Anna Sapountzaki (M.Sc)
Amanpreet Kaur (M.Arch with Distinction)
Ashwin Abraham Mukkaranath (M.Arch with Distinction)
Yi Ju Lin (M.Arch with Distinction)
2020 – 2021
With increasing global population and constant transformation, climate change and limited natural resources have become undeniable facts. Considering the current rate of expansion of cities, it is important for local leaders, urban planners, and citizens to collectively examine the state of the built. Within the limited developable areas in dense urban settings, new demands will increase the pressure to design more adaptable buildings that can avoid unnecessary drastic future demolitions and reconstructions. There is a growing demand for housing that efficiently and adequately meets the needs of the masses, with limiting environmental impacts. There will be an increased demand for buildings that change over time to adapt to newly emerging needs for different qualities and quantities of architectural information. Existing Mass housing developments do not include a comprehensive solution for all the potential scenarios of the future from the beginning. Units in these developments are rarely personalised to match preferences of their inhabitants and the users have negligible impact on their living environment. The research aims at demonstrating a design workflow that can respond to dynamically changing environments over time with a bottom-up approach of design.
This research proposes a residential neighbourhood in Singapore that can be reconfigured based on personal requirements of the users through decades of change and growth. This Residential neighbourhood will possess sustainable construction and material systems that allow it to adapt to changes over time by altering the spatial configurations based on future requirements.
Advanced procedural design and artificial intelligence techniques will be used to create a design workflow within whose framework the end users themselves will be empowered to make design decisions that reflect their desires, with an aim to achieve overall democratization of design.
