Education and Architecture

This is my final year project at university. It was a redevelopment of the International School of Singapore off Preston Road. The school is located on a hillside, hidden amongst dense vegetation.

I tried to think of my memories in school, and I realized that the best memories didnt come from within the four walls of the classrooms. Instead it came from the games that we played in the courtyards, the unhibited conversations I had in the niches and corners of my school, the gatherings on the amphitheatre steps... I can even remember some of the smells and touch of my favourite places outside the classroom, and such places were where I really 'learned'. It is in such places that we are totally free to express ourselves, our creativity and imagination.

I thought how nice it would be to have such places 'teach' and 'inform' the children, by reintepreting the classroom as an external space. To do that, I inversed the figure ground and generated a series of outdoor spaces which are intended for teaching purposes. These outdoor/semi covered/ covered spaces becomes the 'classrooms' instead and the classrooms per se becomes an optional facility and for wet weather programmes only.

Negative spaces thus becomes positive spaces and the entire school is planned around these outdoor spaces, such as circulation spaces, corners, leftover spaces, spaces between classrooms...

Students can also choose to formulate their own memories based on the spaces they choose to gather. There is no central mass assembly space. Instead the spaces are broken up and fragmented and scattered all over the place. This spaces creates a sense of informality and cosiness that encourages small group teaching and interaction, rather than large, unfriendly, intimidating parade squares. Students can hang out along the external corridors, corners, rooftop, anywhere that they feel they can call their own. Each space has its own tactility, views, experience and character.

I believe that architecture should be incomplete. It should hold a certain sense of randomness and freedom that can only be expressed over time. Nothing like those shiny new building you see in magazines, but more of subtle hidden quality that would qualify it timeless.

The school is almost hidden from view from the street firstly by trees and secondly by a series of landscape walls that shield it from the public eye. The mysterious quality of these walls lie in the curiosity of the activity that takes place behind them. Over time, creepers will grow over the trellises provided within the school and camouflauge the school even further with the existing vegetation. Moss and grass would grow over the walls and create a romantised version of the 'ruin'. Students could display their works on the walls or even built upon the existing structures of the school, as a means of personalising their existence and cultivating a sense of owenership and pride. The school's eventual completeness lies in its incompleteness.

Architecture thus becomes the social platform that shape these childrens' growth and memories.