Dense + Green

In the context of today\’s debates on sustainable approaches for high density cities, contemporary architectural practice increasingly seeks new possibilities for integrating green spaces in projects including extensive sky terraces, living facades, vertical parks etc. Combinations of all these, mixed with residential typologies, hotels and offices conjoin at times to produce vertical cities in which the building section becomes what the horizontal plane has entailed up to now.In Dense+Green, students will investigate these issues in the context of Singapore\’s Tanjong Pagar Waterfront, an approximately 150-ha site that is currently part of one of the world\’s busiest ports. The area has been indentified to be Singapore\’s next waterfront city with a wide range of programs and uses. Being located between the old and the new city and in close proximity to several universities, a large island resort, and the CBD area, it is meant to be packaged with large structures to deliver a plethora of spectacular buildings. The role of this studio will be both to question and reason through the transformative pressure that is exerted on this particular site and to find innovative ways of approaching the debates surrounding dense and green building typologies, taking into account their effect beyond their immediate architectural scale and interpreting them as a new collective entity.The architectural approach explored in Dense+Green investigates ways in which the design of smaller elements such as sky gardens, as well as housing, office, and retail units can constitute the \”DNA\” for a large building by packing these within a three-dimensional cohesive whole. Instead of determining a priori a legible final building configuration, form in Dense+Green emerges from the composition of organizational logics of the project and its programs rather than from specific semantic preoccupations. As such, the studio explores a delineation of architecture in that the overarching form is neither dictated nor delimited by its constituent parts but rather is the result of its logic of packing as determined by its author, and is exploited for its potentials in terms of programmatic space and sociabilities. These operations are subsequently combined with larger submissions to organizational rigors and thorough consideration will be given to the technical mandates such as structural logic and circulation needs as well.