Deciphering what the school needs isn’t a walk in the park. Pun not intended.

We’ve picked some spots! Comment and let us know what to do with them!

So after a week of “guerilla attacks” (i.e. surveying our friends and random strangers) and gathering data and suggestions, we’ve begun formulating masterplans for our 40spaces project!

Each group has conceptualised an overall scheme to guide and direct the project, and we’ve just had crit (critique sessions, for the uninitiated) with our tutors and Mr Ming (above, off centre to the left, wearing white), who was the chief architect of NUS when it was first built!

We’re all thinking and working at different levels, scales and types of spatial intervention, but amidst the inflow of ideas there are some that we’ve all gravitated towards:

- creating spaces that foster certain desirable activities, e.g. mingling. NUS has been fragmented into faculties and halls and even within each faculty we find dividing loyalties between majors. So we’re revisiting the notion of belonging – not just to a faculty, but to NUS.

- transforming the studying/learning experience – for far too long NUS campus has been seen as a place where people come for lectures, come for tutorials etc but not a place of transformation, not a cathedral of Learning, and we mean learning with a capital L.

- reorganising circulation – I think we’ve all seen the Facebook petitions to increase the frequency of buses D1 & D2. So when we were surveying other faculties and trying to find our way back to SDE we realised that actually, it’s not that long a walk. Sometimes even shorter than waiting for the bus. Pushing for more pedestrian-friendly routing is probably going to be one of our key goals in this project.

- engaging the Ridge. To quote a friend, “the Ridge is green, but nobody knows that it’s green because nobody goes there”.  Also in line with this are suggestions to reconnect with Nature.

There are 3 scales that we’re working with in this project -

1) person

2) built environment

3) natural environment that 1) and 2) are situated in

- and these proposals all work with a combination of one or two or all three of these scales.

So now we’re coming together and refining our ideas further and trying to create a coherent plan out of the best of these ideas. Check back again soon!

Watch out for our stickers! Coming soon to a faculty near you.

Making sure we’ll pick the right places to design: intensive research into circulation and vegetation.

“This is not a master plan of a clean slate, this is a masterplan of a campus that has existed for many years.” – Mr. Siew from MKPL Architects, briefing us on the masterplan of NUS.

Weisheng

[ ... ]

The purposeless struggle between those who deprive and those who become the deprived goes on. In a similar way, modern civilisation is slowly, relentlessly depriving people of places where they can be themselves. Hardly without noticing it, it is taking away our place by a window. All that has been lost from the world or which is now being taken away: human memory, pride, and existence, and all the small forgotten stories. [ ... ] [A] place by the window [ ] has the power to reawaken all this inside us. The modernists would no doubt call this ‘nostalgia,’ but let us not forget: nostalgia, like the music of Astor Piazzola, is a way of restoring, in these times, things of the deepest importance to the human spirit. The power is found in a place by a window.”

Excerpt from A Place by a Window, Foreword to Alvar Aalto’s Houses
by Hiroshi Naito, architect & professor at Tokyo University

Just thought I’d share a quote that I found rather pertinent to our project!

And so we embark on a long arduous tedious journey of documenting and mapping and attempting to make clarity within our own heads as we’re teeming with a million plans and ideas!

We’re currently thinking about approaches – this is a massive gargantuan task before us and we’re thinking of how best to tackle it. Our first workshop with SDE yesterday went fairly well, though by the end of it I think we realised that we need to take a step back and re-evaluate how we’re going to go along. Currently, with our SDE workshop yesterday we were rather “arbitrary” in our approach (Kelvin’s words) – not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. I think the success of yesterday’s workshop was that it did engage the community, and our approach seemed to be an effective ‘springboard’ for some good suggestions.

But perhaps the downside of holding the faculty-based workshops is that it neglects the in-between faculty spaces, the ‘no man’s land’(s) of Kent Ridge Campus. It also doesn’t adequately take into consideration essential things like circulation and connectivity around campus.

Right now we’re starting to think about this project as a whole, something spanning the campus. It’s going to be a balance between a macro-scale approach that looks at human patterns of movement and activities across the campus, but at the same time keeps in mind the microscopic details of what students from each different major, with different timetables and preferences, need.

{Update}

We’ve just settled our ‘strategies’, so here we go!

Laura

On the 11th of August 2011, 16 students from the National University of Singapore were tasked with identifying and designing 40 spaces in NUS as interaction spaces for students to work, meet or play across the Kent Ridge Campus. This journal tracks our design process, and the work we will proceed to do in the next few months in creating spaces that are not only for the students, but by the students as well.

If you have anything to comment or need to say about our project, feel free to email us at fortyspaces@gmail.com.