Archinect - National University of Singapore

one down. one more to go

2005-03-05T08:38:42-05:00

some of u might know... i am still working with alsop while doing this student stint. it's nice. to b able to stil b part of their creative team banging out the strangest stuff while being in school. here's a little update...

i know u prob have seen this somewhere. IS. streats. life. (singaporean newspaper & mags) & more soon. there's a history to how all these came about. it started from jellyfishes to this after some Nparks (the local garden authority) disapproval. the lilypads were more daringly hanging out to the river... and these bluebells were imagined to be moving. made of carbonfibre. still i personally think they are v lovely how they all turned out. [with all respects to that old watercolour painter who hates them] but this is only a third done. all these lilypads & bluebells along the river. in fact the larger stuff are only just starting. piling. removing. planting.

btw... all these are taken off my original blog here. more stuff of me life over there!

they came they asked they are happy

2005-03-04T08:45:37-05:00

ha! this public crit dated just after valentine's day. this entry's pretty late as well. sorry. jus too busy with so many things.

for a jist of things. do read the previous entries. the masterplan was wellreceived. i have no pictures of me making my 'grand' appearance (ha!) but all went well i guess. many turned up. my dear fren xiuyan came though she was here for 2 weeks from her holidays away from london. there were law medicine all sorta students.

the names of the elements we gave to parts of our masterplan made it easy for the public to understand wat we were toking about quickly. the other masterplans the group presented were harder to grasp & hence more confusion to the whole lot of density we are dealing with. the most amazing thing is that that kindly transcend the strange architecture of stuff we have in mind. many were amused and commented that the masterplan was a lovely crazy idea. they think it can be done somehow i assured them that matters of the structures should...

cliffs, groundscraper, stumps, canopy & flowers

2005-03-04T08:29:23-05:00

i'm back again to tok more about the previous huge junk i blogged. bascially it's the masterplan for a new city campus we are now in. presently the campus is in the suburbs of singapore. pretty quiet. and totally dead (& serious) esp during weekends. as this is sorta masterplan exercise, we are jumping str to going into the public. here i mean presenting to people in the school, the students & the staff & get them to response to us & we response in return. no tutor crits! here's basically what we came out with....

there are 2 main gestures to our proposed new city in the campus; that is The New Ground and The Big Shade. The New Ground to create an immense flat surface of activites that allows meeting, playing, anything. The Big Shade compliments that by providing a better environment for these activities to take place. both responds to the very nature of the hills & the weather in the school which we feel, will have to dealt with to create a new campus. a campus that will allow e...

the shit has landed

2005-02-13T10:14:38-05:00

ok this entry is supposed to go all the way to 5 feb.
a saturday. we are part of the teams of 5.
our objective: to present a masterplan 1stcut model on the city in our campus to be ready for a public crit.
our audience: very normal people. doctors. lawyers. scientists. canteen aunty. not archiassholes which uses funny bombastic words that the everyday is getting frustrated with...

(a little rewind.... since the postcard i posted last entry. we went our rounds. even had a public booth where we get people to envision our "i live here. it's a nice place. it has cinemas...blahblahblah. you can live here too" dream. no pics sadly though but yes, overwhelming responses! we are unsure where we are getting at but all these is becoming promising)

since then, we got into 3 teams of 5, each suppose to come out with a grand idea. after a light snack and some mcdonalds breakfast, my team came out with their junk as u see. not bad for 3 hours of work. what the hell is it, u ask? later.....

l live here. and you can live here too.

2005-01-30T09:08:47-05:00

haven't been updating about school.
health was not on my side the last week. but here's a little update.

the last time i blogged about school was this oneweek workshop we had. we have moved on since then. [but of course..it was eyons since i blogged]. being in kheng soon's studio, he has this idea that we should tackle the issues of housing within the school. but in a different way. the campus of the future, he feels, will (a) hold less knowledge since the digital age does it better with google (b) research less knowledge as corporate firms now undertake that in huge amounts too (c) teach less knowledge & skills as we realised there are more ways of learning the things u wan outside. (online course maybe). hence, he proposed a new campus of intense interaction! of much more people, public, cinemas, clubs, arthouses, anything goes so we dun have to get out of the campus at all! (currently, nus sits in a hill and is 1/2 hour away from the city in a car)

on the other hand, kheng so...

sometimes... to live better you gotta try living with less light.

2005-01-26T11:44:02-05:00

the first week of school started with the urban workshop to supplement this semester theme 'housing'. [prior to that was rather administrative stuff] it was headed by my tutor, keng soon.

as some of you might know, singapore's full of very proper government built housing. you can find the government body that had been responsible for our residential landscape at the hdb. the idea was to give everyone a place to stay after we got independent 40 years ago. it had been rather successful i should say. most of us stays in these hdb flats. and no they are not dangerous like those in NY, something mr extutor erik said. he was thoroughly amazed by this country that is unique because of the success of this beign flats. everywhere. (though he has more interesting thoughts of it)

keng soon, however, was keen to look into the ownership of these flats. yes, we own the flats, but not the land we live in. comfortable with the authorities giving us these flats with choice a,b,c,&d, we grew com...

it's spring. i got a letter from archinect.

2005-01-25T08:49:37-05:00

2 cards arrived today.

the first one was a physical one. tucked in a pink envelope it carries a stamp with a silver head & a par avion blue sticker. the card is white. folded. & it's printed 'spring'. inside a cheque crossed to me. torrance goh. there are words... "in the rooster's waking hour". mixed between knowing spring is indeed coming in eversummer singapore. and so is chinese new year, the word 'spring' is Ã¦ËœÂ¥ in chinese. a word used regularly as an emblem for chinese new year. it was signed.. gingermoj :)

the 2nd letter came with a ding from my speakers. sent exactly on sunday 23.01.05 1.36 am & received a second later, it is titled 'ATTN: School Bloggers'. inside there is lines of perfect black on white. it details an acceptance to blog on this very page you now read & instructions on exactly how to do it so that everything will turn out perfect. it was signed 'Sincerely, Paul Petrunia'

i was glad. school has already started. & this blog shall too. i should *wave*...