THE WRONG CALCULATOR?

Abstract

In 1975 Tay Kheng Soon presented his research based on Leslie Martin and Lionel March's urban investigation in Urban Space and Structure, an antithesis to the dominating view of high-rise living as the only solution to Singapore's land scarcity. When being asked by the press, Mr. Liu Tai Ker, who was then the ChiefArchitect of HDB, gave a political answer in response to this technical proposition, that ,.he obviously has a different calculator from mine.,, This thesis is the continuation of this legacy. In the first part of the thesis, an investigation will be carried out based on Leslie Martin and Lionel March's theory in order to debunk the myth of high-rise living as the only solution to the land scarcity in Singapore, hence finding the answer for the *right calculator". The next part of the thesis seeks to carry forward the result of investigation in the form of architectural manifestation, using data and relationships extracted from Yishun (a typical HDB new town) through various means such as mapping using voronoi diagram, a completely horizontal landscape of equivalency in various aspects can be achieved as compared to the original HDB landscape, yet creating a totally architectural, social and political deviation from the HDB model that was engineered after a Corbusian ideology.