10th ACARA Rookie Architect of the Year award

Congratulations to Ryan Quah Kun Hao, a third-year architecture student has won the 10th Asian Contest of Architectural Rookie’s Award (ACARA). This is an international contest for architectural students in Asia. The competition is organized by Asia United Architectural Association (AUA), and submissions came from Indonesia, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Laos, Nepal, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

The theme of this year’s competition is “Creating Space, Re-interpreting tradition”. The theme challenges students to create creative designs on how the “past” value can be synchronized in the future.

Ryan’s project, titled “High-Tech Favela: Industrial Agora”, illustrate a scene of temperamental growth and negotiation between tenants through a bottom-up approach. Finding value in the existing elements in Defu Industrial Estate, the project conserves the structural element of its formal self to act as affordance for the future urban fabric. The removal of physical boundary and built-element reconstitute Defu as a singular piece of land with unrestricted space and tenants. Freed from lease and prescriptive land-use, this creates a paradigm shift in urban planning – subverting the former factory typology from capitalist hegemony to a new democratic collectivism.

The Industrial Agora capitalises on the legacy columns as the device for management and ownership. Spatial and ‘estate’ development becomes unrestricted, allowing for constant change, accidents and improvisation. Permutated by varied scales and typology of tenants, the architectural space negotiates and palimpsest based on the circumstances that preceded it – resulting in acts of exchange, entanglement, battles, and collaboration. The scene attempts to demonstrate and reflect the complex relationship of interest, conflict and exchange – manifesting an imagined outcome with varied possibilities of growth and negotiation that could take place in an imagined future.

Mentored by: Ar Colin Seah

Click here to view the students’ work.