Design Practice Review

Architectural Design Theory

Assignment III
Lidya Kartika / 1706090023

Architecture had grown rapidly for the past years, every architect challenge themselves to build
something iconic, something different and thus thinking about the functional ability of the building and
how it affect the surroundings. With the help of technology, the needs of research and design decision
became more complex yet easier to be built.
Thinking about limitation the past and the present of architecture, where in the past, there are so
many things that can blocking the creativity of an architect because of the limitation of technology, while
now, there are almost nothing can blocked the creativity because people believe that nothing is
impossible, that everything can be built.
Digital architecture, with the technology advances nowadays, is one of those who help the
architect to make those unbuildable became something buildable. Helping the complex problems or the
complex misfit easier to be read and solved by becoming design thinking, tools, and also can become some
kind of magic to make it happen.
By meaning of digital architecture as design thinking, based on the book, “Theories of The Digital
in Architecture” written by Rivka Oxman and Robert Oxman, can be generate to six categories, like
material form generation, mathematical form generation, fabrication form generation, performativity
form generation, natural or neo biological form generation and tectonic form generation. While digital
architecture as tools, can be presented like the help of computer aided design (CAD) or building
information modeling (BIM) such as Revit, Rhino with Grasshopper, and so many others.
One of those who taking advantages of digital architecture is WOHA, an architect bureau based
in Singapore who brings the modern Asian architecture to a new level. WOHA’s points of formal reference
are multiple: trans versing the local and the global, and the concrete and the abstract, to include art
practice, contemporary textile design, and theories of mathematics and geometry. Binding these
disparate generators is a methodology grounded for formal expression.
Drawing is the medium through which WOHA’s thinking and testing occurs: as they explain,
“Regulation, costs, pragmatic requirements and poetic desires push the pencil around. The pencil
is really mapping all those influences”
 The WOHA office is not extensively digitalized (hand drawing retains a critical role in the design
process), but the process they describe has parallels with contemporary digital practices, where
information about site or program is digitized to become the generative DNA for the final architecture.
This similarity is in the intention, and whilst there is much invested in the development and refinement of
an object, the form is not predetermined. Potentially, buildings can respond in a direct manner to the
parameters of each project, yet have varies architectural expression. Underpinning these ideas is a
revision of the traditional role of the architect, the architecture is no longer a direct translation of one
person’s desires for a particular object, as the building is now inherently the result of a collaborative
creative endeavor. The architecture has a porous, open and non-hierarchical rule base.
Whilst ideas of abstraction are critical to WOHA, they are also concerned with an architecture
that resonates with context, and with known social and cultural rituals, forms and ideas. And to that end,
they develop and seek out pattern: whether found patterns from site, patterns from an existing context,
or more diagrammatic patterns derived from art or elsewhere.

“We believe that the human brain is delighted by patterns, it sense meaning in patterns, and is
able to read very subtle patterns by relating forms and spaces and objects. The more that synergy and
that relationship between elements occurs in an environmental context, the more we feel a sense of
integration and completeness, which gives that feeling of architecture. If these elements also trigger
cultural references, then you start developing a very rich, multivalent environment, reminiscent of many
things known and seen.” - Hassell

One of WOHA’s project in which engage the digital architecture is the Iluma building in Singapore,
it is an entertainment and retail development now become a designated arts, education and
entertainment district. The design contrasts a rectilinear block against a curvaceous sculpted form. The
rectilinear element accommodates large, regular components of the car park, retail anchor tenants,
cinema and performance spaces, while the curved form accommodates smaller retail and entertainment
activities along meandering paths. The dialogue between the two elements is heightened by the
architectural treatment, with vibrant hot colors animating the rectilinear block and monochrome shades
of grey and white cladding the curvilinear block. Overlooking, overlapping and directing views up, down
and across, are strategies throughout the building, inside and outside, to enhance vibrancy, people-
watching and excitement.
 The building, although contemporary in form, relates in scale and texture to the surrounding
neighborhood. The colorful rectilinear element recalls the brightly painted public housing blocks, while
the decorative curvilinear façade translates the varied massing, fine texture, and exuberant, intricately
detailed decoration of the historic shop houses into a different expression.
The internal activities are zoned in three strata with interlinked central spaces. The ground floor
forms a continuous network with the surrounding streets, drawing in pedestrians from all directions. A
pedestrian bridge at the second level flies out across the road to create a link with the neighboring
development. All paths lead to the main atrium, a 40m high space, which is divided horizontally into a
lower and upper volume, each with their own character, but visually connected. The atrium is provided
with lighting and sound for entertainment events and performances. The lower atrium is focused on
smaller, specialized retail, while the upper atrium is surrounded by the entertainment activities. Dividing
the two spaces is an urban piazza, floated 20m above the street, populated by bars, games, cinemas and
restaurants. The third major space is the rooftop theatre and event space, which opens up to open air
lush landscape, roof terraces and café pods – Ibiza meets Bali on the Singapore rooftops. The roof terraces
are located around a central glazed skylight, affording views back down into the atrium spaces, and from
the atrium up to the planted roof.
In order to achieve the planning authority’s vision of a vibrant nightlife district, and to amplify
visibility within the bustling neighborhood, the project features a custom-designed, artistic Crystal Mesh
media façade composed of faceted jewel-like fixtures that glitter in the day and glow in the night. The
crystal media façade was conceived and developed in close cooperation with Berlin based artists and
architects realities:united, and features simple energy-saving bulbs in a custom designed reflector,
controlled by a custom designed software. The façade is treated as stacked, undulating strips that overlap
and recede, the interstitial spaces forming gardens and terraces overhanging the street. The
neighborhood art institutions have been engaged to assist in ongoing curating and award programs to
produce content to animate the façade, and an on-going series of exhibitions and events will showcase
the work of local art, architecture and design students.
The crystal media façade is a three dimensional canvas on which media artists, art students and
even the public can apply fast moving, legible images, text and graphics and architectural treatments, all
at the scale of a city block. Over time, this will build a sense of ownership by the surrounding creative
community, supporting the events and activities within the development, and making iluma more than
just a retail space – it is hoped it will become a true urban place. In the modern city, the urban fabric is
controlled by the authorities, developers and construction industry, a power remote from the man on the
street. Iluma has the new and exciting potential to give ordinary citizens the opportunity to impact their
surroundings at an urban scale.
The technology in the project couldn’t established with the help of digital architecture, in which
WOHA seeks for a material that is still eco-friendly, yet have a big impact for the façade. The building
façade then became a canvas for artists to display their works on a large public scale, and it also establish
a collaboration between WOHA and realities:united. In this case, digital architecture have many benefits,
it help to innovate a new sustainable modern material and also it help architects to collaborate.
We can’t shy away from the technological advances, because the world is evolving and so does
the technologies. They are making the needs of human being become more complex yet there will always
be a solution. Before the invention of digital software and parametric architecture, there are many
architect who thinking about a new architecture, because what they see is that the future would likely to
change. The designer as a driver, in which, architecture become one of the highest evidence of human
civilization. In what may, we can’t deny that technology is indeed a double edged sword. We have to learn
about it and use it wisely before it use us and become a soulless architect.

“Architecture is the mother of art, without architecture of our own, we have no soul of our own
civilization “ – Frank Lloyd Wright
 LEMBAR PERNYATAAN ORISINALITAS

Saya yang bertanda tangan di bawah ini:

Nama : Lidya Kartika

NPM : 1706090023

Menyatakan bahwa tugas yang saya kumpulkan

Judul tugas : Teori_III_Lidya Kartika

Mata kuliah : Teori Perancangan

Adalah benar merupakan hasil karya saya sendiri, dan semua gagasan dan materi dalam karya
ini yang bukan merupakan gagasan atau materi milik saya sendiri telah dicantumkan
sumbernya secara tepat. Apabila di kemudian hari terbukti bahwa pernyataan saya ini tidak
benar, maka saya bersedia menerima sanksi sesuai peraturan akademik yang berlaku.

Depok, 11 Mei 2018

( Lidya Kartika )