François BLANCIAK
Department of Architecture (DOA)
College of Design and Engineering (CDE), NUS
Blanciak, F. (2024). Architectural site-specificity through programmatic sculpture: A design studio pedagogy based on pure geometric forms [Paper presentation]. In Higher Education Conference in Singapore (HECS) 2024, 3 December, National University of Singapore. https://blog.nus.edu.sg/hecs/hecs2024-fblanciak/
SUB-THEME
Opportunities from Engaging Communities
KEYWORDS
Architecture, Urban Design, Site-specificity, Geometry, Community
CATEGORY
Paper Presentation
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
Large-scale architectural interventions are often perceived as intrusive and uncontextualised by the communities in which such projects are built. Residents often complain that such large buildings lack site-specificity, miss human scale, and fail to relate to their respective urban contexts. Indeed, such projects often obstruct views, block existing thoroughfares, and supplant green spaces, which often threatens the life of existing communities.
How to better relate large architectural projects to their surroundings is the topic of a design studio called “Programmatic Sculpture,” taught at the Department of Architecture (DOA) of NUS over the last three years. This design studio proposes a novel approach to the contextualisation of large-scale architectural projects by predetermining the form of the building from the outset, using a simple—or “pure”—geometric form (such as a cube, a sphere, or a tetrahedron) with fixed dimensions on a given site as a basis for design investigations across the semester.
During the Academic Year 2022/23, for example, the students dealt with a tetrahedron of 130x130x130m located in Bukit Batok. Following the urban analysis of the site and its greater surroundings, students are asked to define their own building programme in response to the demands of the community. The design exercise then consists of adapting this prescribed, constraining form to its given site and chosen programme, in a process that can be referred to as an act of programmatic sculpture, involving the erosion of the initial form with the projected programme, and using the malleability of the void to adapt this initial form to the specific demands of the site.
Despite the imposition of a strict constraint, this design exercise leaves students with a high degree of flexibility in the interpretation of the given form, turning the project into a tool to foster social responsibility in them. In accordance with their chosen programme, this initial basic form can be fragmented, distorted, rotated, or affected by any other transformative operation deemed meaningful for the community surrounding the project.
Constraint has recently been viewed as a trigger for creativity in design pedagogy, a theory which appears to be confirmed by this design exercise. Reviewing students’ projects as well as established scholarship on the topic, this paper proposes a quantitative approach to the evaluation of architectural site-specificity, describing the particular criteria taken into account in assessing the students’ projects. It also demonstrates the benefits of this pedagogy for the surrounding communities by comparing the results of this design exercise with more conventional design studios. In conclusion, the paper elaborates on the value of constraint in architectural education, discussing how the simplicity of the given form has incited students to think critically about the spatial demands of the programmes they chose to deal with. It argues that it is precisely because of the simplicity of the given form that it constitutes a potent tool for students to understand how building form can be “sculpted” by the demands of communities, something conventional architectural design studios achieve with much less explicit results.