01/ mod residence @paya lebar
residential | high rise public residential building| nus | y4s1 | studio tan beng kiang | 2022
the new normal: neighbourhood and houing design in post covid-19 pandemic
The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has posed great challenges to our daily lives, socially, psychologically, economically and environmentally. 83% of Singapore’s population live in public housing across 23 new towns built by the country’s Housing & Development Board (HDB). More housing estates are being planned still. How should we design neighbourhoods and housing to weather future pandemics? How will pandemic response measures, such as safe distancing, work-from-home and self quarantine, affect the way we expect people to function and interact? What should the design of pandemic-ready neighbourhoods look like, and how do we envision their residents will live, work, play and learn? This studio researches the implications of COVID-19 on the built environment and envisage a design that can respond in a resilient way to possible future pandemics.
MOD Residence @Paya Lebar is located at the old Paya Lebar Airbase where it has been envisioned to be a modernized residential neighbourhood that welcomes flexible spatial modification and crowd moderation in times of a pandemic. With the use of modules and grid-like systems, the overall design proposes spaces that reconfigurable and transformable, forming micro-communities and breathable spaces that are self-sustaining and pandemic resilient.
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Modular housing units are stacked and are centered around a main courtyard space. Individual mini yards are allocated to each unit, functioning as a sanitization zone before one enters the unit, or as a space to drop off deliveries or parcels safely. It also creates opportunities for both incidental and intentional interactions. The positioning of the units creates corner views and ensures sufficient daylight and air circulation within the spaces. Mobile extensions are also located on the first floor of the podium blocks, open green spaces and sky terraces, which can be configured to create smaller spaces for small scaled programs, reducing the congregation of large crowds.
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The additional help of technology enables residents to use an app to decide as a community the kinds of weekly programs they want happening in their neighborhood, allowing for a variety of programs to consistently happen in their neighbourhood and enriching the residents’ lives.
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With the use of modules and grid like systems, the overall design proposes spaces that can be reconfigured and transformed, forming micro-communities and breathable spaces that are self-sustaining and pandemic resilient.
02/ connect @keppel
residential | mid rise public residential building| sp | y2 | 2017-2018
integrated project: the future of housing
Located at a corner plot facing the promenade and sea, connect @keppel is a 12-storey multi-residential building that responds to the social and environmental issues of future housing - an increasingly dense population due to rapid aging population and the additional influx of foreigners.
The project investigates the idea of encouraging neighborliness and social interactions in a dense environment through the use of open spaces. The project also explores how these open spaces, particularly communal spaces, can serve and cater to people with different degrees of social needs, rating from introvertness to extrovertness.
The building is mainly divided into three layers to represent each zone - public, semi-public and private. These layers are then pulled apart to form communal spaces, and then subtracted to create porosity to encourage better ventilation and visual connectivity among residents within the spaces.
