INTERIORIZED CITY AND THE DELIRIUM OF COMFORT AND CONVENIENCE

Abstract

Singaporeans exist in a largely interiorized world. The tropical heat and humidity provides the perfect reason for a full scale retreat into the interior, basically air-conditioned comfort. Across the island, typologies are successfully replaced by air-conditioned ones.

Also, is the ambition to further link up buildings into a continuous interior with infrastructure of the seamless(escalators, underground malls, air-conditioning...) In effect, interiors are becoming increasingly schizophrenic, consuming more and more of the city, where we progress towards a continuous figure ground, obsessed with connecting the city in continuous covered routes. Thus, emerges a city whose standard of living is highly dependent on air-conditioning and effective insulation.

Here, the thesis sets out to experiment with a new city model emerging from the Singaporean ideals: air-conditioned and an extensively equipped interior. Thus, a continuous interior city under a huge shed is conceived as a critic of Singapore and interiority where the ideal is projected to the point it becomes bizarre, yet at once perfectly normal. Thus, reassessing our aspirations for this tropical city, a city ironically experienced as a centrally controlled air-conditioned arctic.

At heart, the thesis threads between a utopia and dystopia. This 'new realism' looks at the future of tropical Singapore from a darker aspect of an overdone utopia, questioning the city's indulgence in the artificial and delirium of the interior.

Changi Airport is taken as a test site to pursue ideas of the interiorized city, particularly because it has emerged as a monumental interior , almost like a city in its own rights; and also its emergence as a 21st century commercial anchor.

The city is first initiated with the raising of the entire runway, providing a huge shed for the city to be tucked under. This otherwise remote airport land is now given a new status as an establishment of an ideal Singaporean city.

The exploration of the scheme is to zoom in on different scales to view the city, from a broad overview at masterplanning level, to a zoomed in strip and eventually to a detail in the city. Most importantly, the main focus of the scheme is to uncover the consequential bizarreness that emerges from the condensing of a city into one continuous interior. Thus, the scheme is broken down into 4 different scales to be looked at, and its inevitable displacement of the ideal.