Intro: A disappearing city and the solution
This project is called Cybertopia, a form of utopia that stands as a contrast to today’s dystopia Singapore. As Singapore is zoned accordingly to the master plan to create a nation that allows citizen to fulfil their everyday task in the most efficient and isolated way possible. This creates a stressful and isolated society that is too fast for the users to handle, causing them to disappear from the city. As such the intent of the project is to create an environment for them to reappear in an environment that questions the norm of today’s urban environment.
1st Urban Strategy
Located at NUS One North, this site is picked for intervention due to the diversity of educational and technological institute that has little to no relation with each other. This is an in-between districts that accommodates the needs of students, workers and the general public across the many different districts. This urban corridor is an in-between space that compensates for whatever that is missing at the surface.
2nd Urban Strategy
This underground project provide new land to relief pressure off the surface, by allowing the surface to be
redeveloped into spaces that serves to meet the news of users. Services exist can underneath to allow for more spaces to help develop for a liveable environment. These services provides electricity, water, ventilation and the internet from the city grid to create a self-sustaining analogue or digital environment for users to enjoy.
3rd Urban Strategy
What creates this balance between the analogue and the digital to address a disappearing city, is the usage of digital technology to create an immersive world that is balanced by the inclusion of various analogue spaces. Users going underneath from the level of b6 to b10 can experience the otherness of digital life that allows them to detach. These are spaces such as the sakura courtyard, the digital amphitheatre, the digital water environment. Those that wish for a more normal setting can engage with the natural landscape outside from the level of b6 to b1. These are spaces such as the temperate courtyard, roof garden for residents to use. The general idea of these spaces is to provide a place to detach that contrast the more overwhelming surface environment.
Supervisor's comments:
The “Cybertopia” architectural thesis’s premise is the crisis arising from the rift between the analogue and the digital world. This fissure is not just depriving architecture from its representational prerogatives but also dividing generations with deeply disturbing social and spatial consequences aggregated into a dystopian idea of a “disappearing city”. This underground project developed to merge the two worlds, provides a brighter future for the digital savvy population of One North area. It amalgamates cyberspace and the analogue world into a mediated reality that opposes determinism in design. It redefines the notion of our relationship with today’s dual real and surreal urban interface to create new meanings of an architecture that millennials can associate with.
- Assoc. Prof. Ruzica Bozovic Stamenovic (Dr.)