Projects

Although terraced house often represents a mass production for dwellings, there are many ways design intervention could give this building typology a more personalised touch. Bewboc House by Fabian Tan Architect displays an interesting design intervention to a young family’s terraced house in Kuala Lumpur.

Recently, compact design has gained much popularity as a solution to a denser and more expensive space in cities around the world. In terms of functionality, compact design boasts its spatial flexibility—being able to cover multiple needs within one space. If most compact designs are usually applied for residential buildings, the recently finished Deloitte Center for the Edge (Asia Pacific) office in Singapore explores the possibilities of this design approach for a shared space.

In the recent years, adaptive reuse has become one of the most effective approaches in keeping unoccupied buildings with historic values from being demolished. By bringing new functions and purposes, aged buildings can gain new lives and at the same time offer shared memories and perspectives to the community. Generally, adaptive reuse principle is to leave a substantial portion of the historical significance intact while adding new elements to accommodate new purposes.

Of a few places one could safely retreat and relax in this pandemic time is one’s own abode. Many has since reconsidered and rethought their perspective of what an ideal home should be. Among many criteria of an ideal home expected by many homeowners today, having an inner garden or courtyard is on the top list. Completed in 2020, the Raffles House by eben is an ideal example of house with courtyards that promotes the dwellers’ well-being in this current situation.

In the recent years, e-commerce has been disrupting the operations of physical retail spaces, especially malls and department stores. But even if many people now prefer to shop through their handheld screens, the culture of hanging and dining out with others prevails. This makes way to new developments of retail spaces, such as a lifestyle mall that is smaller in size and provides more dining experience and entertainment. These smaller spaces that contain only more or less a dozen curated outlets have been gaining popularity and popped up in many cities.

Among the typical home office buildings in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur, the office of Mantab Group stands quite prominently thanks to its gleaming gold-coloured façade. Hovering over the second floor of the building, the metallic façade wraps the front-facing part of the building with its folded surface. Yet, in contrast with the grandiose façade, a modest and small timber finished box figure stands next to it, marking the entrance to the office.

Situated next to the Yishun Pond, Tzu Chi Humanistic Youth Centre is recently opened to facilitate one of the organisation’s missions to provide supplementary education for the Singapore’s young generations. As a multipurpose public building, this youth centre houses facilities such as a function hall, classrooms, studios and workshops, study rooms, F&B outlets and other congregational spaces for members and visitors to meet and interact.

Sitting on a generous 3,500-square-metre land plot, House68 is a private residence that tries to integrate its surrounding natural feature seamlessly. The architecture firm, Design Collective Architects (DCA) takes a bold viewpoint of how a building in the tropics should be, “Tropical architecture is not to shield and protect the users from the elements but to enhance the experience and bridge the relationship between them.”

With its location being in Ubud, Bali, Titik Dua Ubud Hotel has the potential to position itself as a destination hotel. What is more interesting is that this hotel’s location is adjacent to an art gallery, which the architect, andramatin, tries not to interfere. As the main land plot of the hotel is behind the gallery, the architect decided to elevate the entrance and create a 45-metre bridge that sits right above the gallery for the guests to reach the main building.

Just before the Covid-19 outbreak, the development of office space had reached the point of being an open, feature-rich, flexible, and comfortable space that was believed to increase the productivity of the present-day work. Many companies providing this kind of office was deemed a perfect model of today’s corporate environment, especially when it is compared to the appalling “cubicle farm” office that thrives some decades ago.