zihao's petridish

the punggol new countryside growth model...



the punggol autonomous cohousing experiment...


erm this is the design i kiam everyone... the one that i said i will upload when it is complete but i realise it can never be complete... leonardo does not complete his inventions u see...

it comes in the height of all the talk of emergence theories wuks and sio is talking abt.


basically my scheme comes as a means to meaningfully rehabilitate the tabula rasa land of punggol via means of cohousing and reforestation. (hang on... i know it sounds cliche). it starts off with the mindset to reconciling the 4 main elements in direct contestation in architecture and nature: RAIN, MANKIND, NATURE, DEBRIS (think of any permutation and realise they are multi causal and usually in direct conflict) i do realise that a pro naturalist approach, nor a superficial tree hugger approach is not going to work somehow. but a resultant "Emergence" theory in my work seemed overly utopian. i reasoned that N Parks and a housing agency could come up with public private partnership guidelines to handle the land lease and public access to nature issues. being a cohousing community, the usage of cars shd be optimally reduced and the current LRT system shd ENHANCE the value of staying and playing in the area.

so hor... i laid out an invisible 10m hexagonal grid which could accomodate: a tree, or a housing unit. sadly though, as khengsoon pointed out, the hexagon could be a means to rationalising land division but not the building form... i got stuck in a Buckminster Fuller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house) building form.

the grid interacts with foot paths, with the way nature will be allowed to grow, with visitors bypassing routes into other more "fun places" in our punggol masterplan, results in a mesh of possibilities: 1. natural beauty, 2. cohousing sites , 3. rest, recreational folies, 4. nature to be consumed (for timber, plantations). in the crit i blurted this site as a petridish... khengsoon liked that name. for once i was taico during crit...

the house design was based on a flexible floor plan. i reasoned that with sufficient forest cover with autonomous house technologies, as well as a functioning man made water harvesting system that flows through the area, any building form could be achieved. i have my reasons for believing so... but the design comes through damn raw haha... i required a keen sense of building technologies to understand how a plug and play lightweight wood material could be joint to a structural column system which i invariably failed to do so (see ugly sketches)

the only thing that works is collecting all the landfill debris strewn around the punggol site into gabions and celebrate them into stone adobes that act as cohousing commons house, and/or recreational centres.

sounds confusing? darnz... i had the crit in stitches most of the time. khengsoon calls it the most entertaining crit of the day.

this process of site exploration (i had a table and chair in my site and sat there for 10 hrs one day), reading, chatting with khengsoon, sketching, could never realistically be completed in one semester. but i guess at the end of the day...

...i had my fun