This is home, surely?
Retrofitting Singaporean Public Housing for Domestic and Climatic Collectivity
J.E.J. Meyers (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
D. van den Heuvel – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
R.R. van den Ban – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
This project addresses the future of Singapore’s extensive modernist mass housing stock through the intersecting lenses of reuse, bioclimatic design, and collective living. While Singaporean public housing has typically been understood as a success – with over 80% of the population living in state-built high-rise flats – this project suggests that this existing public housing stock is in fact the site of multiple intersecting crises: of obsolescence, or the impending and assumed large-scale demolition of ageing existing mass housing stock; domesticity, or the ways in which mass housing types have contributed toward the privatisation of the home and no longer accommodate demographic shifts away from the nuclear family; and thermal comfort, or the ways in which housing types have evolved to support increasingly privatised and energy-intensive forms of climate control, such as air-conditioning.
In the face of these intersecting crises, this project imagines progressive, alternative futures for existing Singaporean public housing stock. Through the case study site of Selegie House – the Singaporean public housing agency’s first urban renewal housing project, completed in 1963 – the project proposes numerous strategies for adaptation, including the insertion of new communal amenities, reconfiguration of household typologies, and integration of new hybrid mechanical-natural climatic systems. As a replicable model, these strategies encompass a paradigm shift in relation toward Singapore’s existing public housing stock, aiming to cultivate urgently required new attitudes towards existing structures, living forms, and definitions of comfort.