Kki Sweets and The Little Dröm Store

DRAWING PARALLELS

The two brands—Kki Sweets and The Little Dröm Store—share a storefront at the School of the Arts (SOTA) building in Singapore. Although the design brief was simple—they need to retain their distinctive identities while not looking like two completely separate entities—the main challenge was to create something that would meet the standard of the award-winning school building and to make something new despite the influence of such a commanding piece of architecture.

The team found a solution inspired by Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. Using two of Bloom’s methods—Daemonisation (or ‘counter-sublime’, which looks at the original source of inspiration that will naturally supersede the precusor) and Apophrades (or ‘return of the dead’, which is about direct engagement with the end objective of confronting the original design)—the designers tapped into the structure of SOTA and sought not only to produce an interpretation of the building but also to provide another aspect from which the school can be understood.

The result is a shop space that is an embodiment of the SOTA building into its most essential element—a datum plane and the volumes that it segregates. The datum plane within the shop is designed as a porous trellis so that the entire diagram can be observed and experienced from within. To achieve the top volume, the designers cut through the ceiling to install steel rods on the concrete to hang the trellis.

PROJECT DATA