Our intervention is concentrated on a single axis centered upon the existing Art Café terrace in the old dressing house, taking advantage of the lawn in front of it to form a viewing slope for events. The site plan creates a charged central space, which generates spillover activities to the adjacent green areas that contain movable chairs and tables, arranged by visitors themselves. The wooden pavilion deck creates a circulation loop along the existing path network to welcome visitors from both directions to participate in its events and sit on its ledges. The geometry of the canopy is carefully configured to generate a scenic approach, to block the setting sun during evening lectures and to attract the descending breeze from the hills. During the day, the canopy shelters exhibitions and facilitates meetings for bike tours and gatherings. At night, it transforms into a lecture or screening space. On four weekends, it becomes a temporary Farmer’s Market, where small-scale urban farmers from all over the island can introduce and sell their produce, 100% grown in Singapore. Instead of planting an urban farm for a month, we provide a face for the existing farms of Singapore.

Thelightweight canopy is shaped to work purely in compression, allowing the structure to be assembled from triangular plywood modules like a masonry vault. The force distribution in the structure is manifested in its triangulation— triangles densify where forces increase and diffuse where forces decrease. We use wood as a key renewable material, combined with off-the-shelf steel fixtures, to make the structure environmentally harmless and functionally reusable after the festival. Despite the simplicity of the standardized plywood boards and steel hinges, complex visual variety is generated through parametric design, which also reduces the documentation, fabrication and assembly time of the project to merely a few weeks. The canopy is covered with recycled PVC banners sourced from existing outdoor advertisement boards around Singapore. Different sized banners are stitched together to form continuous layers that are fixed onto the simple conical surface of the underlying plywood structure. Variety in the content and coloration of the banners showcases a collage of recent temporary events and happenings in Singapore, which Archifest, too, becomes part of. 

CFL Team:

Andres Sevtsuk, Raul Kalvo, Faye Nixon.

ARUP Team:

Russel Cole, Mike King.