Main Feature Archives

The Uneasy Relationship Between Architecture Practices and Labour

Lalita, a 24-year-old woman, lies next to her newborn baby inside her ‘hut’, a structure made out of thin branches supporting a blue tarpaulin sheet. “The baby was born here yesterday,” she told me as I scanned the face of the baby and the mother, both looking dangerously underweight. Lalita is a migrant construction worker […]

What our jurors say about FuturArc Prize 2022 Entries

FuturArc Prize (FAP) 2022: Reinterpretation—one theme with the highest realisation potential in FAP’s 14-year run—asked students to reinterpret existing corporate/private/state-owned entities in Asia to transform them into civic/public spaces that give back to the community and are good, inviting, safe and sustainable. This challenge was set in the hope that the visions proposed could one […]

Imagining a Building Culture Revived on Architectural Robustness

RAW focuses their practice on the process of building as much as on the products of architecture Practising architecture in a developing economy like Sri Lanka compels one to confront a number of interconnecting challenges with respect to the technological environment, labour skills and industrial organisation. Technologically, the building industry is fragmented into isolated socio-technical […]

Homes, not Houses

With the gap exacerbated by COVID-19, no single organisation, or even government, can tackle the housing deficit problem alone. The world gained a new word—COVID-19—in 2020 and lost precious lives over the two-year pandemic. When Omicron was declared a variant of concern in late November 2021, the media had referred to it as the dress […]

Aspirations Versus Realities of Utopia in India

The story of Auroville serves to highlight the changing aspirations and consciousness of India as a country, a land of mysticism and spirituality, which it still is, while being one of the biggest consumer markets in the world. Juxtaposed with Aamby Valley and its wealth-driven ideals, it is this heady mix of ancient culture and […]

How Can We Design Cities to Be More Equitable?

When one grows up living in a city-state such as Singapore, one would not have much of an idea of difference between living in a city and outside of it, such as in the suburbs (there’s not much ‘suburbia’ in a small city-state). Thus, living in a city from young does veil one from the […]

Intersectional feminism for a sustainable future

Late last year as the Covid-19 pandemic entered a second wave in Singapore, more than 90 per cent of the cases were counted among the residents of migrant dormitories. A consumer economy that imports the majority of its goods and services, Singapore relies on labourers from throughout Asia for manufacturing and other manual labour, as […]

Moving Beyond Sustainability

In theory, sustainability should allow us to continue to meet the needs of this and future generations. That was the point made by the Brundtland Commission in their definition of sustainability. But that does not address a more basic question of whether or not we should be continuing the current situation. The ecosystems that support […]

Rethinking Sustainability: Form Follows Systems

A CRISIS OF PERCEPTION For centuries, cities evolved gradually in terms of their physical and population size. This trend, however, dramatically shifted in the last 50 years, with urban growth occurring at an exponential scale and rate as urban population numbers spiked. By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s projected 9.7 billion population will live in […]

The Future of Cities: Sustainability’s Deceptive Dream

Where do we go from here? Well, that would depend upon whether we have actually learned something from the COVID-19 pandemic. But it seems we have not. The powers-to-be are poised, waiting for improved conditions so as to continue their unsustainable business as usual. Humankind never learns, not even from major catastrophes. Complacent with money […]

The Next Paradigm; Where We Go From Here

The conversation appears to have stalled. Almost every student I teach or practitioner I talk to, when asked what s/he thinks is sustainable design, replies, “a Green building, right?” The conflation of Green and sustainable is unsettling. It troubles me. It should concern every designer who is alarmed by the planetary crises that we confront […]

Landscape Architecture Is Our First Line of Defence

The design community’s response to COVID-19, much like our reaction to issues of sustainability, tends to gravitate toward silver bullet solutions rather than necessary incremental change. Similarly, at the onset of the pandemic, our hubris and desire to manage Mother Nature guided us to focus on human-centric solutions to our predicament: advancing sensor technology [1] […]