Articulated Landscapes: Sustainable Space Making Across Scales
Globally, more people live in urban areas than in rural areas as our planet has gone through rapid urbanization in recent decades. This requires a rethinking of the design of our future cities in order to formulate sustainable solutions. The presented design studio output is part of a long-term collaboration between Aalto University and SUTD, which started in 2019. The proposed design solutions are the starting point for implementation within a series of test cases in Finland and Singapore. Within the studio, computational methods and techniques are developed to study the relationship between the center and the city across scales and its underlying flows of different data streams like people, material and culture, urban green.Â
----------------------------
Studio introduction
Digital design is driven by thinking in structures and systems, translated in a pattern of order and their interaction. The joint studio is an introduction into such design thinking and emphasizes the exploration of spatial organizational pattern, in various levels of abstraction and scale through the integration of computational methods and workflows. The studio in spring is part of a collaboration with Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and will explore the role of hawker centers as civic spaces in Singapore.
Within the studio, computational methods and techniques will be developed to study the relationship between the center and the city across scales and its underlying flows of different data streams like people, material and culture, urban green. This knowledge will be used to speculate on proposals for new types of Hawker centers in Singapore aiming at the connection of urban and green systems into a new urban typology.
----------------------------
Projects
Interweave
Students: Joonas Saarinen, Tina Cerpnjak
The Hawker Centre is a social nexus point in Singaporean culture, bringing together family, friends and people of different cultural backgrounds to enjoy food and good company in an informal setting. The project aims to expand this notion to incorporate social programme, interweaving urban green and a plethora of leisure activities within a single active landscape. Thus establishing a new social heart of the otherwise anonymous new Punggol urban development.
Fluctuant Surface
Students: Yiping Zhang, Yuyan Shi
The project aims to explore the spatial possibilities of minimal surfaces in the context of the Singapore hawker center.
Open Form
Students: Nora Sønstlien, Solveig Døskeland
The new type of hawker centre is based on the idea of an urban plaza as open space of interaction. In order to connect the urban fabric as well as the natural surroundings within the design, a flexible path system is used for the activation of the ground condition. A series of stripes are adjusted according to the local sun and wind conditions in terms of height and width, breaking down the large site into human-scale spaces with varying degree of intimacy.
Connections
Student: Kai Hakala
For the hawker culture to survive it needs to find ways to attract new entrepreneurs. In my concept I focused on creating comfortable and functional spaces that work together as a whole by supporting each other’s activation throughout the day in a symbiotic manner. This would bring in more customers and therefore increase the chances of hawkers earning a steady income, which would likely encourage new entrepreneurs to enter the profession.
Design in the VOID
Student: Amir Hossein Teymourtash
Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; a fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed. Space was created by piling matter on top of matter, cemented to form a solid new whole. Junkspace is additive, layered, and lightweight. Where it is absent it is simply applied. There is no form only proliferation. But formlessness is still form, the formless also a typology…It is a space of collisions a container of atoms, busy not dense
