DOMESTIC CAPITAL:
Typological Experiments (II)
Studio Tutor
A/P Dr. Lilian Chee
Assisted by Lim Kun Yi James, Liyana Doneva
Level
NUS, M.Arch (1), AR5802
Type
Design Studio
Academic Year
2023/2024, Semester 2
Students
Guo Yuqi, Huang Zitao, Juan Rafael Salinas Panopio, Juliana Marie Jumig Masiclat, Marcus Loh Men Tong, Tan Wan Theng, Zheng Rui
Reviewers
Dr Federico Ruberto, Senior Lecturer, Programme Director (BA Arch), DOA
Dr Constance Lau, Senior Lecturer, University of Westminster;
Dr Victoria Jane Marshall, Senior Lecturer, Programme Director (MLA), DOA
Dr Wong Zi Hao, Adjunct Lecturer, DOA
Ar Thomas Kong, Associate Professor, Deputy Head (External Relations), DOA
Ar Prof Peter Sim, Director, FARM
Ar Lin Derong, Senior Designer, FARM
Ar Christo Meyer, Part-Time Lecturer , DOA
Image Credits: Marcus Loh Men Tong, 'Can You Hear the Music?' in Domestic Capital: Typological Experiments (II) (2024)
SELECTED WORKS
Can You Hear the Music?
by Marcus Loh Men Tong
Musicians are no strangers to self-exploitation. They appropriate their own spaces and shared spaces, as well as robbing time (rubato) to sustain their passion and livelihood. The high-rise flat, like a well-tuned instrument, amplifies the music of its musical inhabitant. The improvisation of a flat into home studios, workshops, or practice rooms often robs the home while also compromising on a dedicated space requisite for the musical arts. Bras Basah Complex’s customary stocking of instruments, music scores and recordings for music lovers and its locale in the heart of the arts district in Singapore makes it an obvious testbed for a new arrangement of living empathetic to music-making, where it shall be the stage for the revival of an ageing slab block.
In this scheme, a part of the slab block is radically transformed into a tower for musicians. The tower becomes a beacon in the city and a social condenser for the musical arts. The music tower also produces modes of sociality which recall the original ambitions of high-rise living. Can You Hear the Music?’ seeks to harmonise the practical needs of musicians with opportunities that the ageing high-rise housing with podium block presents, rewriting a duet between the complexities of everyday domesticity and the labour of music making.
Life In-Between
by Zheng Rui
This project examines the states that exist between the virtual and the real, as well as between introversion and extroversion, focusing on spatial transitions experienced by text creators. Using Bras Basah Complex as a base, it discusses the definitions of work and living spaces. My design intervention emphasises the façade created by the building’s windows and corridors, aiming to disrupt the living and working environments of text creators. By integrating residential units with the podium roof, the design connects public and private areas while activating surrounding living spaces through this in-between zone, thereby promoting interaction among residents. This dynamic also influences the creativity and productivity of text creators. The design strategy addresses the blurred boundaries of work and life in the post-pandemic era, challenges the binary oppositions present in Singapore’s spatial strategies, and proposes new ways of existing in the transitional space between work and life.
Playground: Creative Companionship in a Living Landscape
by Tan Wan Theng
A village’s organic configuration in the city invigorates the life of a podium-block typology once conceived as a microcosm of a city. Inspired by the fluidity and agency of Co-Living Commune in Yogyakarta and the utopic Auroville, Playground seeks to uncover a core unifying architectural spirit that may rejuvenate Bras Basah’s identity as a creative artist residency and an imaginative testbed for boundless experimentation.
Conceiving the podium as a constellation of activities, I explore how urban networks are shifted into a vertical system where transient fluidity of various S,M,L,XL scales of architectural typology create unique stages of encounter and spaces of indeterminacy for co-authorship. Proposing a structural lattice as an addition to the existing block, the site is conceived as an artist residency. Traces of usage and domesticated patterns of everyday rituals in embodied life forms delve into material typologies and atmospheric scenography through the lens of Actor-Network Theory.
My intervention eventually seeks to argue for an alternative paradigm of Creative Companionship by uncovering the tensions between the conflicting commercial typologies with the fluidity and accessibility of knowledge exchange, where knowledge encompassing the work/live agents such as architects, budding creatives and designers, tenants and residents, can potentially form parts of a self generating system of creative capital.
Playground recasts the architect as a mastermind and facilitator of architecture as a social process - where spaces and creative companionship unravel, linger and embody subjectivities. A space to be and to become.
