antique digital

Minox Rolleiflex digital camera

work work work!

Back to work at ar+d. The website will be up soon, or so I heard.

stardom

School holiday has started and school children usually can't wait to shed their uniforms and dye their hair a mess of blonde shades. But the last weekend saw an unusual congregation of kids in school uniforms at Junction 8. It is an audition for yet another reality/talent-search show on Singapore TV, one of the many concurrently happening right now, spawns of the Idol craze from seasons ago.This one, called School Superstar, targets those who are still students in secondary schools and were too young to participate in the original Project Superstar.

14-year-olds queueing up for a chance at stardom. An experience of a lifetime for a few, a giant slap back to reality for most.

werk/guerrillazine

A werk/guerrillazine installation at the +65 CdG guerrilla store, part of the Singapore Design Festival.

a day in Johor Bahru

SDE reunion dinner

Before having to do any real work as a memeber of TAS, I got to enjoy some perks. Well, perhaps it's not really a perk but more of an enjoyable task. Me and 3 others from TAS were asked to attend this SDE alumni dinner, part of the NUS centennial celebration. As the name of the event suggests, it is for ex-students to meet up and do some networking, so we as students were there just to fill the tables. We were arranged to sit in the same table as the DE Club (Design and Environment Club) president and some people from the IDS (Industrial Design Society). As we realized later, the arrangement was far from coincidental, when DE club president tried to start a discussion about plans and funding for TAS and DE club; although we coyly but politely avoided discussing full details or committing to any of the suggestions brought up by the DE Club president, as our own TAS president is far far away in Austria.

The food wasn't bad although just before dinner started , my appettite was slightly spoiled by this horrible dance routine. An amalgation of hip-hop, modern dance, caberet (there was a skirt stripping sequence towards the end) and other unknown influences, it reminded me of certain unsavoury dance shows which I have seen in Thailand. Controlling the urge to throw some money onto the stage, we waited for the dinner to start.

The whole set up was very Chinese-wedding-dinner-like. Round tables that seats 10 each. The dinner even began like a chinese wedding dinner, with fast music pounding and the waiters streaming out in a single file holding platters of cold dishes in their hands. The wedding dinner scenario wasn't complete though, as they left out the dry ice which I was half expecting. The food was quite good for such a big reception but we had to be careful not to get any of those blue and orange confetti thingies, which were scattered onto the tables, into the food.

At the end of the event, I thought, with a full stomach, if such an extravagant dinner was really necessary.

studio debrief

A jolly good studio debrief. We went from Yum Cha Restaurant to the Roof Top Bar in Chinatown and ended up at Scarlett hotel with a sip of lychee magarita and a dose of chocolate.

semester's end

It' the time of the semester when I once again rethink my future as an architect. While criticism and comments are a given in crit, it was especially harsh for me this time. It was quite possibly the worst one I've ever had. It wasn't "worst" in terms of having a bad project, I felt I had a competent scheme. It's just that half way through my crit, I was cut off and was embroiled in some sort of fight between different philosophies towards conservation and I wasn't able to clearly explain my scheme after that, nor was one of the critics interested in the scheme after the conservation debacle. It was an absolute disaster but I stand by what I did, although I wished my brain would work faster and come out with more convincing rebuttals during the crit and not after.

This is my scheme for this semester. The model is one of the better ones I've made in years although it didn't really come into use much during the crit.

The crit for the others in the studio went pretty well, nowhere as heated as mine.

Hann rejoicing over his sucessful scheme.

Reflecting the last semester, I personally felt that it was one of the best studios I've been in. The people were fun and most of us were quite involved in the studio's work and activites. Simply put, we had more than a hi-bye relation. And the site study and masterplan we did for the first half of the semester was far better than anyone of us could imagine.

The day did not end with the crit. After that, we went for a lecture by this Korean architect called, Cho Min-Suk. His works were quite interesting exhibiting strong Dutch influence and exploring intriguing spatial and formal relationships. A good example would be this aprtment block in Seoul that has 160 units but has 49 different unit types, some containing bridges linking 2 seperate parts of the same unit.His practice is called mass studies, I'll try to write a seperate entry when I'm in the mood.

The day simply refuses to end. After the talk by Cho Min-Suk, we had to rush down to Capital Tower for yet another talk by superstar architect Toyo Ito. He is in town today and we were, on short notice, invited to a talk given by him.Organized by the developers of Vivocity (Ito's first project in Singapore) , it was as much a meet-the-fans session as a publictiy stunt for Vivocity, although Ito wryly decided that he will not talk about Vivocity but instead about his other recent works.

After the talk, we went to Lau Pa Sat on the pretext of having a drink to celebrate Wang Ying's birthday (well, not really on a pretext, we really wanted to have a drink.)

autonomous house

Day 1 of crit and most highlight of the day is the crit of the controversial autonomous house. It is the culmination of one semester of intrigue, frustraton and frantic construction.





Daniel demonstrating how the toilet is used.

back to the world of mortals

The last week is now in a blur in my mind, nights spent in studio prying my eyes open and hoping that my finger could click a little faster. Submission is finally over and I have returned to the world of the mortals.