of Architecture

*Options Design Research Studio 1 (AR5801) can be replaced with AR4421 Architecture Internship Programme (AIP) in Semester 1.

# Requisite courses to be considered for admission to the M Arch Programme. These courses can count towards UE requirements.

^ The course must be subscribed along with AIP taken in Semester 1.

AGROPOLITAN TERRITORIES: MATS, RUGS & QUILTS

 Tutor: Stephen Cairns

This studio will design a suite of buildings, connective armatures and productive landscapes that can catalyse sustainable food regions in rapidly urbanising Monsoon Asia. It will focus on innovative ways to support high population densities and mixed-use economies based on agroecological principles. The studio will be guided by three general themes:

• Agropolitan territories: hybrid urban-rural regions developed around decentralised technologies and agroecology
• Mats, rugs and quilts: horizontal, thick 2D/shallow 3D mat-buildings, combining elements, armatures and landscapes
• Seeding strategies: transformations catalysed in time (lifecycles, emergence, growth, entropy) and in thick environmental, material and institutional contexts.

POOL PLUS: “A COMMUNITY HYBRID”

Tutor: Cheah Kok Ming

Half fish, half lion, our mascot the Merlion epitomizes the concept of a hybrid, an entity produced by a combination of two or more distinct elements, usually with an outcome that is more than the sum of its elements. Public swimming pools in Singapore are no longer just destinations for single use. They have grown from neighbourhood lido or aquatic playground into huge community complex integrating library, clubhouse, polyclinic, food court, gymnasium, sports field or park with swimming pool. One strategic value of hybridization is land use optimization. This studio is about architectural hybridization beyond mere packing or stacking exercises.

F.U.N. 4.0 | THE MINDFULNESS CONUNDRUM

Tutor: Fung John Chye

A hallmark of the twenty-first century is the omnipresence of information, which overloads and disrupts our mind in an unceasing flux. This pervasive intrusion of the digital exerts an adverse impact on our physical, mental and cognitive health. Humanity needs an attention revolution and a re-enchantment with phenomenological experiences that promote health and wellness. Future Urban Neighbourhoods 4.0 continues the earlier explorations of architecture and urbanscapes to mitigate the immense challenges of real world conditions in order to imagine viable futures in 2050 and beyond through scenarios of sustainable human communities, wellness, urban solutions, and deep technologies. The Mindfulness Conundrum begins with an investigation of mindfulness through meditation in the common spaces, to unpack the sacred in the ordinary. The studio unpacks future environments at urban and architectural scales. Students examine the multifarious challenges under the broad umbrella of future urbanism.

POOL PLUS: PUBLIC ACCLIMATIZATION 

Tutor: Florian Heinzelmann

Pool Plus: Public Acclimatization investigates sports facilities in response to the existing masterplan of “Tengah Forest Town” with all its aspects of a futuristic HDB town and its implementation of smart technologies, green and sustainability measures, car free district, vast plantations, urban farming, etc. and potential integration of those aspects with the design research on a neighborhood and building scale. The design brief encompasses swimming pools, gyms, fitness studios, supporting amenities, back of the house, staff facilities and also additional sports facilities and community programmes which should be freely explored. These aspects open the design research for a multifunctional building which is striving for synergies between various programmes, community aspects, technologies, green & blue landscape and also resilient solutions like passive climatic design strategies which additionally form relations between indoor, semi outdoor, and outdoor spaces. The studio further investigates the role of public sports facilities within the Singaporean context past and present and how these facilities or aspects thereof can be adopted and envisioned for the future.

HERITAGE IN MOTION: TRADITION RE-PRESENTED

Tutor: Ho Puay Peng and Tan Kay Ngee

Tradition is often constructed. People view tradition differently across generational or cultural boundaries. Everyone takes away a perspective of tradition when encountering rich culture due to its deep layering. Oftentimes, such encounters challenge our perception of cultural phenomena and challenge the culture that is ours. Heritage is tradition valued. However, in the process of heritage making, we often take a static and narrow view of the tradition. We tend to freeze the tradition. This can be directed to the study of built heritage within the rich traditional landscape, such as Kyoto. In this most traditional of Japanese cities, there are a plethora of cultural forms covering all aspects of life. However, in such a stereotypical construction of Kyoto, we have cast the contemporary interpretation of tradition aside and focus only on the traditional forms as we see them. This studio questions such an approach and encourages the exploration of a different encounter with the tradition. The point of entry into the Kyoto milieu can be literature, crafts, rituals, world view…. The site is a modernist secondary school not far from the river Kamogawa. You will propose a new use of the school buildings within the urban and cultural contexts of the site, and design new facilities to support the functional programme to enhance the significance of the built heritage.

HILL WITH A VIEW – THE FORMER KEPPEL GOLF CLUB

Tutor: Richard Ho

It has been announced that the lease for two of the 23 golf courses in Singapore will not be renewed when they expire in 2021 and the land will be returned to the Singapore Land Authority.  It’s timely that we as a nation re-examine our priorities especially when so much land has been set aside for the recreation of so few, not to mention that golf courses are perhaps the most detrimental to the biodiversity of our natural environment and not sustainable in the long run for a city-state that purportedly has a shortage of land, but what will happen to these two golf courses?

It is the intention of this studio to select one of these, the Keppel Golf Club located at Telok Blangah, to propose appropriate uses for its future.

BE MY GUEST

Tutor: Thierry Kandjee and Petra Pferdmenges

In the last Venice Architecture Biennale the curator Hashim Sarkis asked, in an age of conflict, ‘How will we live together?’. The exhibition at the Thai pavilion addresses the Tha Tum district in Thailand where humans and elephants have lived side by side for centuries. ‘The architecture is embedded with much consideration for one another, as elephants are considered members of the household,’ says the Thai curators.

Our design studio entitled BE MY GUEST aims to respond to the question of the Biennale at the scale of your choice (district, building or installation). It is a call to you as ambassador of togetherness among humans as well as among human and non humans.

QuantumCITY: THE QUEENSTOWN STUDIO

Tutor: Khoo Peng Beng

Our foundational understanding of reality – of what matter is – is totally changed by the quantum paradigm. The ideas of Newton, Darwin and Freud, the basic sources of today’s world view have been overtaken by new discoveries. In the worldview of the emerging quantum paradigm, the universe is not a lifeless, soulless aggregate of inert chunks of matter, it is instead a living organism. Life is not a random accident and the basis of the human psyche is more than about survival and self-gratification. We are all a part and simultaneously a whole in our interconnected universe. How does this new paradigm affect our well being, our city and architecture.

The studio is interested in exploring the quantum paradigm and the dance of relationships and materials that affect our overall perception and being in architecture. We will adopt a state of un-knowing or aporia so that we can be open to exploring possibilities arising from the interactions of the multiple contexts affecting any issue. We will start by immersing ourselves in Queenstown, Singapore’s first public housing estate.

MUSEUM ALIVE!

Tutor: Ar. Thomas Kong; Dr. Khoo Eng Tat; Dr. Clement Zheng; Dr. Yen Ching-Chiuan

Museums around the world are working to break traditional stereotypes by revamping their designs to connect to wider groups of audiences. The emergence of virtual museums and augmented reality apps are extending the boundaries of museums beyond their physical walls. In this joint studio, architecture students will collaborate with engineering and industrial design students in designing immersive and interactive museum experiences that address a cause. Topics such as storytelling, virtual, augmented and mixed reality, embodied interaction and haptics, cultural computing and place-making will be introduced to support students in delivering diverse outcomes. Students may design interactive experiences that transform space, create new content and interaction modality, or learn a new language of technology based on three broad museum futures – The Metaverse Museum, The Inclusive Museum and the Distributed Museum.

SULTAN SHOAL BRIDGE

Tutor: Joseph Lim

As Tuas Phase 2 is currently under construction 150 meters away from Sultan Shoal Lighthouse which is situated on a 0.6ha island, the idea of a bridge to provide vehicular access arises. While the crossing is a vital landmark reflecting the corporate image of the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore as a progressive organisation, the public appreciation of this special facility requires deeper thinking.

Beyond a singular transport function, the studio identifies key challenges in order to direct design strategies that fulfil fitness for purpose, sustainable and low energy imperatives with innovative scopes for fabrication and installation.

To this end, the physical linkage between Sultan Shoal and Tuas Port Phase 2 is to provide more than accessibility to Sultan Shoal, as it is to link new with old in a heritage site of historical value in the development of Singapore. The linkage will integrate the Tuas Port development and the Victorian architecture of the Lighthouse in a proposal to do more than display maritime heritage and history, or to facilitate corporate functions and events for public engagement. It seeks meaning for a new existence in an area of former restricted access.

This studio is supported by the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore.

FEELS LIKE 38˚ C, SOUTH SEA WIND FLOWING THROUGH AT SOME SPEED

Tutor: Ling Hao

62% humidity is pretty intense. I sit shirtless soaking it all in; on the 23rd floor with multiple cross-ventilations and directly under a fan, this thing still hits you with a full force, each time, every year, on this island, in this flat.

The building came before me, I came from somewhere else, but i adapt to this flat, move around in it, lie here, sit there, look out from, clouds drift by… The environment and our behavior continuously mutually transform. As we wake up each day, are we able to refresh our relationship with our environment?

The intentions of this studio are to discover the flows of time in our daily world and to encounter a natural way of living.

DESIGN FOR DEMOCRATIZATION OF ARCHITECTURE

Tutor: Warren Liu

The business of architecture and construction is very inaccessible to the vast majority of the population, it is expensive, complicated and undemocratic.

In particular, building is largely left to wealthy speculative developers who build directly for the second-hand market and therefore have little incentive to build something of good value and sustainable. Today, architecture and building are still primarily top-down activities driven by profit, and not the wishes and needs of end users.

Given that the construction industry alone takes up more than 50% of the non-renewable resources consumed by humankind and a situation where a few decide what is good for the majority, how can we even begin to solve some of the serious and systemic challenges we face today, such as global warming, resource depletion, disruption of labour and material supply chains, aging population, and rising cost?

With advanced, high performance materials that are inexpensive and easily sourced, augmented with digital design technology and manufacturing, it has become tenable for the act of building to be more accessible to a larger segment of the population. The key lies in combining cheap materials with simple construction techniques that enable portable and quick assembly, like lightweight prefab or modular systems, as well as with new technologies and innovations like open source collaborations and digital fabrication that simplify customisation without compromising architecture’s creative potential.

It is time to change the traditional tendency for Architects to conceptualise building designs with the design brief in mind but leaving it to engineers and contractors to work out how to build it. The profession needs to apply design thinking to allow transparency and to optimise all stages of the building process so that more people can engage in the act of building. In that way a  bottom-up architecture can emerge and meet with the top down process.

ORDINARY DENSITIES

Tutor: Victoria Jane Marshall

Problems of extreme population or building density are often used to influence desirable or undesirable urban form. Might other conceptions of density shape urban futures differently? Density, as geographer Colin McFarlane (2016) notes, is both a topographical problem of number and measurement and a problem of topological politics and space. The studio will explore one kilometre square, “ordinary” (Robinson, 2005) areas in Southeast Asia through found densities; topographical, relational, volumetric, experiential, and perceptual. The term ordinary here means an area where there is no singular big conflict, where power, understood topologically and with nonhumans and their diverse agencies in mind, is diffused.

ESSENTIAL QUALITY OF SPACE

AN ANTIDOTE TO CHAOS

Tutor: Pier Alessio Rizzardi – TCA Think Tank

How do we experience space? And why should we mind about it?

A showcase of projects, from masterplans, buildings, and installations will offer hints on how to respond, displaying approaches to design rooted in visual, physical, and immaterial dynamics arising between users and architectural space, simulating experiences, and guiding behaviors.

The course will present the ephemeral nature of architecture, the uncertainty of fixed programmes, and solutions to the fragility of the present and future urban environments.

Each module will uncover interdisciplinary and cross-scale design solutions providing functional tools to create thriving and vibrant spaces, successfully withstanding the test of time.

Starting from a conceptual understanding of the potential of the space, students will explore the possibility of formal and informal spaces, creating practical design results to implement in different archetypal architecture projects.

SENSORIAL & SMART – design investigations

Tutor: Ruzica Bozovic Stamenovic

This Option Studio is examining the potentials of sensorial mechanisms to drive design decisions, initiate paradigmatic changes and generate new built landscapes in the process. Supporting smart technologies and advanced integrated thinking should be the tool for achieving novel, exciting, affective and effective designs.  A generic design brief is the Sensorial Singapore Capsule, a temporary pavilion set in Singapore, or abroad. It represents the essence of sensorial values of the city, exceeds the expected tropical framework and implies more conceptual characteristics detectable through all senses. Methods of design investigation include facilitated short design exercises and other scenario-based explorations and experimentations with sensory design, monitoring and documenting through collages, intuitive drawings, cartoons, conceptual models, material performance exercises, and visualization of ideas and concepts in other forms and analogue/digital techniques.

URBAN DECARBONISATION: COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS AND RULE-BASED DESIGN

Tutor: Rudi Stouffs

This studio focuses on Singapore’s sea-city fringes and its current threat of increasing shocks and stresses induced by climate change and excessive CO₂ emissions. Specifically, through computational analysis and rule-based design we aim to explore urban design and planning approaches that can help to mitigate climate change and reduce its effects, emphasizing the reduction of carbon emissions and the potential for building biomimicry technology to capture, absorb, store and remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Starting from the current urban landscape, we aim to identify positive design actions and express these in the form of design rules that encode their conditional application to the existing situation thereby achieving a preferable outcome. Embedding both conditions and parameters for application, design rules operate on the data at hand, and express geometric and semantic transformations. Design rules support computation and the exploration of alternative design outcomes.

MORTAL ENGINES: TURF CITY

Tutor: Gwen Tan & Chew Kok Yong

By the end of 2023, the Singapore Land Authority will repossess the plot of land where The Grandstand sits on, as well as its surrounding areas, for upcoming land sales. With its history dating back to the 1930s, it is a repurposed horse racing stadium that now houses lifestyle, F&B, retail, education, office and sports facilities. It is also home to a wide variety of flora and fauna.

Rewilding is a strategy used by conservationists to ensure continuity of our natural environment and sustainability of resources for future generations. In nature, cross-pollination leads to stronger species. Due to the pandemic, the way we reimagine spaces has been accelerated, and the hybridisation of spatial programming is on the rise.

How can we add a value proposition to the land sale of Grandstand that does not involve a full scale bulldozing of the site? We see Grandstand as the best place to test bed a “cross-pollination” of programmes, urban rewilding, and placemaking to serve the community around. Are we able to better design the building and/or the spaces around it, and ensure its materials also contribute back to the ecology?

THE LOOS & WAGNER VIENNA STUDIO: RETHINKING THE RINGSTRASSE

Tutor: Rene Tan & RT+Q Architects

This is part of a series of design studios that apply history to design. It pairs a great architect of the past with an important city. Its primary aim is to guide students towards creating beautiful designs for a better sustainable environment today.

Like its companion studios – the Palladio-Venice, Brunelleschi-Florence, Le Corbusier-Paris, the Bernini & Borromini-Rome studios – this travelling design studio engages a city, revisits the past and applies relevant lessons to the present.

The aim is to acquaint the student with important architects in the context of a global city – in this case Vienna, the city of the Habsburgs, of Mozart, of waltzes, of coffee-houses, and of the Wiener Schnitzel; a city rich in history, culture and architecture. In broader terms, this studio will also look at the works of other important architects and personalities of ‘ fin-de-siecle’ Vienna, notable Josef-Maria Olbrich, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoshka, Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler amongst others – cultural giants who made Vienna the leading cultural centre in Europe. The studio will 1) research and analyse buildings by Adolf Loos & Otto Wagner, 2) reinterpret and reconstruct their values, and 3) apply and develop ideas into two (2) small design projects.

This studio explores Loos & Wagner’s contribution to architecture and design (in this case the Raumplan of Loos and the urban vision of Wagner) and how its relevant in today’s design challenges. This studio engages urban planning, conservation, landscape and reconstruction within the larger scenario of design, travel and fun.

Conceived as a ‘travelling studio’ that takes the classroom out of the school, actual travel to Vienna (during term-break) is contingent upon covid restrictions. If travel is not possible, the studio will proceed with virtual-travel utilising online material, digital information and other resources available.

NEW TRANSFORMATION POSSIBILITIES

Tutor: Teh Joo Heng

Interestingly, much of natural resources and human effort are used to create our built environment. Indiscriminate demolition and rebuilding should be re-examined. Our built environment should be viewed as a resource, to be valued and treasured.

Rethinking our built environment as resource will provide a significant insight to address the sustainability issues we are now facing.  The studio would like to investigate how the existing built environment in the city, consisting of building, road, public infrastructure, urban spaces can be transformed, re-structured, re-programmed to invent new strategies to ensure long term resilience and sustainability.

The studio hopes to speculate what the BRAS BASAH BUGIS AREA will be like when this transformation takes full effect.

THE URBAN-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: ORGANIZATION STUDIES & ITS ARCHITECTURE

Tutor: H. Koon Wee

The original urban-industrial complex theory came about through a study of cities in China, as they were industrializing and urbanizing at an alarming rate. Conventional economic wisdom suggests that developing states have to industrialize. Once developed, their cities would rapidly deindustrialized and take on tertiary or service-oriented functions. However, their innate techno-urban rhythms and programmes remain highly industrial, and often silently oppressive. Educationalist Ken Robinson went as far as to suggest that our current education is still rooted in 19^th century industrial forms, preparing workers with incremental skills for production. Singapore is replete with iterations of an industrial 40-hour work week, such as the sizing of MRT and highways to match peak hour capacity travel, design of parks for weekend recreation, extolled virtues of punctuality and efficiency, and many others. Throughout the centuries, industrial organizations have produced not only factories and workers, but they have given form to infrastructure, greenery, housing, education, healthcare, food, cultural production, and so on, in the same way that they have given rise to institutions of social welfare, justice and control.

This studio seeks to identify the organizational traits behind a number of these industrial firms that may have since diversified into other entities. Adopting organization studies as a design methodology, students would study an industrial organization of their choice, similar to how they may develop an understanding of a complex client through research. This process will train students to read the territorial and spatial footprints of such an organization, in pursuit of its production and profit goals.

With an understanding of the depth of exploitation and control required of factories and related urban functions, students would further formulate the basis for a new programmatic and formal intervention.

TROPICAL PUBLIC HOUSING: BUILT FORM, SPACE, DECARBONIZATION

Tutor: Yuan Chao

80% of Singapore‘s resident population live in flats built by Housing Development Board (HDB). Meanwhile, Singapore aims to archive net-zero carbon emission in 2050. Public housing planning and design undoubtedly play an important role on decarbonization, and it is still challenging to architects to balance the increasing demand on housing and potential environmental impact.

This design studio tries to tackle this important mass housing design issue and engages students to explore ways to conduct climate-responsive design to provide public housing that are more climate sustainable and resilient. The studio emphasizes the systematic environmental strategies for decarbonization at different design stages.

The knowledge delivered in this studio allows students not only to deepen the understandings on urban microclimate, but also to practice the corresponding design strategies and skills.