THE RESERVOIR FARM

Abstract

Upon the closed boarder of Malaysia and Indonesia during early COVID-19 spread in April, many Singaporean, fearing the complete cut-off of daily grocery supplies, resorted to panic buying and hoarding of basic sustenance. The pandemic has surfaced the paranoia towards survival and the selfishness of depriving the less privileged to access to these daily essentials, and the flawed national progress in prioritising tertiary industries that almost completely replaced local agriculture, alerting to the vulnerability of being an import-reliant countries in different dimensions.

This thesis started out by examining Singapore’s food security in its current predicament and a future full of uncertainties. While it is necessary to scale up local productions of food in light of more fragile global supply chain, building up a strong mindset towards contingency situations is equally important.

In order to address both the hardware and software of food security, the thesis speculates a near future where a severe vcrisis event takes place and shuts down Singapore’s import of food sources, forcing her to rely on local production completely.

The Reservoir Farm adopts antifragile food production system that aims at meeting the basic nutritional demand of each individual, through decentralised production strategies across the island. The thesis looks at boosting production of food fish, to fulfil 100% local demand of protein during crisis.

The thesis proposes a new scheme of flexible fish farm typology that addresses pre- and crisis demand of proteins, by exploring the potential of tilapia fish for contingency production. The new typology is located beside selected reservoirs across the island to intermediate food production as a shared responsibility among the state, enterprises and communities. It aims at uplifting local reservoir beyond its functional use as a space for water storage and recreational activities, by transforming it as a space for skill transfer and an alternative landscape for food production. The architectural implication of this proposal is an infrastructure that serves as a new form of urban common centred around the knowledge of fish and water as a space-maker, an education tool, and a social catalyst which inculcates optimism and perseverance in times of adversity.