Research by Design
Foundations for Home-Based Work: A Comparative Perspective (Conference and Exhibition, 2023)
The global pandemic restructured the locations and logic of paid work in profound ways, requiring many to work from home and setting society on a pathway that is transforming conventional boundaries between work and home. Be it the work-from-home office worker, the digital nomad or the precariously engaged gig worker, each one uses the home and neighbourhood in novel ways. This conference reflects on the social and infrastructural implications of this restructuring from a comparative perspective.
Foundations for Home-Based Work: A Comparative Perspective is a hybrid international conference funded by the Cultural Research Centre, under Department of Communications and New Media and jointly held with the Asia Research Institute at NUS, as a culminative part of a research project entitled Foundations for Home-Based Work: A Singapore Study (NUS-IRB-2021-799; Project No. A-0008463-01-00), funded by MOE SSRTG, under Principal Investigator Associate Professor Lilian Chee, and Co-Investigators Professor Jane M. Jacobs, Professor Audrey Yue, and Associate Professor Natalie Pang.
Link: https://foundationsforhomebasedwork.com/conference
Reframing Public Heritage Symposium
Link: https://www.whampoaarchives.com/videos/
Research By Design: Promise, Anxiety and Insecurity in Academia
Remote Practices: Architecture in Proximity (Online Public Symposium, 2020)
Earlier this year we proposed a CFP entitled “remote practices” to explore how architecture’s complex and distant interfaces are being intensified through a mass globalisation of the discipline. In it we sought to explore how the remote practice of architecture has become inherent in the way phases of early ideation to late production could take on surprising transformations as architects and critics use different tools to manifest ideas and imaginations to the otherwise distant and invisible; to design, describe and critique future and past constructions in absentia.
As people retreated to their homes in the recent pandemic, the business of doing architecture in schools and offices also shifted into their temporary holding spaces. It made many of the issues we wished to discuss in the original CFP more timely. Architecture, a discipline which thrives on expression and imagination, and which had already been remotely practised by way of translation across different media and sites, now takes on a further dimension of distancing; this time in the absence of a physical community of architects, designers, teachers and students.
The distances between these different modes of doing architecture—drawings, diagrams and models, manifestos and critiques in the printed form; augmented reality walkthroughs and digital films; digital prefabrication technologies, and the built form—create several thresholds by which architecture may already be understood as a remote practice. In the past few months the practice and education of architecture has faced a temporary cessation of travel, closure of many construction sites and an absence of office environments where ideas can be openly discussed and materialised through conversation. What are the local and global implications which the remote practice of architecture entails, for the pedagogy, practice and critique of architecture?
1. Pedagogy: What does it mean to teach design face-to-face, and what is lost in translation from a distance? What values might there still be for the haptic and analog modes of learning-through-making, in a shift from physical to virtual? What opportunities and new knowledges do remote practices offer for testing and running experimental ways of learning?
2. Practice: If anything, a pandemic has made the remote practice of architecture a global reality. Yet in these new norms, what might remote field-working methods offer as discoveries in lieu of access to real/physical sites? How would authorship in architecture be redefined? Are there precedents for new forms of collaborative authorship to emerge?
3. Critique: The architectural community has begun to critically reflect on the shifting spatial paradigms of inside-outside, private-public, and home-workplace that remote practices have emphasised. Yet, creativity and criticality may be risked in the distancing and fragmentation of education and practice. What alternative modes of creative energy and critical discourse might be borne from architecture’s contingent and emergent remote practices?
Link: https://remotepractices.wordpress.com/keynote-speakers/
Situating Domesticities in Architecture (International Conference, 2017)
This international workshop brings together academics working to challenge the established notions of domesticity with relation to home, architecture, and space in order to re-interrogate the inherent relationships of these four tenets. More than the terms ‘home’ and the ‘interior,’ domesticity implicates gender, sexuality, labour, class, ethnicity and taste. It suggests certain productions, be it biological, material, psychological, social or national. Within these diverse domains, domesticity concerns the performative aspect of bodies in space as occupants, tenants, parents, grandparents, children, maids, architects, designers, builders, state-representatives. And, it also involves spatial practices which represent, reproduce, construct and govern these bodies. As such, its scope is necessarily wide-ranging, referring amongst others to ‘domestic sustenance,’ ‘domestic affiliation,’ ‘domestic comfort,’ ‘domestic help,’ and ‘domestic boundaries.’
This workshop provides a forum to discuss these changing relationships affect disciplinary discourses, and the implication on their histories and theories. Collectively, we are interested in the politics and poetics of domestic space related to: policies and protectionism, war and territorial conflict, economic liberalization, consumerism and consumption, colonization and decolonization, gender/race/ethnicity, migration, nation building, media culture, and technological developments in building processes and domestic products.
Link: https://situatingdomesticities.wordpress.com/
Poster Photos
Miscellaneous: Poster Photos.
Miscellaneous: Poster Photos.
Miscellaneous: Poster Photos.