09 July 2012

NUS CityEx 2012: Un/Folding

A hundred of the best student ideas from the National University of Singapore Department of Architecture are now on show at this year’s City Exhibition. Yvonne Xu reports.

The central thinking behind this year’s City Exhibition – the annual showcase of projects and ideas by architecture students from the National University of Singapore – is titled Un/Folding and there cannot be a more suitable concept.

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“The idea is to show how our investigation of architecture slowly unfolds through the years in school. In Year 1, our projects are small. It could be a resort [or] residential work, and we usually work to given briefs; by Year 5, we work on projects of bigger scales, such as masterplans and urban planning and we also work at a deeper and more intricate level,” explains Exhibition Director and 5th-year architecture student Terrence Ho.

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On show at the month-long exhibition at the URA Centre Atrium are some 100 student projects, with a number of them focussed on pressing social issues. 3rd-year architecture student Priscilla Khiu, for instance, addresses the issue of Singapore’s ageing population by examining the possibility of establishing nursing homes for dementia patients between public housing HDB blocks. The idea is that a facility in a familiar environment would benefit dementia patients through offering them their “remembered homes and could double up as a connector or node, linking existing blocks to a common compound where residents’ needs could be fused with dementia care facilities”.

NUS

Another highlight of the exhibition is the presentation of the NUS Solar Decathlon House, a still-in-development prototype headed for the Solar Decathlon 2013, an international competition that challenges collegiate teams to design, build and operate zero-energy solar-powered houses that are cost-effective, energy-efficient and attractive. The Solar Decathlon project is a first-ever project in NUS that spans 8 different departments in 3 faculties, namely School of Design and Environment, Faculty of Engineering, and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

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Rendering of the Solar Decathlon House

NUS CityEx 2012: Un/Folding
Date: Till 28 July 2012
Venue: The URA Centre Atrium
Time: 8.30am – 7pm, Mon – Fri; 8.30am – 5pm, Sat
Closed on Sun and Public Holidays
ura.gov.sg