The project investigates the quality of informality along the canal that was identified to enhance the future master plan in creating a sense of kampung identity within a self-sustain community. Thereafter the project began to redefine the relationship between the ‘canal’ and the ‘industrial shophouse’ by negotiating the natural element of ‘rain’ into a transformative hybrid dialog. Contrastingly, the canal is perceived as a synergistic asset, while the shophouse is seen as a physical asset in the process of blending the two boundary conditions. 

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In this case, the canal becomes a flea market, where goods and supplies are relied on from the proposed ‘cloud storage space’. Where drones would assist in supplying the flea-market tenant. This proposal encourages coopetition between the ‘shophouse tenant’ and ‘flea-market tenant’ in working cohesively. 

 

Uncontrollably, as the water level increases in the event of a monsoon season, a second space is introduced when the canal is compromised. However, the change of event creates another job opportunity when water becomes an asset. In this manner, tenants of the flea market (canal) will contribute to the shophouse agro-ecosystem. This contribution of producing food as an asset would eventually affect the sales along with the flea market, such that the food is produced to encourage profit from both the ‘supplier’ and ‘retail’ sides.

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Peter Cook - Archigram

Instant City: Infiltration & Spatio-Temporal Negotiation, 1969 

Architecture has been traditionally seen as “rigid” and slow in adapting to new conditions. Rapid advancement in the development of novel smart technologies offers new means of user-to-space and people-to-people interaction and fundamentally challenges the “traditional” primacy of physical space in architectural and urban design. In this respect, one may recall Archigram’s Instant City (Peter Cook, 1968-1970) as an attempt of proposing temporary architectural infiltration through the audio-visual environment, mobile objects, and new technological means in order to trigger the spontaneous transformation of a “dormant” architecture/city into a responsive environment with a series of “ephemeral” events and situations.

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Therefore, the project aims to explore the meaning of infiltration in response to eurhythmias and arrhythmias as well as speculate on how the present and the future environment would react to such infiltrating forces. New Paya Lebar Airbase's large development can be seen as an anticipated big event/arrhythmia or a series of events to respond to a creation of a second/third space.

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Joseph Fenton

The Hybrid, 1985

Borrowing from genetics, described the concept of architectural hybridization as a process in which different forms, functions, and users converge in a synergetic and mutually enriching manner, giving rise to new "superior species". He identified three types of hybrids. 'Fabric hybirds' are derived directly from the structure and its correspondence to the immediate urban context. 'Grath hybirds' represent combinations of different urban forms that articulate different functions they house. ‘Monolith hybrids’ merge different programs under the unified skin in often unexpected and mutually dependant ways. The process of hybridization, however, possesses the risk of creating sterility and mere coexistence, leading to ‘mixing for the sake of mixing’ and “false hybrids” (e.g. mixed-use developments). True hybridization requires greater interaction between (infra-)structural and programming facets of a “building”, their mutual intensification and activation of the surrounding contexts and networks.

 

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