CITY ROOMS
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The Factory and The City
Industrial Development in Singapore
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In Collaboration with Yang Huang, Yao Bo
This project is premised upon two fundamental ambitions, the recuperation of an idea of the city as a project, and the pursuit of alternative forms of urbanization in response to the challenges posed by the industrial development in Singapore. The former treats the project of the city as a cultural, political, and aesthetic act; the latter as a strategic project for urbanization, articulated through its architecture, landscape, and infrastructure.
I. The Beginning of The Story
The story opens with a status quo in Singapore - land shortages, industrial development, and a growing population.
Located close to the border with Malaysia to the north and Republic Polytechnic to the south, this 55 Ha site is planned as a new mixed-use industrial zone and served by the new Woodlands North MRT Station. At present, due to land shortages and a growing population, Jurong Town Corporation, the statutory board in charge of planning and delivering spaces for industrial activity in Singapore, is adopting a strategy to increase the density of industrial land for clean technologies and to re-locate polluting and labor-intensive ones to the border between Singapore and Malaysia.
II. Research
(1) Recuperation: The City As A Project
Industry 4.0 brings about the Maker Movement that puts the ability in the hands of the people to fund, design, manufacture, distribute, market, and sell their own goods. The practice emphasizes the collective sharing of knowledge and technologies as people move from consuming to creating and sharing. The key difference between makerspace and conventional factory space is that the main component of makerspace is the living room, which acts as a social space where people get together to share and communicate. It is used as one of the spatial models for makerspace because of the social nature of the makers’ economy.
Therefore, the makers’ economy stimulates the transformation of established factories. Those industrial and manufacturing entities that are isolated in the periphery of cities have been reimagined as ones that could be part of the urban core in which social space is the main element. So it triggers a question: What would be the public space in the city of Singapore that promotes the sense of social spaces? To find out the answer, we start with the analysis of the current main types of public spaces in Singapore.
Esplanades and Parks
The first type is esplanades and parks. Take the Padang as an example. It was originally constructed to separate the earlier built urban core form the cannon fire. Although it has changed to ceremonial and recreational use, most of the time there are no people playing on the field since it is not suitable for the climate of Singapore with its direct exposure to the sun.
The "Five-foot Way" of Shophouse
The second type is the five-foot way of the shophouse. The shophouse is the main prototype in Singapore’s former downtown core, which is the combination of the Lilong house and British utilitarian grids. Although the space is narrow, it is used well to define the street edge and it provides the mediate space between the street and private houses.
Transportation Driven Public Space
Then it is the transport driven public space. With the development of the MRT system, many of its stations, entrances, and exits formed public spaces. However, they are spaces for transit rather than spaces for pause and repose.
Transportation Driven Public Space
And there is commercial driven public space. Large commercial developments replaced what used to be a system of outdoor urban spaces consisting of a network of streets & alleys. The shopping malls and their commercial atrium interiorize the public space, which is effective in the tropical city like Singapore. However, it can hardly be the ideal type for social space for they are mainly for shopping.
(2) Recuperation: The City As A Project
The City Room
The absence of clear existing types makes us rethink what the social space would be on the scale of the city in Singapore. Our project examines the city room proposed by Fumihiko Maki as a potential public space in Singapore because it is not only able to enclose the large space that incorporates diverse programs and functions but also has the ability to mediate Singapore’s hot, wet and rainy climate.
The City Room, Fumihiko Maki
And the city room is one example of Maki's Group Form. It could be interpreted in two scales: the interior room and the accumulation of rooms that are organized by certain reasons as one of the collective forms.
Group Form, Fumihiko Maki
Typology Analysis
Two precedents offer the possibility for construction and densification of the city room in Singapore.
In terms of the enclosure of large space in the city room, ZKM utilizes two vertical concrete slabs connected by vierendeel truss to provide big structure-free spaces in the center. The city room could take advantage of ZKM's structure system to accommodate multiple and sharing space in the center hall. Plus, the vertical hollow structures will also encapsulate circulation and utility spaces.
ZKM, OMA
City Room
Moreover, due to the shortage of land, numerous factories in Singapore are multi-floored in order to intensify the use of land. We also can see a number of cases that the stacking of different programs in one building in Singapore. Therefore, it raises the question of how we create the programmatic switch.
The School of the Arts design by WOHA is another good case to look at. The middle structural layer of this project acts as a programmatic switcher between the school on the upper part and the public facilities underneath. In our proposal, the factory layer in the middle can be a transferring plate that allows the programs above and below to be fundamentally different.
School of the Arts, WOHA
City Room
III. Proposal
(1) Factory As The Framework of The City Room
Factory As The Framework of The City Room
Vertically, the factory layer in the middle acts as the transfer plate between the city rooms below and the housing above. Since the stacking of programs in Singapore is inevitable and necessary due to its intensive land use, creating the second ground through a transferring plate becomes increasingly convincing.
The city room on the ground level encapsulated by maker space and the factory above. Different from Maki's city room which is merely retail-driven, our proposed city room is the integration of different urban programs with makerspace. The city room provides large sheltered interiorized public space for different urban activities. Meanwhile, it is like an urban living room that people get together to share and communicate. The civic activities and the whole process of the maker industry such as design, training, manufacture, and selling take place simultaneously in the city rooms and inspire each other through the vivid interaction.
(2) Site Plan
As mentioned above, with the extensive maker-space revolution, factory or the maker space nowadays has the potential to be integrated into city life with social spaces and diverse programs, thus triggering new manufacturing mode and a new way of life. So our project is a string of city rooms bounded by the colonnaded shop house.
It is not a spine moving into rooms, neither is it a linear sequence of rooms, but provides multiple entrances and exits according to the urban context into the various city rooms. Various city rooms connected with each other form the collective public space for the whole city. This continuous experience from room to room also responds to the tropical climate in Singapore.
Site Plan & Axonometric View
City Room As The Library And Media-related Innovation Center
The city room makes the open library with grand walls of bookshelves in it possible. People could read wherever they like to: in the collective reading space, in the leisure space around, or even reading in the staircases that are all the way to the top of the bookshelf. At the same time, People can easily participate in the media-press-related makers’ industry. The training studio like reading, publication, and bookmaking are open to the citizens, where ideas and knowledge can be shared, and people can even try to DIY a book in these maker spaces.
City Room As The Library And Media-Related Innovation Center
City Room As The Fitness Center And Sports-related Makers' Hub
Moreover, a sheltered city room is an ideal place for indoor and outdoor sports. People can swim, run, play balls, and do other exercises regardless of the weather in the city room. At the same time, the city room of the fitness-related industry is not only a lab that people invent, test, upgrade, and customize fitness equipment, but also a hub of fans tethering together for sports events.
City Room As The Fitness Center And Sport-related Makers' Hub
City Room As The Fabrication Lab
In the city room of fab lab, participatory lectures and exhibitions of the newest high tech of manufacturing are open to citizens. And the fab lab city room is a more versatile space as an incubator of startups from different fields. One can always visit the lab to see the operation of the robotic producing and discuss with technicians and experts to materialize their concepts of new products.
City Room As The Fabrication Lab
City Room As The Central Plaza
The city room in the center serves as a central plaza for multiple purposes. A series of big events can accommodate in the central plaza due to its tremendous open space. For instance, it could be the exhibition hall of the spacecraft of the newest research and development. Also, it can be converted into a live concert hall with the capacity of thousands of audiences.
City Room As Central Plaza
Structural Transferring Place: The Factory
As mentioned, the factory layer in the middle acts as the transfer plate between the city rooms below and the housing above. It’s the space that accommodates the mass production robotic manufacturing streamlines as well as research institutes with space for sharing and communicating.
Structural Transferring Plate: The Factory
The Second Ground Above The Factory: Housing & Garden
Different types of housing buildings and various types of units can be provided on the second ground above the factory level. Small rental units are provided above the station city room which response to the huge flow in the adjacent station and their temporary needs for accommodation. Also, near the educational institutes, there is a provision of student housing with shared common space, in which the enlarged corridor becomes the platform for interaction that is buffered by the landscape. The others are medium and large units for families and people who work and live here, which also accommodate the extended corridors that act as social spaces and the response to the tropical climate as well.
In a nutshell, by using Factory and makerspace as the framework and organizer, the city rooms are introduced as the prototype to integrate social space that accommodates various programs and city life with makerspace and factory, through which urban synergy is achieved.
The Second Ground Above The Factory: Housing & Garden
