Curated by faculty from the NUS Department of Architecture and including projects from faculty and students at the College of Design and Engineering, the Singapore Pavilion from the International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale has returned home to go on display at the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) Centre in downtown Singapore.
Titled "to gather: the Architecture of Relationships", the exhibit showcases 16 projects from four themes that examine how we share space.
The pavilion was displayed last year at the 2021 Biennale Architettura - the architecture showcase of the Venice Biennale, a festival of international arts and architecture held every two years in the northern Italian city.
Led by Prof Ho Puay-peng, head of the Department of Architecture at the College of Design and Engineering, the curatorial team behind the pavilion was tasked with answering the Biennale Architettura's theme for 2021: how will we live together?
Taking inspiration from hawker centre culture - which Prof Ho said was a "uniquely Singapore sight and framing device" - the curators set out each exhibit as a table within a mock hawker centre.
"The hawker centre serves as an entry point for us to embark on a series of encounters with the 16 featured projects," Prof Ho told guests attending the exhibition's opening ceremony, held in the atrium of the URA Centre in downtown Singapore.
Uniquely Singaporean
The installations selected by the curatorial team - featuring both built and speculative projects - aim to showcase a uniquely Singaporean model of gathering and living together, representing a cross-section of local cultures and society.
The theme of the festival was given added weight by the COVID-19 pandemic, which upended and transformed the way individuals and communities interact with one another and their surrounding built environments.
"With the pandemic that straddled the period of the Biennale, this particular edition of the Singapore Pavilion has given us the opportunity to reflect on togetherness and how we can live meaningfully with each other - and with nature - within our societal and cultural ambience," Prof Ho said.
Designers behind the 16 projects wanted to showcase how good design plays a central role in establishing safe, healthy and inclusive spaces, the Pavilion's curators said.
New ideas
The exhibit was co-commissioned by the URA and DesignSingapore Council. It was officially opened in Singapore by Ms Indranee Rajah, Minister in the Prime Mister's Office and Second Minister for Finance & National Development.
"While we may not consciously think about them, public spaces are part and parcel of our everyday lives," she said in her speech.
"I hope that visitors will not only take away insights on our relationship with public spaces, but also insights on our relationship with each other - and go away with new ideas on how they can contribute to creating vibrant spaces in their communities."
Two of the projects showcased in the Singapore Pavilion were conceptualised by CDE faculty and students. They are:
Architecture of the Sharing Culture
Co-helmed Dr Zhang Ye from the NUS Department of Architecture, this speculative project encourages the public to re-imagine the concept of "togetherness" - of both the physical and the virtual, in the present and the future. Using augmented reality technologies, the designers invite visitors viewing the exhibits to immerse themselves in a series of hypothetical urban realities that encourage and cultivate sharing.
We are Millennials, Mobilised
Led by Assistant Professor Simone Shu-Yeng Chung from the NUS Department of Architecture, the exhibit stems from an architecture design studio that challenged students to be digital natives and explore the new subjectivities arising from the merging of technologies. The imaginative projects were all conceptualised by millennials who see no distinct separation between the physical and the virtual.
The projects on display in the pavilion cover four sub-themes - Communing Relationships, Framing Relationships, Uncovering Relationships, and Imagining Relationships.
As well as hawker centres, the projects take their inspiration from Singaporean urban spaces such as community centres, sky gardens and void decks that are fixtures in facilitating and nurturing sociability in the city.
The Pavilion will be on show at the atrium of the URA Centre in Maxwell Road until July 8, 2022.
