Annabelle Tan Kai Lin
A Working Archive of Design, Research and Thoughts
A Working Archive of Design, Research and Thoughts
A Journey through Past, Present and Post-Tropicality
The project is an investigation into notions of ‘tropicality’ in the context of Singapore. Historically, concepts of nature, comfort, civil behaviour and progress have been shaped by depoliticised agendas grouped under the umbrella of ‘tropicality’. Framing ‘tropicality’ in terms of scarcity and affordances, the project ‘unmakes’ colonial vestiges of ‘tropical success’ that linger in our infrastructure and ‘remakes’ a landscape of affordances.
01
Scale of the Island-scape
The first scale of the project investigates tropicality at a transnational and islandwide scale. Sites of production, reproduction and exchange are connected in a networked landscape across Singapore, unearthing the flows of material, people and meaning that make up the current landscape.
A Post-Tropical Network of Urban Instruments
The issue of ‘tropicality’ is framed in terms of man-made scarcity and potential affordances. Eight key resource of land, water, food, energy, labour, material, biodiversity and civic space are investigated as tropical ‘technicalities’. This forms the basis of a language of interventions that both physically provides new affordances within the familiar urban landscape.
02
Scale of Infrastructural Urbanism
While the network of urban tools ‘unmade’ infrastructures of scarcity and ‘remade’ affordances, the proposal then attempts to synthesise the two strands of thought to forge an architecture from this post-tropical condition, at the scale of infrastructural provision.
A New Socio-Ecological Continuum
The proposal is a radical re-imagining of land use, proposing an inhabitable eco-corridor that completes the ecological connectivity between Tengah forest and the nature reserve, while also providing the housing units that was to be built by clearing Tengah. Along this new linear ecourban continuum, civic nodes bring neighboring communities together, weaving together an interconnected post-tropical network.
A Taxonomy of Post-Tropical Architectures
The eco-corridor is made up of eight new architectural prototypes that share the material and reproduction logic but serve different programmes. Apart from new housing typologies, there are hydropower pools, bamboo and timber community workshops, artificial paddy fields and shade-giving hydroponic growing towers.
Metabolic Systems
The infrastructure aims to produce and reproduce itself, both socially and materially. Thus, brick, bamboo and timber are chosen for the ability to be made and used locally in-situ. Growing periods, cultivation cycles and mechanical properties of these materials have informed the largescale masterplanning of infrastructure as well as the small-scale details of material logic and aesthetic.
03
Scale of the Domestic Everyday
Lastly, the project turns to an intimate domestic scale. At this scale, I turned to oral histories, generational memory and intimate familial moments of the domestic to re-imagine how we might live in the future, in tandem to the infrastructure of affordances proposed.
A Cascade of Terraced Housing
Rejecting the privatised and individualised atomisation of nuclear families, this collection of terraced housing condenses generations and families together to share skills and resources more efficiently. This typology houses multigenerational families and focuses on areas for the passing down of embodied knowledge and practices, supported by infrastructure that allow ownership over resources. These in-built resource systems are legible in the form of rainwater collectors, ventilation courtyards and changes in the brick wall.
A Thin Sliver of Housing
Challenging our inherited Western standards of comfort, the interior spaces of the house are reduced to a thin sliver, forcing habits of living to embrace the tropical exterior. The internal space becomes a weather-contingent living area which has to be activated by practice, aided by a designed set of cabinetry that defines space depending on how it is deployed. Likewise, the facade is a set of cabinetry customisable by inhabitants, creating a varied façade of heterogeneous porosity and vulnerability to weather.
A Growing Tower of Housing
This typology inverts a tower to create a ring of public-facing living spaces around the brick core. ‘Wet’ spaces and staircases are located in the core which remains as the stable infrastructure while living arrangements around it change. Main living spaces face outwards for light and ventilation, mediated by a movable and adjustable facade of woven bamboo and timber. The central common space creates a semi-private oasis for domestic moments, like laundry drying and lounging, to coalesce into collective moments.
