“I think, with time, government and big time estate developers will embrace this innovation but I don’t think it can really help provide housing for the poor. Because, one, it is only this company that has the franchise. Two, structure is of high quality. The rich people will hijack it and it will become a thing of prestige and, three, you cannot remove the cost of land from the equation,” he said.
July 29, 2010 | Broadcast | News
BCA mulls law to get owners to “green” existing buildings
In case you missed this link that we tweeted on @fivefootway.
The Building and Construction Authority (BCA) is mulling a possible law to get property owners make their existing buildings more environmentally-friendly.
The rule will cover all existing buildings, with the main focus on commercial and office buildings and hotels. This could come in two to three years to help Singapore meet its goal of “greening” 80 percent of its buildings by 2030.
So far, only 8 percent of some 210 million square metres of existing floor area have been “greened”.
We think it’s about time something is done about this. Here’s the link to the article on CNA.
July 28, 2010 | Broadcast | News
China’s urban disease
“A city isn’t a mechanical thing, but an organic life form with history and culture that needs to grow… but China views cities as machines to be dismantled and put together at will.”
Despite the “Better City, Better Life” theme of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, many argue China’s cities are becoming ever less habitable.Southern Metropolis Daily reporter Zhang Chuanwen discusses the problems facing China’s cities with professor Zhang Song of Shanghai Tongji University’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP).
via China Dialogue
July 28, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Some things just don’t work in China
And for a good reason. Assembly’s Sarah Wesseler visits one of Shanghai’s One City, Nine Towns projects and finds a “shabby and depressing” ghost town – great for Muzak and wedding photos, but will it – and the rest – ever become living communities? Shanghai is now one of the largest and most densely packed cities in the world, and one of its top prerogatives right now must be to provide housing for around 400,000 people each year to keep up with the demand. Because many of the new developments are far from the city’s business centers and are poorly linked to public transportation, the successful business people they were meant to lure have largely stayed away. Shanghai’s highly inflated housing market (in which property can double in value in just one year) has also played a role—although houses in the new towns sold out quickly, the vast majority of buyers were speculators who simply let the houses sit empty while waiting to sell them off.
But they make great wedding photo shoot locations.
via Assembly
July 28, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Asia’s alarming cities
IF YOU are the sort to worry at night about man-induced climate change, then book a stay at any of the new high-rise hotels going up on the edge of China’s big cities—start looking for them around the third ring road. When you stagger red-eyed out of bed to peer into the murky dawn, you will see rank upon serried rank of raw “superblock” developments, a mile apart, marching into the distance. You think of the emissions involved in their carbon-hungry construction, the traffic jams on the arteries tying them into the expanding city, and the new coal-fired power stations being built to light them up. And you wonder how Asia can change its habits—energy consumption grew by 70% in the ten years to 2008—before it is too late for all of us.
via The Economist
July 24, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Civic Life
CIVIC LIFE is a major project in Singapore that explores identity, architecture, memory, community, a sense of place and civic space that has been unfolding since early 2010. A collaboration between the National Museum and the British Council, with support from the Singapore International Foundation and the Arts Council of England, the project comprises of four strands: TIONG BAHRU: A short film shot in and around the Tiong Bahru estate in June 2010 by acclaimed UK-based filmmakers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy and a cast of hundreds of volunteers from the Tiong Bahru estate, A PERSONAL VIEW: A regular blog on the Civic Life themes featuring articles written by leading writers, artists, architects and thinkers, WHERE THE HEART IS: A micro-short film competition organized in collaboration with DepicT! and WRITING THE CITY: A creative writing programme exploring the ideas of place and identity, featuring Singapore Literatre Prize winnere Suchen Christine Lim and launching in October.
Watch this interview with the directors of TIONG BAHRU in which they talk bout the process of putting the project together and their experience of filming in the heritage estate and its hawker centre and wet market. TIONG BAHRU: The film will premiere at the National Museum in October 2010.
Following up from the film which is in post-production at the point in writing, CIVIC LIFE has recently launched a short film competition called WHERE THE HEART IS, looking for 90 second films that take as their subject a place that is important to you, the filmmaker. These places could be public or private spaces (or ever places that do not exist anymore) and can be in any genre – animation, abstract, photo-essay, drama.
In an attempt to garner as many entries as possible and get people involved in filming the stories within the built environment that they live in, the organisers have determined that the judging criteria will be more about the emotional connection to the place the filmmakers can put across, rather than technical considerations. In fact, submitted films can be shot on any digital format and equipment, including handphones.
The films will be featured on the CIVIC LIFE website and the best 40 films will be screened alongside TIONG BAHRU at the National Museum of Singapore in a series of special screenings across October and the filmmaker with the best overall film will find themselves on a flight to Encounters, the UK’s leading short film festival, which takes place In Bristol over 5 days in November. For more information, check out http://www.civiclife.sg/competition.
For further information regarding the project, visit www.civiclife.sg
Foreclosure: FIVEFOOTWAY co-founder, Adib Jalal, is a consultant to the Civic Life project.
July 23, 2010 | Broadcast | Events | News
A sketchwalk at Tiong Bahru
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Tiong Bahru neighbourhood and it was exciting to get to know about the first ever sketch walk around the estate organised by the good people of White Canvas Gallery, which is based in Tiong Bahru of course. With a turn out of about 100 enthusiasts made up of residents and the extended community that hail from beyond, the entourage drew the lovely town and bonded with the community. Go over to the Tiong Bahru neighbourhood blog for more.
[via: Kelvin Ang]
July 22, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Alliance for S’pore designers
Francis Chan for The Straits Times – DESIGNERS from disciplines ranging from architecture to fashion and advertising have banded together to drive the local design scene towards greater global recognition.
On Tuesday, eight design-related industry organisations, came together to launch DesignS, an initiative to create a platform for closer coordinated design work here.
Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts Lui Tuck Yew, who was guest of honour at the launch at LaSalle College of the Arts said the move was timely and relevant.
‘The convergence of design across the various design disciplines provides more opportunities for designers to collaborate and encourage a cross-pollination of ideas and concepts,’ said Rear-Admiral (NS) Lui.
The DesignS alliance includes the Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Singapore, Designers Association Singapore, Interior Design Confederation (Singapore), Singapore Furniture Industries Council (SFIC), Singapore Institute of Architects, Singapore Institute of Landscape Architects, Singapore Institute of Planners and the Textile and Fashion Federation. The initiative is also supported by the DesignSingapore Council, an agency set up in 2003, to promote and develop Singapore design.
‘With design, and not just design, but design with a strategic and cross-disciplinary approach, different sectors beyond the design industry will benefit from design’s unique propositions and offer advantages for businesses,’ said DesignSingapore Council director Jeffrey Ho.
July 20, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Six Degrees of Support
Our friends at Six Degrees have recently unveiled their new online community platform, dedicated to the creative industry which can be found at www.sixdegrees.asia. The site which is still in beta, targets freelancers, and through its features, hopes to give creatives better access to a dedicated network of support, resources and opportunities. So for those one-man architecture practices, model-makers, renderers, this might be a good place to find new work and connect with people.
Beyond the online initiative, Six Degrees have also been busy offline. They have already conducted a few workshops focusing on practical issues concerning freelancers such as getting started, getting paid, filing tax forms, etc. and there will be more in the coming year. Topics that will be covered in the near future include legal clinics and workshops in a variety of other topics like cashflow management, basic contract law and negotiation skills.
To find out more, do hop on over to sixdegrees.asia.
About Six Degrees
Six Degrees is a social enterprise owned and managed by Emily Hill, an independent arts collective and Singapore’s first confluence of arts, creativity and business. It is being developed with valuable input from freelancers themselves and strategic industry partners and with seed funding from the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts.
July 13, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Another chapter begins
Hello friends of FIVEFOOTWAY!
It’s been almost 3 years since the foundations for FIVEFOOTWAY was first laid. Since then, countless articles have been posted, many projects have been done, websites have changed and we’ve also seen the team grow and shrink over time. There have been many wonderful moments and multiple mis-steps along the way too and we have learned a bit more about ourselves and the community from those experiences.
Recently, we’ve taken a step back from what we’ve been doing in order to gain some perspective and let’s face it, we can do so much better than this. Now is a good time as any for a renewed sense of focus, vigor and enthusiasm and that is what we are excited to share with you.
[ BLOG ]
Read all about it on our NEW tumblr-powered blog here:http://fivefootway.tumblr.com/
[ FACEBOOK PAGE ]
We are also moving away from this FB group and towards a FB page. If you ‘Like’ us, then please hop on over and show it. We would also appreciate it if you would invite your friends to do the same!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/FIVEFOOTWAY/132926460072900
[ @fivefootway ]
If you are on Twitter, you can start following us onhttp://twitter.com/fivefootway. We will be tweeting about things we like and other miscellanies along the way.
There’ll be a lot more soon. But for now, happy walking!
Cheers,
Adib (& JJ)
July 8, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Extension to Kahn’s Indian Institute of Management to be built
The first phase of a new extension to the campus (with a built-up area of approximately 600,000 sq ft) of the IIM-A was built in 2008. Built on a 38-acre plot across the street from the main campus and connected to it by an underpass, it was designed by Ahmedabad-based architect Bimal Patel.
Adding to a masterpiece, even if it is across the street, is a daunting challenge. Like any other architect in a similar position, Patel had a number of difficult choices to make. For example, he could have chosen to continue Kahn’s material palette and language, or to respond to it with something completely different. He did a bit of both.
Patel’s campus answers Kahn’s warm brick with a very different material: exposed concrete, which is much more alienating (Kahn himself used it in his Salk Institute in La Jolla, California). But it continues some of Kahn’s rhythms of form and space. He also adds a spin to the design with playful metal screen-sculptures (by artist Walter D’Souza) that challenge the unsmiling concrete order.
The strategy works, but only in part. Kahn’s architecture takes the humble brick and creates from it a monument that is also a nurturing presence. The monumentality is counterpointed but never diluted. The alternation of high and low, large and small openings and spaces is one way in which this is achieved. Another is the intricacy of brick itself. Neither undercuts the seriousness of the monumentality.
With a simple geometry like Kahn’s, the built masses of the extension are already severe. The concrete surface makes them even more so at the moment. Some of Patel’s attempts at counterpointing the severity work — the metal screens, for instance. Others don’t. Small panels of exposed brick in the concrete frame, and the occasional circular openings, are relatively weak gestures that never challenge the concrete masses in the way the metal screens do. They only nibble away at the dignity of the overall order without necessarily softening it. But it must be remembered that the complex is incomplete, which adds to the sense of severity. As they grow, the trees will probably cast softening shadows on these walls, and as more buildings spring up a greater sense of intimacy will emerge in the outdoor spaces. That will be when the dialogue between the new and the old can be properly assessed.
Full story at Business Standard
[Image Courtesy BusinessWorld.In]
July 8, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Reiser + Umemoto Designs $110-million Taipei Pop Music Center
If all goes as planned, Taiwanese pop will get an expansive home where musical culture meets high design. Construction is expected to begin in 2012 on Taipei Pop Music Center, a $110-million entertainment complex envisioned by Reiser + Umemoto RUR Architecture, with engineers from Arup Associates.
The team’s competition-winning design for a difficult 823,000-square-foot site in Taipei places three main structures on two separate pieces of land, which will be connected by a broad new walkway built over an existing road. “In a sense, it’s really a piece of the city,” says Jesse Reiser, one of the firm’s founding principals along with Nanako Umemoto. “We deliberately bridged the two sites, and created an elevated public ground to connect all of the elements.”
read more at Architectural Record
[Image Courtesy Reiser + Umemoto]
June 30, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Michael Graves builds a casino.
The Slate’s architectural critic Witold Rybczynski draws surprising allusions between Graves’ latest built project in Singapore (abomination, in my opinion) to the work of Henry Van De Velde and Josef Hoffman, though Graves himself says the Sentosa IR is a cross between Chicago’s World Expo and Coney Island. To which I would say: Sentosa (or Singapore) is none of.
But an interesting read nonetheless. Go here for the slideshow.
Via Slate.com
June 30, 2010 | Broadcast | News
just when you thought the automobile was dying…
This is Beijing. It has struck me, since I arrived here, how much we bash the US for being such an automobile-centric country; and how much more dependent, and probably unwilling, people here are to walk the streets. Well, as they say, “in the China of opposites”, some people will drive and the rest will have to walk or bike. I think the perils of living in such an environment are obvious enough:
And then you have this, a museum so audacious in its conception that you wonder why people like me care at all. FastCompany’s Suzanne Labarre gives the scheme its due credit, and true to form, the project performs superbly as a provocation. It is also brilliant in its execution if you look at the diagrams put up on Dezeen. But observe the kind of willful blindness (to quote someone famous) which the architects demonstrate when asked how people would return to their cars after viewing the exhibits:
“In the China of opposites, those who have the economic means to possess a car also have the means to have a personal chauffeur.”
(Not that Singapore is any better. A good and probably the most comfortable way of getting around in 100% humidity and 35 degrees celsius days is still the car. followed by the MRT, and then maybe the bus.) In fact, the use of the automobile seems to me like a context-dependent, socio-cultural right-of-passage for many countries before the tipping point comes to take them to pedestrian friendly salvation. Take Beijing, for instance. Would you, today, really want to walk through zipping bicycles, smog, and millions of Chinese people? Thought so.
See more of China’s coming drive-thru Car Museum at FastCompany and Dezeen
June 30, 2010 | Articles | Broadcast | Features | News
where we used to play…
…looked something like this. (Toa Payoh Lorong 6, Block 28; Courtesy Talk of the Block; Playgrounds make me Nostalgic.)
What got me thinking (and feeling nostalgic) about HDB playgrounds was a recent project by David Rockwell (of Rockwell Group fame) called Imagination Playground, a deployable playground-in-a-box that has been finding its way across the United States. Back then, we had to make do with what were admittedly awesome caricatures of giant elephants, dragons – like the one above – and other animals bent to do our childhood play-time bidding. Having moved out of our HDB apartment, the memory – of those formative years where i’d spent hours just imagining what the belly of a concrete elephant could be other than the belly of a concrete elephant – remain clear in my head. It just goes to show how much playtime contributes to a child’s early years to build imagination, resourcefulness and schemes of brilliant mischief. (not that I possess any one of those traits…) What are HDB playgrounds like today? What do the playgrounds in condominiums look like? How do these compare to what the Housing Development Board so cleverly put in the communal grounds of the older twentieth century New Towns? If you’ve got photos and things to say, we’d like to collect them and maybe put them up here on the site. Send your submissions to office@fivefootway.com
Here’s Rockwell’s Imagination Playground, courtesy of the Architect’s Newspaper:
June 29, 2010 | Broadcast | News
master builders no more?
In what is hardly a new topic of conversation, Joshua Prince-Ramus talks about the myth of the individual architectural genius – the masterful sketch, the architect as visionary – and the way he and his colleagues at REX go about their work. This tidbit sums up a lot of the discussion, “We used to be called “master builders” because, like symphony conductors, we knew enough about what everyone else was doing, all the other disciplines to know what to ask and where to direct our attention. If all we are are stylists, that will further marginalize the profession.” While I totally agree with P-R, you’ve got to admit that someone out there has got to educate the clients of the future about this mode of working, and further develop the operational model of the architectural practice. If Shop Architects have shown us one way, maybe REX can show us another. My only reservation is how a lot of these practices have landed (and even labelled themselves) on the hyper-rational side of things because of their focus on ”more unartistic issues such as engineering, project sequencing and contract liability–areas most other architects cede to engineers and planners.” But as long as this is done in the name of recovering whatever lost ground that architects have given up to others, I think it is a lesser evil than the napkin sketch.
via Forbes
June 29, 2010 | Broadcast | News
building without blocks
South Africa has a new export – crates which allow cheaper construction of solid concrete dwellings, complete with electricity and water – at a lower cost. Although the new construction method, owned as a franchise by a South African company, has been much touted to raise the quality of residential dwellings in Africa (in particular those of the “not-so-rich”), others see the bigger picture a little more clearly.
Johnson Emeruwa, an estate agent, believes the innovation might become widely accepted but doubts its ability to reduce the cost of housing particularly in places like Lagos.
via 234NEXT
[Image Courtesy Allwell Okpi]
June 29, 2010 | Broadcast | News
a campus for students
Mdh Tajuddin Mhd Rasdi cheers the new Taylor’s University College Lakeside Campus in Subang Jaya, Selangor; that proves “when you put students first, architecturally, learning can be exciting” (though it’s not without its shortcomings).
via The Star
June 29, 2010 | Broadcast | News
what our cities tell us
A Pakistani architect is saddened by the buildings and roads of Rawalpindi and Islamabad that “remind us of our loss of freedom, fears and obsessions.”
This is an ongoing reaction not just by architects but by people all over. In places where spectacle and iconicity give way to more ubiquitous, everyday surroundings, we find an appreciation for the seemingly mundane in photography blogs, photo journals and paintings in galleries. The celebration of our surroundings is indeed a realization of its nuances that may go unnoticed without closer observation. Like Moatasim writes, “One can tell a lot about a place and its people only by reading the everyday landscape; such as social injustice and security threats that are implicit to the way we live and move about in our cities. The buildings and roads of Rawalpindi and Islamabad remind us of our loss of freedom, fears and obsessions, a few of the many other stories that are materially embedded within these twin cities. The question is, what stories are your cities trying to tell you?”
via The News
