A Garden in the Forest

The restored barnhouse (from the previous post) is the site for an Interpretative Centre to be built by the National Parks Board at the Dairy Farm sector of the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve.

What is interesting about the Dairy Farm Hut, as it is also known, is that not only does it sit curiously on the boundary of the nature reserve it is also very much surrounded by nature. It is connected to other similar 'installations' (red squares on the map above) and is a checkpoint along the Dairy Farm Loop, one of the main hiking trails negotiating the nature reserve.

[Image : National Parks Board]

The project brief for the Interpretative Centre called for the centre to be open not only to the public but also to nature. When we went to the site, we realised what that meant - the barnhouse did not have any doors.

Strategically this became the starting point for our proposal. Given that nature surrounds the barnhouse building in a pervasive way, in the same manner, the notion of being enveloped in nature will be critical for the experience within the Interpretative Centre. Also, we sought a position of the project as residing at the interface between man-made and nature, akin to its geological location on the boundary of the reserve. These 2 critical thoughts developed into a plan organisation and diagram of relations between the new qualities and conditions we were interested to explore.

The plan is organised into 3 concentric zones of experience. The first is a sensorial zone thought of as a conceptual forest which sees the continuation of nature from the surrounding environment taking over the ground and wall surfaces through time. The second is defined by 2 interwining ramps containing the exhibition circulation, of which the exhibition content can be similarly curated. Lastly the innermost zone houses a raised man-made garden with resting areas and seats cladded in astoturf. The garden itself is sustained by a large planter containing treated soil of depth to the level of the raised garden.

[All images by PLYSTUDIO unless otherwise stated]

Hence the title of this post. Lets hope we will get a chance to work on it further.

We will be updating our website soon with more project details and information.

Viewing Walls

We have been busy recently with a project which got us spending some time seeing, looking and viewing at the airport. The subject of our stakeout was the viewing mall.

The viewing mall is a strange and peculiar landside phenomena created and built originally for the sole purpose of viewing aircraft. The viewing mall neither connects nor separates, leaving an ambiguous space in between you and the aircraft, between you and the projected image of flying, aviation. This is the conceptual space that the project in question attempts to address.

I don't know whether this is the case in other countries, but to many locals in Singapore the viewing mall in Changi Airport is viewed as a sort of destination in itself, a place to eat, shop, view, rest, even study or simply to enjoy the air-conditioning - a kind of public space away from the city, a getaway from the tropical heat. According to CAAS (the airport authority) the airport is Singapore's largest shopping mall in terms of sales. Shopping and dining are inexplicably tied in with the experience of the viewing mall. In all of Changi Airport's 3 terminals, shops and restaurants line both sides of the corridors leading to the viewing malls. Airport management suitably figured it would be profitable to tap into traffic generated by a desire to see and be close to aircraft. 'Dine, Shop, View', the tagline used by the airport, rightly proclaimed. Yet despite these, the current state of the viewing malls does quite live up to its expectations.

The design brief called for the design of an exhibition (on civil aviation history) with the viewing malls at Terminal 2 and 3 as the site. Our design began on the premise that 'viewing' is a condition intrinsic in the experience of the viewing mall as well as the exhibition. It follows then that the viewing of aircraft and the viewing of exhibition will inevitably become intertwined.

Our proposal seeks to redefine both individual experiences by emphasizing the dual presence of each program, by making a collision in such a way that the simultaneous experience of one becomes unique and enhanced through the presence of the other. As a two-fold iterative framework, the visitor's experience oscillates between both entities - the viewing mall with the backdrop of aircraft landing and taking off becomes the contextual reference for the exhibition. The exhibition in itself became a kind of typological construct designed in reference to and arising out of the airport's layout and organisational plan, one in which all of us would be familiar with. Viewers literally move through a series of layers resembling the various spatial zones experienced pre-flight, from arrival to check-in, the transit lounge and eventually to the aircraft, all played alongside the real context of the viewing mall. These layers are 'viewing walls' that defines and organises the functions for viewing, exhibition, rest/seating and interactivity.

[All images and photographs from PLYSTUDIO]

Do check our website soon for the detailed project descriptions.