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TABLE OF CONTENTS

HEAD’S MESSAGE

BA ARCH + M ARCH PROGRAMME INTRO PROGRAMME OVERVIEW

BA ARCH 4-YEAR BREAKDOWN

13 SUGGESTED CAREER PROSPECTS 19 GLOSSARY 20 BA ARCH 4-YEAR BREAKDOWN (WITH APC)

BA ARCH (HONS) PROGRAMME

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN ARCHITECTURE PROGRAMME DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE BA ARCH (HONS) PROGRAMME Y1-4 YEAR 1 SEMESTER 1

YEAR 1 SEMESTER 2

YEAR 2 SEMESTER 1

YEAR 2 SEMESTER 2

YEAR 3 SEMESTER 1

YEAR 3 SEMESTER 2 BA ARCH STUDIO SEQUENCE

DESIGN 1 : SEEING, THINKING, MAKING

DESIGN 2 : SCALE, PRECEDENT, CONTEXT

DESIGN 3 : AGGREGATION, STRUCTURE, SPACE

DESIGN 4 : ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE, ENVELOPE

DESIGN 5 : DENSITY, URBANISM, PUBLICNESS

DESIGN 6 : SYSTEMS, COMPREHENSIVENESS, INTEGRATION BA ARCH DESIGN STUDIO 1 TO 6 / FACULTY

OPTIONS DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIO / DESIGN 7

SEMESTER 1 OPTIONS DESIGNRESEARCH STUDIO 1 / DESIGN 7 64 SEMESTER 2 OPTIONS DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIO 2 / DESIGN 7

BA ARCH DESIGN STUDIO REVIEW CALENDAR

INTEGRATED DESIGN SPECIALISATION / ENTRY TO M ARCH

M ARCH PROGRAMME

MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE PROGRAMME DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

M ARCH SEMESTER 1 & 2 ARCHITECTURAL THESIS SEQUENCE

M ARCH SEMESTER 1 ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE STUDIO

86 M ARCH SEMESTER 2 ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN THESIS 87 M ARCH SEMESTER 1 ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN RESEARCH REPORT

90 M ARCH DESIGN RESEARCH THESIS SUPERVISORS 101 M ARCH DESIGN RESEARCH THESIS OFFERINGS

MA ARCH DESIGN STUDIO REVIEW CALENDAR

BA ARCH AND M ARCH / DOA GUEST LECTURERS, VISITING PROFESSORS

103

108 VISITING PROFESSORS & EXTERNAL REVIEWERS FOR AY2025/26 111 STUDENT EXCHANGE PROGRAMMES (SEP) 112 PUBLIC AND GUEST LECTURE SERIES FOR AY2025/26

CONTACTS

113

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DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE HEAD’S MESSAGE Welcome to the new academic year, AY2026/27, at the NUS

built environments can be better preserved or transformed,

Department of Architecture! We are thrilled to have you join our

and how we, as professionals and citizens, can play a more

leading design programmes in Asia and a dynamic community

active and critical role in society. We need to hone our skills

of higher learning.

as practitioners while thinking and working critically and creatively.

NUS Architecture is Asia’s premier school of design, architecture, landscape and urbanism. Led by a cross-

As we work to take on these social, technological, and

disciplinary and international faculty, we champion design

intellectual challenges, we must also work together as a

excellence through a vision of ‘Architecture for Asia’. Our

community. As you move through studios and classes, think

design and research respond specifically to the challenges of

about how we can support one another. Seek support from

the global equatorial region.

faculty and staff when faced with issues and difficulties. Team up on initiatives and projects. Show care in challenging

Engaged in cutting-edge practices, research, and teaching,

situations. We are here to work and learn as a community of

the department is committed to leading in design and planning

committed individuals.

innovations to meet the planet’s many new and growing challenges, including the climate crisis, urbanisation, and the

Navigating a large department and programmes like ours can

impact of socio-economic transformation on communities

be exciting but daunting. We hope this handbook will serve as a

and the built environments. Our carbon-neutral facilities are a

valuable guide to help you make the most of our vast resources

testament to our commitment to change.

at NUS. As detailed and comprehensive as the handbook can be, things may inevitably be left out. Please feel free to reach

Our programmes prepare our students to be changemakers

out to our staff and your peers. We wish you well as you embark

in the profession and society. As you undertake your

on your journey in the new academic year!

intellectual journey through our programmes, ask how the

JEFF HOU, Ph.D, FASLA Provost’s Chair Professor and Head of Department

+-7 hrs

NUS-DOA

PROGRAMME OVERVIEW For AY2026/2027 - Bachelors of Arts in Architecture (Hons) (4-year programme) + Master Programmes offering

PROGRAMME BREAKDOWN For AY2026/2027 - Bachelors of Arts in Architecture (Hons) (4-year programme) Clearing at least 160-unit (over 8 semesters)

PROGRAMME BREAKDOWN For AY2026/2027 - Bachelors of Arts in Architecture (Hons) (4-year programme) - For students with 40-unit Advanced Placement Credits from Singapore Polytechnic (Architecture) Singapore Polytechnic (Interior Design) Clearing at least 120-unit (over 6 semesters)

PROGRAMME BREAKDOWN For AY2026/2027 - Bachelors of Arts in Architecture (Hons) (4-year programme) - For students with 40-unit Advanced Placement Credits from Temasek Polytechnic (Interior Architecture & Design) Nanyang Polytechnic (Architecture) Clearing at least 120-unit (over 6 semesters)

PROGRAMME BREAKDOWN For AY2026/2027 - Bachelors of Arts in Architecture (Hons) (4-year programme) - For students with 36-unit Advanced Placement Credits from Ngee Ann Polytechnic (Design - Architecture Specialisation) Clearing at least 124-unit (over 6 semesters)

SUGGESTED CAREER PROSPECTS with Bachelors of Arts in Architecture (Hons)

GLOSSARY The full glossary of the course codes and titles for Bachelor of Arts in Architecture (Hons) (4-year MOE-subsidised programme) and transit to Master of Architecture (1-year MOE-subsidised programme)

Picture credit: Rory Gardiner

BA ARCH (HONS) PROGRAMME

BACHELOR OF ARTS IN ARCHITECTURE PROGRAMME DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE The Bachelor of Arts in Architecture is a platform for critical

scaffolded to progress through the modules providing a

inquiry, design experimentation, and intellectual production,

comprehensive understanding of what architecture entails.

where

researchers engage architecture

Design studios are curated to progressively expose students

not simply as the making of buildings, but as a cultural,

to questions of: scale, precedent, context, aggregation,

technological, ecological, and political project.

structure, space, environment, climate, envelope, density,

students

and

It is a

space where students and researchers engage rigorously

urbanism,

with the theoretical, material, spatial, and technological

integration, criticality, agenda and methodology. Studios and

publicness,

systems,

comprehensiveness,

conditions that shape the built environment, while confronting

hands-on workshops are accompanied by seminars covering

architecture’s agency in the production of social realities. The

areas of history and theory, urbanism, and the environment.

programme cultivates a collective of intellectually ambitious

Fusing criticality and embracing engineering skillsets, we

and creatively driven individuals committed not only to the

welcome students ready to carefully and critically employ

design of buildings, but to the rethinking of architecture

technology to shape the future.

itself -its histories, ideologies, ecologies, and futures. Through speculative inquiry, critical reflection, and design

We help developing, and support, students’ ideas and

experimentation, the programme positions architecture as an

explorations through a blend of analog and digital approaches,

active force capable of transforming how societies organise

from

space, negotiate power, and imagine collective life.

computational methods. Through a curated pairing of

hands-on

material

experiments

advanced

research-design we organically foster the growth of students’ Students engage with modes and methodologies of reading

independence, getting them to gradually determine the

and imagining space, defining programme, investigating

architects they want to become. Students get enmeshed with

atmospheres, enabling alternative and emancipatory modes

architectural thinking, discipline, and practice, understanding

of living and making place. Emphasising the need for measure-

the value of problem-solving as a mix of analysis, criticality

and-care, they are asked to reflect on how to operate and devise

and creativity. Sharpening skills through iterative processes

spatial strategies whilst approaching questions pertaining

and guided tutorials, throughout the academic years we hope

ecology, fostering tactful ethics and promoting sustainable

students acquire confidence, endurance and resilience.

practices.

The

tropical,

diverse

and

technologically

oriented setting of Singapore offers a base to pursue studies

BA Arch DOA, in the spirit of CDE of which we are part,

foregrounding innovation and inclusivity, aiming through

cultivates inter-disciplinary thinkers, a generation of makers

architecture at devising spaces and producing relations in

able to document the world equipped with synoptic visions,

support of more sustainable modes of living, of diversity, and

comfortable with moving between fields of knowledge,

community-making. The local settings of Singapore offer a

grasping the need to operate locally and globally, synergising,

rich environment whence to start mapping and understanding

distilling and organising architecturally a vast array of cultural

the global dynamics affecting the planet, its deep and ever-

elements, morphological types, and modes of making.

evolving ecologies, the complex fabric of the living, the human

Paraphrasing what someone has said, it is not enough to

and more-than-human actors involved. The global>to<local

reflect on the world, the necessary task is that of collectively

pendulum allows us to keep reflecting on how to locate and

changing it. Architects commit to the future through acts of

engineer the human in relation to nature, ultimately prompting

optimism, affecting the living and contributing to the making

a multi-scalar understanding, and formulating new ways to

of society, its eco-logical grounding. Architects contribute to

discuss ethically what we mean with such terms.

shaping the forms-of-life that are possible and the relations that are enabled and disabled within each space, in time.

At DOA BA Arch we endorse a layered way of thinking able to

Such agency is not to be taken lightly and for granted, as that

span and connect a variety of domains converging towards

is architecture’s enormous potential, a vow that requires new

what we call architecture. The program welcomes students

creative individuals to be constantly renewed and reactivated.

with no prior architectural knowledge, it is a four-year course, FEDERICO SIMONE RUBERTO, Ph.D Senior Lecturer Bachelor of Arts in Architecture Programme Director

Picture credit: Muhammad Iskandar Ariffin & Riego Lewis Gabrielle

Picture credit: Shawn Lee Jin Fatt

BA ARCH (HONS) PROGRAMME Y1 - Y4

Picture credit: Martin Cabrera & Yap Rui Xi

The new undergraduate curriculum is introduced for

This foundation programme is set within a broad-based

incoming students AY2026/27, it is a four-year BA

interdisciplinary education model. It provides a strong

(Arch) programme comprising design studio and other

disciplinary foundation and at the same time encourages

essential courses. The courses have been curated and

students to expand their horizons and worldviews beyond

are consolidated so to be part of the inter-disciplinary

the confines of the discipline. Ultimately, students are

vision of the College of Design and Engineering (CDE). The

encouraged to draw on expertise and knowledge both

curriculum creates pathways that accommodate a wider

within the Department and across the University. This

range of second majors, minors and specialisation. During

allows students to align their design education with their

the four years, students progress through seven design

own specific areas of interests. By offering a wide range of

courses where they are introduced to 18 foundational

opportunities and offering comprehensive training in both

themes in architecture.

This largest component of the

discipline-specific and general education, our programme

curriculum takes place in design studios, where students

prepares students to be able to navigate a complex

tackle different hands-on design challenges, and discover

and multivariate future. This prepares them to become

their own unique, critical and creative approaches to solve

influential citizens and visionary thought leaders, not only

assigned design problems. At the same time, students take

within the field of architecture but in other various domains.

additional courses for their Major Requirements within the DOA—courses within the Common Curriculum offered by

The following pages describe the design studio themes and

the College of Design and Engineering (CDE) and General

other essential courses for Years 1-4.

Education courses and courses in Unrestricted Electives elsewhere in the University . The Major and Common courses are carefully aligned and calibrated with the corresponding studio levels. These complement the learning objectives and outcomes of the design studio sequence.

YEAR 1 SEMESTER 1 AR1101A DESIGN 1 SEEING, THINKING, MAKING UNITS: 8 This

key

foundation

course

introduction

Learning Objectives:

basic design concepts and methodologies, as well as representational techniques specific to seeing, thinking,

1. 2.

the

non-directional

relationship

understand

perception,

scale,

space,

form,

proportion and composition.

ideas, ranging from traditional representation to emergent trends operating on the frontiers of data-driven and digital

understand

between seeing, thinking and making.

and making. These will be explored via analogue means. Students will be introduced to a wide range of architectural

To understand and deploy line weight, line type, and graphic composition to produce structure and

techniques in the field of design today.

hierarchy in the visual field. Ideas of space, form, proportion, composition, and order

elevation, perspective, and sketched and scaled

will be examined and explored. As foundational design

axonometric drawings.

components, these will provide requisite grounding in developing a visual language through the practices of

To understand and be able to make plan, section,

To understand and make models as fundamental

drawing, sketching, and model making. Students will learn

mediums of design thinking and as part of the design

basic drawing techniques and skills, including line weight,

process.

line type, scale, and the projective techniques of plan,

To understand the difference between representation, abstraction and transformation in the architectural

section, elevation, perspective and axonometric drawing.

process. Students will also be introduced to techniques for

understand

architectural

representation

understanding and addressing information and data, as

necessarily a mixed mode employing mixed media, and

well as the abstraction of architectural ideas through

that the “whole picture” can only be formed through the concurrent use of multiple methods.

the production of architectural drawings and 3D scale models. They will be able to evaluate such representations

To be able to read information and data and translate

as part of the fundamental process and methodology of

it into analogue architectural ideas, drawings and

contemporary computational design, and as an extension of

models, whilst engaging critically with the process.

traditional methods of gathering and analysing information.

Picture credit: Sui Xuewen

EG1311BE** DESIGN AND MAKE

GEA1000 QUANTITATIVE REASONING WITH DATA

UNITS: 4

This course covers the fundamentals of design and

This course aims to equip undergraduate students with

prototyping for the built environment. Students will learn

essential data literacy skills to analyse data and make

design principles and tools relevant to architecture,

decisions under uncertainty. It covers the basic principles

landscape architecture, the built environment, civil and

and practice for collecting data and extracting useful

environmental

disciplines.

insights, illustrated in a variety of application domains. For

Through a stage-based design process, students will engage

engineering,

and

example, when two issues are correlated (e.g., smoking

in experiential learning through group design projects that

and cancer), how can we tell whether the relationship

include eliciting user needs, ideating solutions, and making

is causal (e.g., smoking causes cancer)? How can we

prototypes to demonstrate their ideas.

deal with categorical data? Numerical data? What about uncertainty and complex relationships? These and many

** Highly encouraged for DOA students to read as this course is specifically developed considering the integration of architectural/ tectonic principles. Alternatively students can read EG1311.

other questions will be addressed using data software and computational tools, with real-world data sets.

DTK2234 ADVANCED DESIGN THINKING UNITS: 4 This course explores advanced design thinking strategies, integrating

architecture

and

landscape

architecture

fostering holistic understanding, creativity, innovation, and critical reflection. Through projects and theoretical discussions, it develops a foundational skillset for both architecture and landscape designer, highlighting keywords-ideas, which are presented via relevant case studies and through selected practical exercises. The course engages various questions influencing design as well as the role or representation —and of technology for design, as an essential part of the creative process. Emphasis is placed on resilience, sustainability, and adaptive strategies for contemporary design challenges. By the end of the course, students will develop a critical, forward-thinking approach to shaping built and natural environments with creativity and strategic insight.

Picture credit: Soh Enxi, Destiny

YEAR 1 SEMESTER 2 AR1102 DESIGN 2 SCALE, PRECEDENT, CONTEXT UNITS: 8 This course will build on AR1101A by focusing on the

Learning Objectives:

development of three foundational design skills: Scale, Precedent and Context. Students will be introduced to 3D

proportion, in relationship to context and the human

complexities and relationships of scale, discover the use

figure.

and transformation of precedent in architectural design processes; and gain an understanding of context as a

To understand and deploy dimensions, scale and

To understand and transform precedent as a vehicle for design innovation.

component that impacts design outcomes within the built and natural environment.

This course will enhance students’ use of different

To understand and integrate context in the conception of design. spatial qualities.

mediums and graphic communication, with an introduction to complex 2D and 3D projections at scale, as well as the

5. 6.

To understand and deploy a design method to structure the design process, making visible the transformational

method(s). They will also delve deeper into the use of 3D

processes in drawing and model making.

models as part of the design process. Expanding on what they have learnt the previous semester,

To understand and produce projective drawings in scale.

use of digital and analogue tools. Students will learn to combine representational tools to illustrate their design

To understand and begin to describe and communicate

To understand and deploy line weight/type, scale

students will employ various visual mediums as part of the

and graphic hierarchies to communicate information

design process, and as a tool to present, defend and refine

and design intention, and to understand and deploy

their ideas on architecture.

materials in model making to communicate design intent.

Studio projects will also begin to wrestle with certain

with analogue tools in hybrid representations.

fundamental issues in architecture: site, programme, circulation, organisation of public and private zones, and the differing requirements of users. Students will apply thoughtful, rigorous methods in the process of formmaking, understanding it to be the language through which architects shape and create spatial experiences.

Picture credit: Studio William Ng

To begin incorporating digital technologies together

To begin incorporating research methodologies and critical thinking as part of the design process.

10. To present architectural ideas in concise and considered visual and verbal presentations.

AR2524 SPATIAL COMPUTATIONAL THINKING

AR2227 HISTORY & THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE I

UNITS: 4

Spatial computational thinking is increasingly recognised

This course is the first of a two-part course introducing

as fundamental to various spatial disciplines. It involves

students to the history and theory of architecture and

idea formulation, algorithm development and solution

urban design. It is shaped around themes grouped by

exploration, with a focus on manipulating geometric and

environmental features to emphasise the ways that

semantic datasets. Students will learn to use parametric

societies have built in response to the landscapes,

modelling tools to generate and analyse building elements

resources, and tools available to them. Covering almost

at varying scales, and applying visual programming

two millennia of global architectural and urban history,

interfaces to develop and test complex algorithms. They will

the course begins in approximately 500 BCE, ending in

learn to structure their ideas as algorithmic procedures that

approximately 1400 CE. The teaching material is presented

integrate data structures, functions, and control flow. They

to encourage comparative cross-readings of architectural

will also gain familiarity with higher level computational

history between geographies, societies, climates, cultures,

concepts, such as decomposition, encapsulation and

religions, and socio-political registers.

abstraction. ** Highly encouraged for DOA students to read as this course is specifically developed considering the integration of architectural/ tectonic principles. Alternatively students can read CS1010%.

AR1328A ARCHITECTURAL MATERIALS AND CONSTRUCTION UNITS: 4 The course introduces the basic concepts of construction

experience of architecture. Architectural design and the

technology, focusing on key materials use in building

knowledge of materials as well as construction technology

components and fundamental building system for the

are interdependent. This integration of knowledge supports

context of tropical climate. Properties of materials

design

are discussed as technical strategies that will shape

rationale and imagination. This foundational course

construction and architectural form. Connecting rigid and

provides the context to appreciate architectural tectonics

linear or planar materials will focus on timber and steel

and structure-related knowledge for AR2328A Architectural

construction. Building with modular units and aggregation

Tectonics and Structural Systems and AR3328 Architectural

will address techniques of masonry and casting concrete.

Structures and Forces.

exploration/development

with

both

technical

The knowledge of materials and their deployment in construction are vital in influencing the performance and

YEAR 2 SEMESTER 1 AR2101 DESIGN 3 AGGREGATION, STRUCTURE, SPACE UNITS: 8 This course investigates the architectural potentials of

Learning Objectives:

structure and space through the operation of aggregation— that is, the combination of architectural spaces, functions, and

connective

circulation

systems.

Students

(material, gravity, tectonics) as ordering elements in

will

architecture.

propose architectural forms through the aggregation of volumetric programme components, creating a balance

To understand and deploy the principles of structure

To understand, design and deploy aggregation of

between repetition and singularity. They will grapple with

volumetric elements as an ordering component of

the complexities of function and organisation in a variety

architecture, with scalar relationships of parts to the whole.

of scaled spaces. They will also gain an understanding of material, gravity, and structure as foundational

mass, form, voids and volumes.

components and ordering systems of architecture and explore the interdigitation of these approaches in space-

To understand and design spaces through the use of

To understand and deploy a design within a site that exerts its own influence on the massing and

making.

distribution of the architectural project. Students will expand their representational techniques

outcomes are achieved through clear thinking and

to include 3D projections and begin to incorporate

rigorous iteration.

the element of time. A repertoire of representational approaches that includes relevant drawing representation

To begin to understand the semester’s themes as values in architecture, and to formulate and articulate

types such as hybrid or synthetic drawing that combined

a position with respect to these values.

analytical information in the spatial, formal, organisational and tectonic aspects, will be introduced along with digital

To understand that design is a process, and the best

To develop and deploy advanced projective drawing and

fabrication methods. These digital tools will be employed

model making to communicate process, intentionality

alongside and within advanced analogue techniques of

and research findings.

model making.

•To utilise digital drawing and making in a hybrid relationship with advanced analogue tools.

To incorporate research methodologies and critical thinking as part of the design process.

10. To articulate and present architectural ideas in concise and considered verbal, written, and performative presentations, and to engage critically in studio and review discussions.

Picture credit: Veryn

AR2228 HISTORY & THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE II

CDE2212 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR DESIGN

UNITS: 4

This course is the first of a two-part course introducing

AI for Design is a cross-disciplinary course that investigates

students to the history and theory of architecture and

the changing role of artificial intelligence in creative and

urban design. It is shaped around themes grouped by

design-based practices. It considers both the potential

environmental features to emphasise the ways that

and limitations of AI, fostering experimental thinking,

societies have built in response to the landscapes,

reflective inquiry, and deepening the applied utility of AI

resources, and tools available to them. Covering almost

within creative processes Besides treating AI as a technical

two millennia of global architectural and urban history,

instrument for automation, it is primarily positioned as

the course begins in approximately 500 BCE, ending in

a generative force, one that reshapes how knowledge is

approximately 1400 CE. The teaching material is presented

created, shared, and understood across disciplines and

to encourage comparative cross-readings of architectural

within changing technological contexts.

history between geographies, societies, climates, cultures, religions, and socio-political registers.

AR2328A ARCHITECTURAL TECTONICS AND STRUCTURAL SYSTEMS UNITS: 4 The course introduces the basic principles of tectonics

to achieve the desired architectural objectives. Second, to

structural

inculcate sustainability literacy shapes appropriate design

systems and their relationship with construction details

decisions concerning the choice of materials, construction

and techniques. Building components are presented

technique, building waste, and life cycle strategies. Third,

as integrated systems. Tectonics is discussed as an

to help students see the interdependence of architecture

expressive quality of architecture and structure achieved

and construction in supporting technical imagination

by materials, construction, and integration of building

to achieve tectonic quality, an expressive potential of

components. The course also addresses sustainability

architecture, by considering construction strategies,

by considering the choice of materials, construction

techniques, and integratives in the design process. Fourth,

methods or strategies, and considering both qualitative

to foster an understand of the importance of making

and quantitative perspectives. The objectives of the

physical models and to establish a consistent relationship

course are- First, to provide foundational construction

between

knowledge essential for integrating building components

construction techniques, and the structural frame.

architecture

examining

the

basic

architectural

space,

choice

materials,

YEAR 2 SEMESTER 2 AR2102 DESIGN 4 ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE, ENVELOPE UNITS: 8 This course examines the boundaries of environment, climate, and architecture through the specifics of the envelope. Students will understand the gradient of

Learning Objectives: 1.

of environment as a fundamental component of

atmospheric conditions between the interior and exterior, forms of atmospheric conditioning, and the design of climate in an expanse encompassing air, breeze, rain,

architecture. 2.

influence or are influenced—by the act of architecture.

They will expand representational methodologies and

architecture of the built environment.

extends

the

To understand climate as a complex and variable set of mediums that influence design.

To understand the envelope, as a site of exchange, in a range of positions from human to territorial scales, and to understand filtering as a component of architecture.

To develop collaborative skills and to critically engage with contradictory information and data in the design

design processes to incorporate the invisible conditions of the atmosphere as a design medium that impacts the

environment

versa. 3.

Students will understand and deploy advanced digital simulations alongside analogue testing and projecting.

that

these impact design processes and outcomes and vice

be explored, and the value systems of environmental and

the site as a set of dynamic factors and processes—that

understand

and systems both natural and constructed, and that

implications of hot and wet equatorial environments will

histories. Students will expand their understanding of

interpretation of the site to include dynamic processes

dust, smells, and other contaminants. The contextual

sustainable designs examined within their long discursive

To understand and critically deploy conditions

process. 6.

To apply conceptual tools in design, making value and ethical judgments as to the material and resource consequences of decisions in the design process, relative to a larger understanding of climate and the

Picture credit: Poh Hui Yee & Shang Zixuan

environment. 7.

To utilise advanced projective drawing and model making to communicate process and architectural iteration.

To utilise digital drawing, simulations and model making alongside advanced analogue tools and testing methodologies.

To organise and properly present research for design, and understand what constitutes design research.

10. To present architectural ideas in concise and considered

verbal,

written

and

performative

presentations, utilising a wide range of mediums, and to engage critically in studio and review discussions.

CDE2501 AR1329 SUSTAINABLE SYSTEMS CLIMATE, ECOLOGY AND FOR LIVEABLE CITIES ARCHITECTURE UNITS: 4

UNITS: 4

Using case studies of Singapore and other cities—through

The impact of the tropical climate on buildings results in various design strategies to minimise energy usage and operational carbon while increasing comfort. Here, different building typologies, functions, and occupancies —whether individual or collective —and related compactness are relevant. It discusses the impact of passive environmental design, performance and synergy with the ecological system in achieving sustainable or regenerative objectives. Students will learn about degrees of applied technology and design complexity, ranging from passive design strategies to the integration of green elements and embedding a design into the environment, as well as potential reciprocity with the surroundings. The course covers daylight, solar radiation, and as a result, radiant and ambient temperatures, which can be mitigated by wind, ventilation, rain, and water bodies in the surrounding area. In addition, material aspects such as bio-based materials, embedded carbon, and circularity, as well as manufacturing processes like prefabrication and sourcing, will be examined.

a system thinking lens—this course explores how cities are planned, developed, governed and managed to achieve liveable outcomes of quality of life, sustainable environment and a competitive economy. Thus, allowing us to understand the role(s) that urban systems professionals (urban policy makers, planners, architects, engineers, real estate consultants and managers) play in achieving an integrated way of liveable city outcomes, by combining their individual expertise in different disciplines.

Picture credit: Poh Hui Yee & Shang Zixuan

YEAR 3 SEMESTER 1 AR3101 DESIGN 5 DENSITY, URBANISM, PUBLICNESS UNITS: 8 This course explores the influence of the city on the

Learning Objectives:

architectural project. Students will explore density and its relationship to the form, mass, and volume of buildings,

configuration of architecture.

alongside broader questions that arise in responding to the urban context and its shared spaces. How architects

To understand and take a critical position on urbanism as influenced by the aggregation of architecture.

respond to such questions will be understood as a fundamental component of cities and city-life—not least

To understand and critically deploy density in the

To understand publicness as a fundamental component

through their consideration of the “public,” in its interrelated

of the city, to see public space in relation to private

spatial and cultural aspects, within their design processes

space, and to understand the value of differences in

and products. Students will gain an understanding of the

how spaces (public, private and hybrid) are designed

spatial implications of neighbourhoods and communities,

and represented.

and how spaces (both real and imagined) shape and are

To further understand architecture as a series of relativities, for example, of the room relative to its

shaped by social and political relationships.

building, the building to its context, and vice versa. 5.

To participate in inquisitive and analytical design methodologies, asking critical questions about the urban context, social issues, and broader cultural and political influences that affect the form, functions, and programming of the city.

To design with the conceptual tools to make value and ethical judgments on spaces within and about the city.

To fully explore an architectural concept and develop its architectural expression through criticism and rigorous iteration.

To utilise advanced projective drawing and model making to communicate the design processes and architectural iterations.

To refine mastery of analogue and digital tools in the making of architectural representations and ideas.

10. To present architectural ideas in thoughtful and concise verbal and written presentations, supported by a vareity of visual media, and to engage critically in studio and review discussions. Picture credit: Goh Rae Ern Ashley

AR3223 INTRODUCTION TO URBANISM UNITS: 4 Students will be introduced to the foundation of what is Urbanism. The holistic knowledge analyses the study of relationships, interconnectedness and interdependencies between people in urban areas with the built environment. They will undertake a thorough examination of urban history, key theories, topics, design principles and practices related to urban design, urban planning and landscape design. They will also develop critical and analytical skills of reading, documenting, analysing and synthesising complex information on contemporary urban issues and conditions.

AR3328 ARCHITECTURAL STRUCTURES AND FORCES

Picture credit: Rae

UNITS: 4 The course introduces advanced principles of tectonics in architecture by presenting basic structural formulae and their relationship with structural analysis technology. The course also addresses sustainability by considering the choice of materials, construction methods or strategies, waste management, and life cycle thinking. The course also addresses about structural constraints and possibilities, the properties of structural forces, and their relationship with building functions. The forces are discussed as transferring through “intuitive” learning experiences using structural analysis applications. The objectives of the course are-First, to understand the stress design for gravity and also the stress design for wind pressure or seismic

force. Second, to inculcate the structural frame and criteria quantifications and develop the effect of architecture, structure, and construction on tectonic quality. Third, to help students see the interdependence of architecture and construction in supporting technical imagination to address issues of construction cost and assemblage in relation to selected building types and building systems from the perspective of a structural engineer. Fourth, to foster the effect of architecture, structure, and construction on tectonic quality and demonstrate the integration of building components to achieve the intended architectural design.

YEAR 3 SEMESTER 2 AR3102 DESIGN 6 SYSTEMS, COMPREHENSIVENESS, INTEGRATION UNITS: 8

Learning Objectives:

This programme aims to develop a high level of competence

of systems (of production, technology, infrastructure and so on), and in turn embedded within larger systems (of ecology, economy and so on). Under the guidance of their tutors, students will research and refine a conceptual system of concerns to be fully explored and developed in

between constituent parts and their whole, resulting in the

semester is intended as a summation—demanding that

this foundational sequence, students are expected to show advanced architectural thinking that will form the basis for embarking on the Masters programme at DOA. They should deploy advanced and mature representational techniques to communicate architectural ideas. Design projects at this stage will also demand a holistic awareness of the issues related to the environment, climate, context, technologies and building.

Picture credit: Ng Jeng Yong

the

To understand and take a critical position on integration To understand architecture as a complex of systems To design with conceptual tools to make value and ethical judgments on the respective roles of different systems in architectural design.

To fully explore an architectural concept and develop its architectural manifestation at all scales through a critical and rigorous iterative process.

To utilise advanced projective drawing and model making to communicate process and architectural iterations.

To utilise digital data, visualisations, and contemporary simulations in 2D, 3D, and 4D mediums, to make visible

students take informed design positions incorporating all 18 studio themes they have covered. As the conclusion of

manifest

and to explore possible future trajectories. 4.

Students will sharpen their competence in research, design thinking, operational skills and communication. This

critically

as a value system in architecture. 3.

creation of a cohesive whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

and

design thinking. 2.

their architectural proposals. This entails a critical and nuanced understanding of architecture as a synthesis

understand

comprehensive range of considerations that impact

in comprehensive and integrated building design. The architectural whole is approached as a complex network

the complexities of architecture. 8.

To incorporate research methodologies as part of the design process.

To communicate architectural ideas in concise and considered verbal, written, and performative presentations utilising a wide range of mediums, and to engage critically in studio and review discussions.

10. To begin to ask, scope and refine an architectural question beyond answering of a brief.

AR3722 SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEM UNITS: 4 This course will provide students with an understanding of the concepts of environmental systems and their spatial requirements in an architectural context. The increasing need for the integration of building technologies within multidisciplinary projects in a modern construction environment will be addressed. The course first focuses on understanding how basic environmental systems or building services systems (mechanical, electrical,

ROOFPLAN

plumbing and drainage) are related to the building program and broader built environments. Codes of practice, such as fire safety, will also be addressed. Furthermore, renewable energy and water systems in architecture in the green building movement will be discussed. FIRSTSTOREYPLAN

SECONDSTOREYPLAN

PF1101A FUNDAMENTS OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND FINANCE UNITS: 4 The course covers the fundamental principles of project management and finance, identifying elements of economic decision-making in nine broad project management knowledge areas. Students are introduced to theories relating to the management of project scope, time, cost and finance, risk, quality, human resource, communications, and procurement. The overall integration of these eight knowledge areas together with project finance, and the management of externalities as the ninth project management knowledge area is also considered alongside environmentally sustainable projects, workplace safety and health regulations and contract law. Picture credit: Ruth Grace Gomez

Picture credit: Tan Zi Xuan

Picture credit: Natasha Ong and Oviya

Image Credits: Florian Heinzelmann and Chew Shi Cheng Christopher

BA ARCH DESIGN STUDIO SEQUENCE

DESIGN RESEARCH OPTIONS STUDIO

Architectural design can be overwhelming in its

of negotiation between the building and the atmosphere

complexity. To guide students’ learning and creative

around it. Design 5 then further expands upon this concept

explorations, the six studios in the undergraduate

into the spaces and conditions between architectures,

design studio sequence are structured as deep dives

as “Density, Urbanism, Publicness” are investigated

into different facets of architecture. As each semester

and unpacked. By Design 6, students tackle “Systems,

progresses, students gradually delve into a narrower

Comprehensiveness, Integration” and are expected

breadth of considerations, while concurrently allowing

to produce design work that displays a holistic and

for more opportunities in experimentation, exploration,

cumulative understanding of the knowledge, skills, and

and conceptual probing.

thinking from the five studios prior. The 6 core Studios are followed by the more open inquiry of Design 7 / Options

Design 1 introduces “Seeing, Thinking, Making” as a

Studio, a course structured to allow more diverse forms

recurrent, non-linear process, equipping students with

of experimentation and research.

fundamentals of representation in architecture and understanding and processing visual information. In

Some fundamental concerns such as architectural

Design 2, students are guided by “Scale, Precedent,

form, site, programme, and the user, are not named

Context”, to design in three-dimensions, exploring the

as “themes” but are nonetheless ever present from

relationship between people and the spaces surrounding

studio to studio. The revisiting of these concepts each

them, making small architectural components. Design

semester allows for an increase in sophistication and

3, using “Aggregation, Structure, Space”, prompts the

complexity as students progress through the years.

combining of courses to understand the relationship

These fundamental elements should be seen as dynamic

between parts and the whole. These three design

rather than static or given. Furthermore, as students

studios are additionally characterised by a specific

cover the different studio themes, they should gain an

focus on equipping students with architectural literacy.

understanding that throughout, a thorough examination

Architecture is made through physical forms; “form”

of these components, and their associated parameters,

is therefore the architect’s language. The mastering of

should be incorporated as part of the design process.

this language—whether writing, reading, or speaking

Ultimately, the 18 design themes are lenses through

it—is one of the non-negotiable foundational skills of the

which allows them to investigate architectural seeing,

architect.

thinking, and making.

Through “Environment, Climate, Envelope”, Design 4

The following pages describe in more detail the directions

interrogates the interface between architecture and its

of the six design studios for AY 2026/27.

environment, expanding the idea of the facade as a zone

DESIGN 1 SEEING, THINKING, MAKING CHRISTO MEYER

Architecture is often introduced through the study of exemplary buildings, canonical

Design 1 Year Leader;

precedents, and established disciplinary knowledge.

Unit 1 Leader

present in the spaces we inhabit every day: bedrooms, corridors, staircases, void

Yet architecture is equally

decks, thresholds, streets, and shared spaces. These familiar environments shape ISABELLA ONG

our experiences, behaviours, and relationships long before we learn to recognise them

Unit 2 Leader

as architecture.

NG SAN SON

Design 1 introduces architecture through the reciprocal study of architectural canon

Unit 3 Leader

and lived experience. Through drawing, analysis, observation, model-making, and material experimentation, students develop an understanding of architecture as both a disciplinary tradition and a creative act of transformation. The studio brief is organised around the processes of Seeing, Thinking, and Making. Seeing involves learning to observe and represent space with precision. Students study significant architectural precedents alongside the spaces they themselves inhabit, developing an understanding of geometry, proportion, hierarchy, organisation, and occupation. Thinking involves learning to compare, superimpose, interpret, and transform architectural ideas. Through collective investigations, individual spaces are brought together to produce new relationships, overlaps, thresholds, and interstitial territories. Students explore how architecture emerges through encounters between different spatial orders. Making involves learning through material experimentation and construction. Spatial ideas are translated into artifacts through processes of casting, cutting, assembling, joining, modelling, fabricating, and testing. Through making, students encounter architecture at the scale of the body and explore how material, atmosphere, and occupation contribute to architectural experience. The semester is structured as a cumulative design investigation. Each project builds upon the previous one, allowing students to develop increasing levels of complexity while maintaining rigorous architectural methods of analysis, drawing, representation, and making. The aim of the studio is to cultivate architectural intelligence through observation, critical inquiry, spatial imagination, and material experimentation.

By working

between canonical architecture and everyday life, students learn to understand architecture not simply as the design of objects, but as the creation of relationships between people, spaces, materials, and experiences. Image Credits: Observational Drawing (Charcoal on Paper) from NUS DOA Workshop, Drawn Conclusions, led by Christo Meyer, Isabella Ong, Jerome Ng, Tham Wai Hon. 2026. Photo: Ni Kechun

DESIGN 2 SCALE, PRECEDENT, CONTEXT PEERAYA SUPHASIDH

At what scale do we relate to this wonderful world? How do we contextualize

Design 2 Year Leader;

ourselves in it? These fundamental understanding of being in space, sited in

Unit 1 Leader

a place, is rooted our ability to perceive and make sense of the environment that surrounds us. Scale dictates the relationship of our very own selves

WU YEN YEN

to that of another relatively bigger or smaller things. It allows details to

Unit 2 Leader

emerge while shifting the focus to and from the context that is relatively

LEE HUI LIAN

attention, imagine measuring the softness of one’s breath against the

Unit 3 Leader

exhale of a storm, the rhythm of the pounding heart against the counts

larger or smaller. The understanding of scale calls for the intimacy of

between lighting and thunder. Scale drives the ability to magnify and at the same time to summarize, as it reveals what otherwise is concealed to our very own senses. Taking precedent from the morphology of things – ranging from microscopic to that of the cosmic scale. Students are invited to act as instigators in a collective attempt to make sense of this world. Through the material lens expressed in architectural tectonics, particular details are called to attention, while others are allowed to fade away in the act of translation and transitions. The regularity and the repetition, similarities and differences, will be articulated through different expressive mediums as a way of understanding tectonics in making architecture. The relationship between parts and whole is explored in rigorous iterations as materials unfolds and hold themselves together again. Contextualizing stems from observing the static and dynamic nature of the site: the rhythm and pace of movements. The history and collective memories that precedes the present give clues on how we understand the current moment we are in. The constructed serves as memories that have persisted, organizing the world that we continue to navigate. How will architecture and its parts engage with the ground and the environmental milieu that surrounds it? How does it situate itself within the larger urban context and the memories embedded in built environment? What material relationship can project establish to that of the site’s, both in terms of performative and expressive qualities? The understanding of a site and programs cumulate into the body of knowledge that lends themselves to creation. Design 2 establishes the understanding of how materials come together and situated themselves in place to that serve as organizing principles through which we can share our collective experience. By understanding the methods by which they come together to express themselves, the repeatability, rhythm, and details of the resulting spaces is created, constructed and ultimately experienced by the measurement of our very body. Image Credits: Ng Yun Di AY24/25 D2 Elaine Lee Studio

DESIGN 3 AGGREGATION, STRUCTURE, SPACE LEE KIAN ENG, VICTOR

Collective Dwelling

Design 3 Year Leader; Unit 1 Leader

Design 3 is interested in the emergent forms of spatial and tectonic organisation that arise through the interrogation of aggregation, structure

CHAW CHIH WEN

and space.

Unit 2 Leader Aggregation is by definition a group, body or mass composed of distinct TIAH NAN CHYUAN

parts; the gathering of things together. In architecture, aggregation

Unit 3 Leader

involves the arrangement of unitised spaces, forms or components into a larger collective whole. In this Studio, students will define what the individual parts are, how they are brought together, and what architectural relationships are produced through their aggregation. Structure is understood in two related ways, beyond its load-bearing function. First, it is an organisational structure: a format, order, system or logic through which multiple units and parts are arranged. Second, it is a constructive structure: a physical and tectonic assembly of spaces, volumes, cores, floors, walls, stairs and other related architectural elements working together across interior and exterior conditions. Through aggregation, structure and space should therefore be developed in relation to one another, giving rise to compelling architectural outcomes that are formally coherent, spatially legible and tectonically considered. The common theme of Collective Dwelling will serve as the programmatic vehicle of investigation. The nature of dwelling is defined by spaces for inhabitation in relation to human scale, domestic routines and forms of occupation. Collective dwelling should be understood not only as an aggregation of dwelling units, but also through the shared spaces and ways of living that emerge from aggregation. Students will examine how individual units combine to form clusters, and how shared spaces, thresholds, circulation, light, air and privacy gradients are produced as consequences of aggregation. Common spaces should not be treated as residual areas or merely as amenities added after the units are formed, but should emerge from the spatial and organisational logic of the aggregation. The pedagogical focus for Design 3 will be developed through the Units framework across three different urban sites in the city. Each Unit will offer a specific focus and approach to investigating methods of aggregation: Unit 1’s typological exploration of interfaces as relational devices for shaping spatial commons through aggregation; Unit 2’s aggregation through sectional investigation of positive and negative inversions; and Unit 3‘s drawing upon of tessellation as a generative framework, weaving discrete fragments into an interconnected architectural tapestry. Image Credits: Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura. Source: Pedro Capriata, “Ricardo Bofill’s Walden 7 Turns 50,” Guiding Architects Barcelona.

DESIGN 4 ENVIRONMENT, CLIMATE, ENVELOPE MICHAEL BUDIG

Hybrid Skins

Design 4 Year Leader; Unit 1 Leader

Hybrid Skins investigates the architectural envelope as an active zone of exchange between environment, climate, and inhabitation. The envelope

TIAH NAN CHYUAN

cannot be understood as a simple line separating inside from outside. It is

Unit 2 Leader

an expanded field of gradient conditions.

LEE KIAN ENG, VICTOR

Hybrid refers to the changing actors and environments that contemporary

Unit 3 Leader

skins must mediate. Some envelopes are designed around human comfort, privacy, daylight, ventilation, and thermal protection. Others are shaped by machine performance, security, storage, cooling, automated systems, or highly controlled technical environments such as data centres and vaults. A third trajectory considers the relationship between architecture and nature: skins that support vegetation, filter biodiversity, host beneficial microbial life, or create porous territories between human occupation and nonhuman life. Students will be encouraged to ask what should be kept inside, what should remain outside, and what should be allowed to pass, inhabit, accumulate, or transform within the envelope. Design 4 will be a hands-on studio. Students will work through precedent studies, environmental drawings, material experiments, physical models, analogue testing, digital simulations, and iterative prototypes. The aim is to develop a rigorous and inventive understanding of the envelope as an environmental instrument, a cultural interface, and a spatial generator. The design process will move from thinness to thickness by asking what a building skin needs to do.. In the first stage, the studio will examine highperformance skins through familiar analogies from clothing and technical textiles, such as insulating layers that trap air close to the body and thin membranes that repel rain while allowing moisture to escape. From there, the studio will translate these principles into architectural envelopes. In the second stage, students will define a minimal building skin, drawing the visible and invisible conditions it negotiates. These may include the ways in which air, wind, rain, heat, humidity, dust, light, sound, views, smell, biological matter, contaminants, and electromagnetic signals are slowed down, filtered, absorbed, redirected, or blocked. In the final design stage, the skin will be pulled apart, deepened, folded, inhabited, and spatialised. What begins as a layer may become a pocket, balcony, cavity, garden, service zone, threshold, climatic buffer, or room. The envelope will therefore be understood not only as a technical component, but as a spatial and tectonic device capable of producing new forms of inhabitation. ImageCredits: Diller Scofidio, Blur Building - Swiss Expo 2002, Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland; photo by Michael Budig.

DESIGN 5 DENSITY, URBANISM, PUBLICNESS JOSHUA COMAROFF

Social Life and City Form

Design 5 Year Leader; Unit 1 Leader JACQUELINE YEO Unit 2 Leader WU YEN YEN Unit 3 Leader

Design 5 explores the relationship between spatial form and social life in the city. More specifically, this course investigates how architectural interventions in urban contexts can alter this relationship—creating new potentials human agency, occupation and interaction. Cities are sites of energy and labour exchange, climatic and transport flux, and dynamic balances of bureaucracy, community, and capital. Tangible dimensions like form, density, scale, and volume exist alongside intangible factors: policy, heritage and culture, and unequal relations among public and private interests in the ownership of public space. Scientific study has repeatedly disproven simplistic “spatial determinism”: the idea that humans respond mechanically or predictably to spatial conditions. At the same time, we know intuitively that our social experience is undoubtedly shaped to some degree by spaces. As Winston Churchill once put it, “we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us.” Humans are not passively controlled by environments. Our actions are informed by context, but we also transform spaces through our actions. This is a theory that is now known as “possibilism”: architecture tends to delimit, but also remain open to, different possible actions based on its configuration(s). Design 5 invites students to explore this relationship—what we will call social form—across various urban sites in Singapore. We will observe and patterns and instances of behavior, expression, and interaction. We will map tangible and intangible factors affecting social behavior in space, to design a building that responds to our observations. This requires asking important questions: How do architecture and the built environment shape or respond to sociality? Can particular places and physical-spatial configurations enhance or inhibit agency and action? And, most significantly: how might an architect produce changes or additions of building-form that alter these interactions, giving rise to new possibilities of city life: new programs, new forms of community, and new potentials for encounter and negotiation? Image Credits: Photo by John T on Unsplash

DESIGN 6 SYSTEMS, COMPREHENSIVENESS, INTEGRATION FRANCOIS BLANCIAK

Design 6 requires students to synthesize the diverse bodies of knowledge and

Design 6 Year Leader, Unit 1 Leader

skills acquired throughout the previous design studios of the undergraduate architecture program. As the culminating studio of this sequence, it challenges

CHAW CHIH WEN

students to integrate theoretical understanding, technical expertise, and creative

Unit 2 Leader

exploration into a comprehensive architectural proposal. By focusing on the responsiveness of architectural form to both external and internal factors, the

ADRIAN LAI

studio examines how architecture can effectively accommodate site conditions,

Unit 3 Leader

environmental particularities, and programmatic requirements through the development of a clearly articulated design concept. Central to the studio are the notions of systems, comprehensiveness, and integration. Systems are understood as interconnected networks of relationships that influence the organization, performance, and expression of building designs. These include infrastructural systems, circulation networks, spatial hierarchies, and programmatic arrangements that work together to shape architecture. Comprehensiveness stands for the ability to consider and respond to a wide range of concerns—structural efficiency, environmental performance, site-specificity, and functional requirements—which should be translated into refined and detailed architectural propositions. Integration signifies the successful synthesis of these diverse factors into a coherent whole that embodies an economy of means. It involves organizing multiple parameters—both opportunities and constraints—through a unifying transformative process that gives meaning to the project. Rather than treating design elements as isolated components, students are encouraged to develop holistic proposals in which every part relates to a clearly expressed architectural idea. The studio promotes experimental approaches that move beyond the superficial aesthetics of systems to generate novel architectural proposals that convey their presence and sense of purpose while enhancing their respective contexts. Students are expected to identify the governing principle of their design and articulate all aspects of the project around this central objective. To this end, geometry will serve as a fundamental design tool within the studio, providing a means of organizing functions into coherent systems that integrate the constraints of both program and site. Students will engage in the mapping and analysis of urban conditions, examine historical and contemporary precedents, diagram the overarching idea of their project, and translate these into a consistent building design. Through the interaction of movement flows and geometric patterns, students will explore how architectural form can emerge as a simple response to complex design challenges. Image Source : Oskar Schlemmer, Diagram for Gesture Dance (1926). Source: Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin (public domain)

BA ARCH DESIGN STUDIO (1-6) FACULTY

AR1101A DESIGN 1

AR1102 DESIGN 2

_YEAR LEADER/UNIT LEADER (YL/UL)___________________

CHRISTO MEYER Associate Professor Practice; PG Dip PP (RIBA Part III) (University College London), PG Dip Arch (RIBA Part II) (London South Bank University), BA Arch Studies (RIBA Part I) (University of the Free State); ARB, RIBA, Registered Architect, UK

PEERAYA SUPHASIDH Assistant Professor; M Arch (Harvard University); BA Architecture (Rhode Island School of Design)

_UNIT LEADERS (UL)__________________________________ NG SAN SON Adjunct Associate Professor; M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore ISABELLA ONG M Arch (The Bartlett UCL); BA Architecture (National University of Singapore)

_UNIT LEADERS (UL)__________________________________ WU YEN YEN Adjunct Associate Professor; M Arch (Columbia University), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Green Mark AP, MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore LEE HUI LIAN Adjunct Associate Professor; M Arch, B Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore _STUDIO LEADERS (SL)_______________________________

_STUDIO LEADERS (SL)_______________________________ GYN KONG M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore) TAN JIA YU, FIONA M Arch (The Bartlett UCL); BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore SEAN CHIA M Arch (Harvard Graduate School of Design); BA Architecture (National University of Singapore); MAIA FONG HOO CHEONG B Arch (Hons), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore), Dip Illum Des (Sydney University); GMAP, MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore EMERALD WU M Arch (Harvard University); BA Architecture (University of California, Berkeley); Registered Architect, Commonwealth of Massachusetts

ELAINE LEE WEI MEIN M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore) CHIN KEAN KOK B Arch (Hons), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore), Dip Illum Des (Sydney University); GMAP, MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore NG WILLIAM M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore FONG HOO CHEONG B Arch (Hons), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore), Dip Illum Des (Sydney University); GMAP, MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore JEROME NG XINHAO M Arch (ARB/RIBA Part II) (The Bartlett UCL), Architecture BSc (UCL), BFA Visc Comm (ADM, NTU)

AR2101 DESIGN 3

AR2102 DESIGN 4

_YEAR LEADER/UNIT LEADER (YL/UL)___________________

LEE KIAN ENG, VICTOR Adjunct Associate Professor; AA Dip (Architectural Association), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, ARB, Registered Architect, Singapore and the UK

MICHAEL BUDIG Associate Professor in Practice; PhD (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology); M Arch (University of Innsbruck); Registered Architect

_UNIT LEADERS (UL)__________________________________

CHAW CHIH WEN Adjunct Associate Professor; M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore

TIAH NAN CHYUAN Adjunct Associate Professor; AA Dip (Architectural Association), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore

LEE KIAN ENG, VICTOR Adjunct Associate Professor; AA Dip (Architectural Association), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, ARB, Registered Architect, Singapore and the UK

_STUDIO LEADERS (SL)_______________________________

SRI SARAVANAN M Arch, B Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore

HUAY WEN JUN M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore

NEO SEI HWA Adjunct Associate Professor; B Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore

RONALD LIM M Arch (Yale University), BA (Wesleyan University); MSIA, RIBA, Registered Architect, Singapore

LEE HUI LIAN Adjunct Associate Professor; M Arch, B Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore CHAN WAI KIN B Arch (University of Melbourne); Registered Architect, Singapore JEROME NG XINHAO M Arch (ARB/RIBA Part II) (The Bartlett UCL), Architecture BSc (UCL), BFA Visc Comm (ADM, NTU) YANG HAN M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore CHU LIK REN B Arch (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore FLORIAN HEINZELMANN Associate Professor in Practice; PhD (Eindhoven University of Technology), M Arch (Berlage Institute), Dipl-Ing (Munich University of Applied Sciences); Registered Architect, the Netherlands PETER SIM B Arch (Hons), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); ARB, Registered Architect, UK KELLY KOH QIAN WEN M Arch (University of Michigan); BA Architecture (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, New York State MELVIN KENG M Arch, B Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore ANNABELLE TAN M Arch (The Bartlett UCL); Architecture BSc (UCL)

ROY PANG PING JING B Arch (RMIT University); GMM, UDA, DfSP, MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore KEVIN LIM AA Dip (Architectural Association), BA Architecture (National University of Singapore); IGBC THAM WAI HON M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore) YANG HAN M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore ROBIN HARTANTO HONGGARE Assistant Professor; PHD (Columbia University); BA Arch (Universitas Indonesia) YUAN CHAO Associate Professor; PhD (The Chinese University of Hong Kong); M Phil in Architecture (Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture) SHIN YOKOO Senior Lecturer; PhD (Tokyo University of Science), M Eng, B Eng (Tokai University); Registered Architect, Japan PIETER HERTHOGS Assistant Professor; PhD (Engineering) (Vrije Universiteit Brussel); MSc, BSc (Architectural Engineering) (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

AR3101 DESIGN 5

AR3102 DESIGN 6

_YEAR LEADER/UNIT LEADER (YL/UL)___________________

JOSHUA COMAROFF Deputy Head (Student Life); Assistant Professor; M Arch (Columbia University), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Green Mark AP, MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore

FRANÇOIS BLANCIAK Associate Professor; PhD, M Arch (University of Tokyo), DPLG (École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble); Registered Architect, France

_UNIT LEADERS (UL)__________________________________

JACQUELINE YEO AA Dip (Architectural Association); BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); ARB, Registered Architect, Singapore and UK

CHAW CHIH WEN Adjunct Associate Professor; M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore

WU YEN YEN Adjunct Associate Professor; M Arch (Columbia University), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Green Mark AP, MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore

ADRIAN LAI Adjunct Associate Professor; AA Dip (Architectural Association), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, ARB Registered Architect, Singapore and the UK

_STUDIO LEADERS (SL)_______________________________

TSUTO SAKAMOTO Associate Professor; MSc (Columbia University), M Eng (Waseda University), B Eng (Tokyo University of Science)

TAN TECK KIAM Adjunct Associate Professor; M Urban Planning (University College, London); BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore ROY PANG PING JING B Arch (RMIT University); GMM, UDA, DfSP, MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore RONALD LIM M Arch (Yale University), BA (Wesleyan University); MSIA, RIBA, Registered Architect, Singapore FLORIAN HEINZELMANN Associate Professor in Practice; PhD (Eindhoven University of Technology), M Arch (Berlage Institute), Dipl-Ing (Munich University of Applied Sciences); Registered Architect, the Netherlands LEE MAY ANNE Adjunct Associate Professor; M Arch, B Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore SAPTARSHI SANYAL Assistant Professor; PhD (The Bartlett UCL); M Arch, BA (School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi) CASEY NAI HUEI WANG Visitng Senior Fellow, M Arch (Harvard University Graduate School of Design); BSa (National Cheng Kung University) ADRIAN LAI Adjunct Associate Professor; AA Dip (Architectural Association), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, ARB Registered Architect, Singapore and the UK

JOSEPH LIM EE MAN Emeritus Professor; PhD (Heriot-Watt University), MSc (University of Strathclyde), B Arch (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore NG SAN SON Adjunct Associate Professor; AM Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore WONG KER HOW M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore JACQUELINE YEO AA Dip (Architectural Association), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); ARB, Registered Architect, Singapore and UK CHEAH KOK MING Deputy Head (Academic), Associate Professor; B Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore LEE MAY ANNE Adjunct Associate Professor; M Arch, B Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore CHAN WAI KIN B Arch (University of Melbourne); Registered Architect, Singapore WU HUEI SIANG M Arch (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore TAN JIA YU, FIONA M Arch (The Bartlett UCL); BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore PHUA HONG WEI M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore)

BA ARCH OPTIONS DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIO DESIGN 7

OPTIONS DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIO DESIGN 7 SEMESTER 1 and SEMESTER 2 (YEAR 4 & MARCH STUDENTS) OPTIONS DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIO 1 / DESIGN 7 UNITS: 8

This two-semester design course sequence establishes the foundation for creative practice design research in architecture. It provides students with an opportunity to select from a variety of studio topics, thereby allowing them to choose themes aligned with their individual interests and intellectual drives while creating synergy with their studio leader. Framing design as a creative practice, the objective of the course is to develop a high level of competence in creative practice research, leading to design outcomes that are innovative, skillful, and insightful in terms of architectural design. The course expects students to demonstrate a high degree of proficiency in research, design, representation, and communication. Throughout the process, students are not only conducting research but also translating its outcomes into actionable strategies in architectural design. The processes and final products should be communicated through representational techniques that are most suitable for the architectural design content. representation, and communication.

Picture credit: David Quek Hao Meng

SEMESTER 1 OPTIONS DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIO 1 / DESIGN 7 PROGRAMMATIC SCULPTURE Tutor: François Blanciak The Programmatic Sculpture studio will focus on one simple geometric form as a basis for design investigation. This form will be a large cone with fixed dimensions, located on a given site in Singapore. Following a thorough analysis of the site in its greater context, students will be asked to determine their own programme. The design work will then consist in adapting the original form of the cone to its given site and chosen purpose, in a process that can be referred to as an act of programmatic sculpture, involving the erosion of the initial form with the projected programme.

THE RAINBOW HOUSE: Designing with More-thanHumans in an Afro-Brazilian Sacred Grove in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil Tutor: Gareth Doherty They constitute worlds apart, almost like African islands in the middle of a sea of Western civilization. —Roger Bastide, Le Candomblé de Bahia

Our fieldwork in Salvador will be complemented by a workshop at the EtniCidades research institute in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia. We will visit projects by iconic Brazilian designers such as Roberto Burle Marx, Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi, as well as work by contemporary designers such as Sotero Architects, and Salvador’s colonial heritage sites. Our fieldwork will be complemented by talks from local experts, including Candomblé leaders, architects, arboriculturists, and botanists.

CO-DESIGNING A HAWKER CENTRE IN THE HEARTLANDS Tutor: Jayde Lin Roberts Singapore’s Hawker Culture was listed as Intangible Cultural Heritage in December 2020, with newsand social media describing these places as Singapore’s dining room. And yet, recent discussions question the sustainability of this heritage as vendors age, and operating a hawker stall remains physically and economically challenging.

Afro-Brazilian sacred groves, or terreiros, can be understood as a combination of urban farm and monastery where elements of nature associated with Afro-Brazilian spirituality are cultivated. The studio site is Casa de Oxumarê, the House of the Energy of the Rainbow, located in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil’s fourth-largest city and its original capital. Afro-Brazilian groves such as Casa de Oxumarê are highly designed spaces, just not in a formal Cartesian sense. The principles by which they are shaped have been handed down over generations through detailed observation and close engagement with the landscape.

In the past 20 years, various architects have proposed different solutions to improve hawker centres. Nevertheless, as the tangible spaces where intangible heritage might be preserved, they struggle to compete with coffee shops and other venues.

This studio aims to explore the spatial and material design of Afro-Brazilian terreiros, and some of the lines of inquiry that can best be experienced and understood in the field. In addition to fieldwork, both remote and in person, the studio has a technical focus, in which we will work on the design and spatial arrangement of the various houses within the sacred grove, the stabilization of the steep slopes on which it is located, and its integration with the city around it.

This community-based studio tackles this problem by co-designing with hawkers and customers in Clementi Avenue 2. You will 1) learn research and facilitation methods to acquire first-hand information about the needs and perceptions of different stakeholders, 2) design participatory games to acquire more in-depth understanding, then 3) use your grounded knowledge and insights to propose new designs for the renovation of an old hawker centre in a 1970s HDB.

As cities such as Salvador expand, they encroach on hundreds of sacred groves, and the sites are under pressure to relinquish their green areas. As a legacy of the slave trade, these sacred spaces sometimes have an uneasy relationship to the city around them. At the same time, rituals that were once performed in the seclusion of the terreiros are increasingly taking place in public spaces such as parks and across the city. These are some of the dilemmas motivating this studio.

What has been missing in the understanding of hawker practices and customer preferences or desires? If hawker centres are an integral part of Singaporean identity, what should these spaces look and feel like? What needs to be present other than the bare necessities?

Note: This studio includes a mandatory 3-day workshop (20-22 August) with a master facilitator with over 40 years of experience in community building and participatory methods.

SHAPING DESIGN SOLUTIONS SEARCH ENGINES Tutor: Pieter Herthogs

THROUGH

URBAN

The studio adopts a Search+Design methodology in which computational search approaches are explicitly integrated into architectural design workflows. In this studio, students explore the interplay between context and type using computational design methods. The Search Engine is a central instrument for this studio, used to structure and scope the contexts through which design solutions can be shaped and characterised. Students will learn analytical tools and apply AI-enabled computational methods to address data and develop search engines. Students will collect multi-modal urban data and preprocessing data through ArcGIS or python scripts. By applying computational methods (e.g. machine learning such as self-organising maps, retrieval techniques, or knowledge graphs), they develop search engines to determine relationships between urban form and environmental contexts, mapping correlations and coincidences. Advanced urban datasets and tools, such as a searchable ‘3D Masterplan’ of Singapore, complement their work. The exploration focuses on Singapore; we propose a focus on health-related environmental factors. Rather than starting from fixed sites, students scope and define what their design objects will be - a plot, a space, a workflow, or a rule-set - through the lens of urban search engines. They explicitly explore the formulation and application of design prototypes, and formulate what makes ‘good fit’ for their design, towards contextualised and user-centric solutions and strategies. Search engines thus serve not only as analytical devices but also as vehicles for structuring design solutions, linking exploratory methods with targeted problems, and facilitating the exploratory design processes.

FROM NODES TO PORTALS Tutor: Joseph Lim In reimagining rapid transit interfaces for the future, we challenge entrenched notions of commuter space, speculating on new cultures enabled by advancements in rolling stock, ticketing, and security. With turnstiles rendered obsolete and the 90-minute rule operating without spatial enforcement, the boundary between paid and unpaid areas dissolves. What can a station now become, when control is no longer spatial? Freed from these constraints, the ground plane—once dominated by back-of-house infrastructure, with up to 40% of its area occupied by transformer rooms—becomes available for reimagination.

This studio takes that provocation as a starting point: How might the liberated interior of the station extend into the city, becoming a seamless urban or suburban node continuous with its surrounding neighbourhood? If transit space is no longer defined by access control, what new civic and communal programmes can it host? Can the station be reconceived not as a conduit, but as an urban amenity in its own right—one that exceeds the logics of efficiency and convenience? What new agency does the station roof assume, as both the dominant architectural element and a mediator between infrastructure and environment? Beyond its roles as structure, sculpture, energy apparatus, and climate modifier, can station architecture begin to register and produce the distinct cultures of Singapore’s diverse locales? Three landmark stations each with very different site contexts are selected for speculation. The studio will be supported by Arup Singapore and SMRT Corporation with design input. Students proficient in Rhino/ Grasshopper are encouraged to join. A structured workshop to simplify selected commands will be conducted.

BLACK-BOX: INSCRIPTIONS IN/OF TIME Tutor: Federico Ruberto We often imagine ourselves at the pinnacle of technological development, yet climate change, ecological degradation, and geopolitical instability increasingly reveal the fragility of our infrastructures and archives. Even when we speak about sustainability, they rarely imagine durations exceeding a few generations, …species evolve, transform, and or, become extinct. The design studio investigates architecture as an act of memory-inscription. Situated between archaeology, landscape, monument, and archive, it asks how architecture might record, preserve, transform, or relinquish memory in the face of geological (deep) time. The studio begins with direct exposure to the field. Students will undertake an immersive journey into remote landscapes (5 days, at various locations in Japan), traversing natural fields and sacred sites marked by deep environmental histories. Through walking, recording, collecting, mapping, listening, drawing, filming, and writing, students will encounter the landscape not as scenery but as an active archive composed of traces, sediments, scars, residues, and forgotten narratives. These traces encountered will then become the basis for architectural speculation. Working exclusively with site-specific materials and conditions (one form of being sustainable), students will explore architecture as a medium through which memory

becomes embedded within matter. The resulting projects may archive physical artefacts or data, biological samples, stories, sounds, geological records, or digital information. The archive here is understood not simply as a repository of information, but as a cultural and material mechanism through which the present communicates with the past, and with unknown futures. The project could take the form of a time capsule, monument, archive, earthwork, petroglyph, chamber, marker, megalith, ritual structure, or other architectural device capable of engaging human temporal scales, and times beyond immediate human occupation. The project asks students to imagine themselves as makers preserving the present, and simultaneously as archaeologists of the future, constructing an architectural trace, one present …but also one that may one day be discovered, misread, forgotten, or revered by others that will encounter it.

BUILDING AS PERFORMANCE Tutor: Peeraya Suphasidh How can intentional integration of passive thermal regulating mechanisms through the use of natural elements not only optimizes temperature profiles within the architectural spaces but also serves as visually and functionally appealing elements in the project? By re-examining building materials and methods, the studio is imagining a version of innovation and technology in the context of extreme temperature fluctuations and uncertainties. Each specific culture and climatic zone warrant their own idiosyncratic responses to shared challenges in the global climate crisis. We will be working toward researching and developing ways of building that contribute to the human need for comfort, which also contain qualities of beauty and idiosyncrasy. What entail those qualities and conditions in architecture? Can such conditions exist for all, namely, can novel ideas and innovation perpetrate cultural and logistical barriers to support people of all circumstances in different geographical, cultural, and climatic backgrounds? How would such methodology look like? In additional to its technical performance, can the resulting architecture achieve a high level of idiosyncratic expression, remarkable enough to poke curiosity and wonder to the passerby and inspire a degree of awe for people who experience the resulting spaces? Working across the scales of architecture and furniture, collectively, we will be imaging a version of the future where progress happens and is equally acknowledged. Student will cultivate a framework to imagine how technological advances, and beauty, might take shape, with the focus on a performative approach to building in the tropical, developing world context.

FRANÇOIS BLANCIAK Associate Professor; PhD, M Arch (University of Tokyo), DPLG (École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble), Registered Architect, France GARETH DOHERTY Associate Professor, DDes (Harvard University), MLA, and Cert. Urban Design (University of Pennsylvania) PIETER HERTHOGS Assistant Professor; PhD (Engineering) (Vrije Universiteit Brussel); MSc, BSc (Architectural Engineering) (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) JOSEPH LIM Emeritus Professor; PhD (Heriot-Watt University), MSc (University of Strathclyde), B Arch (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore JAYDE LIN ROBERTS Visiting Associate Professor PhD, Built Environment, University of Washington MA, International Studies, China, University of Washington, BA, Architecture, University of California, Berkeley FEDERICO SIMONE RUBERTO Senior Lecturer; BA Architecture Programme Director; PhD Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought (The European Graduate School); MSc Architecture, BSc Architecture (Politecnico di Milano) PEERAYA SUPHASIDH Assistant Professor, Master of Architecture II (Harvard University), Bachelor of Architecture (Rhode Island School of Design), Bachelor of Fine Arts (Rhode Island School of Design)

Picture credit: Andrew Lee Ruo Zun

Picture credit: Tan Yan

Picture credit: Daryl Lim Mingze

SEMESTER 2 OPTIONS DESIGN RESEARCH STUDIO 2 / DESIGN 7

LILIAN CHEE Dean’s Chair Associate Professor, Research by Design Cluster Leader, Assistant Dean CDE; PhD (Bartlett, UCL Scholar), MSc (Arch. History with Distinction) (Bartlett, UCL), B.Arch (Hons.) (NUS), BA (Arch. Studies) (NUS) RACHAPORN CHOOCHUEY Ong Siew May Professor; PhD (The University of Tokyo); MSc in Advance Architectural Design (Columbia University); BA Arch (Hons) (Chulalengkorn University); Registered Architect, Thailand SHIN EGASHIRA Ong Siew May Professor; PhD in Architecture and Urban Design (RMIT University); AA Diploma (Hons) (Architectural Association); BFA (Hons) (Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). H. KOON WEE Visiting Associate Professor; M Arch (Yale University), B Arch (University of Western Australia), BA Arch (National University of Singapore); FRSA, Registered Architect, Singapore and the Netherlands RICHARD HO Professor in Practice; B Arch (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore THOMAS KONG Associate Professor, Deputy Head (External Relations); M Arch (Cranbrook Academy of Art), B Arch (National University of Singapore); Assoc. AIA, Registered Architect, Singapore NEO SEI HWA Adjunct Associate Professor; B Arch (National University of Singapore), BA Arch Studies (National University of

Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore SHINYA OKUDA Associate Professor; M Eng, B Eng (Kyoto Institute of Technology); Registered Architect, Japan and the Netherlands ONG KER SHING Associate Professor; MArch (Harvard University), MLA (Harvard University), BA (Harvard University), Registered Architect, Singapore TSUTO SAKAMOTO Associate Professor, M Arch Programme Director; MSc (Columbia University), M Eng (Waseda University), B Eng (Tokyo University of Science) RUDI STOUFFS Dean’s Chair Associate Professor; PhD, MSc (Arch Comp Design) (Carnegie Mellon University), MSc (ArchEng), Ir-Arch (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) TAN BENG KIANG Associate Professor; DDes (Harvard University), M Arch (University of California, Los Angeles), B Arch (national University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore TAN TECK KIAM Adjunct Associate Professor; B Arch (Hons) (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore YEUNG MAN KI, LARRY Adjunct Assistant Professor, MArch (National University of Singapore), BA Arch (National University of Singapore)

BA ARCH / M ARCH DESIGN STUDIO REVIEW CALENDER ACTIVITIES

Design7 /

AY2026/2027

Design7 /

BA ARCH YEAR 4 IDS 73

INTEGRATED DESIGN SPECIALISATION Below are the Year 4 courses which are part of the Integrated Design Specialisation that are required to enter the M Arch Final Year programme. For AY23/24 Cohort, please refer to the website. The following information is for AY24/25 Cohort onwards. For such cohort the M Arch courses to be read are: Architectural Design Thesis Research, Archi Practice, Graduate Elective and Architectural Design Thesis. Requirements to qualify for the Integrated Design Specialisation: -Average B in Design 5 and 6, GPA 3.0 and above DESIGN 7 (either Sem 1 or Sem 2)

CONTEMPORARY THEORIES

Tutor: Various (see previous pages)

Tutor: Federico Simone Ruberto (Sem 2 )

Units: 8 This two-semester design course sequence establishes the foundation for creative practice design research in architecture. It provides students with an opportunity to select from a variety of studio topics, thereby allowing them to choose themes aligned with their individual interests and intellectual drives while creating synergy with their

Units: 4

studio leader.

architectural education, manifold forces that shape

This course aims to expose architecture students to an array of intellectual ideas and theoretical positions by drawing from an expanded field of discourse that includes architecture, urban studies, design, and the humanities. This broad focus acknowledges the unique nature of the design of a building, and the role an architect plays

URBAN DESIGN THEORY AND PRAXIS

in society. The lecture and assignments will be based

Tutor: Justin Kollar (Sem 1), Naomi Hanakata (Sem 2)

around nine topics: atmosphere, interior, representation,

Units: 4

capital, agency, security, networks, infrastructure, and the

This course will provide a comprehensive and in-depth

Anthropocene.

examination of the theories, methodologies and praxis of urban design. It will introduce ideas that are instrumental in establishing the foundations of urban design, examine

ARCHITECTURE INTERNSHIP PROGRAMME

rationales and strategies for creating vital and lively urban

(To be taken in Sem 1 of Year 4)

spaces, and explore key issues and the myriad challenges

Coordinator: Richard Ho & Teh Joo Heng

facing urban design both today and in the future. In

Units: 12

particular, this module will view urban design from a place-

NUS DOA’s Architecture Internship Programme is a

making perspective—ranging from physical to social,

highly encouraged course that complements students’

tangible to intangible, and global to local—with a primary

architectural education in the classroom.

focus on topics such as urban form, density, diversity,

Under this internship programme, students undergo six-

identity, public space, community, and sustainability.

month work attachments at firms or organisations in the fields of architecture, design, infrastructure and urban planning. This provides students with valuable exposure to

ADVANCED ARCHITECTURAL INTEGRATION

a range of professional experiences and skills which cannot

Tutor: Shinya Okuda (Sem 2)

be taught in a traditional university setting. It also allows

Units: 4

them to observe practitioners at work, see how classroom

The course will offer learning experiences in multi-

learning translates to the workplace, and experience the

disciplinary collaboration and problem-solving between

rhythms, ebbs and flows of life on a job in architecture and

architects

students

for

its related fields.

Students

will

Finally, the internship also helps the student progress in

look at case studies that will provide an overview of the

his or her maturity and understanding of the industry, in

foundations for interdisciplinary collaboration. A series of

preparation for entry to the M Arch programme. The six-

lectures on advanced architectural technologies will also

month internship is recognised by BOA as partial fulfilment

illustrate how multidisciplinary collaboration can produce

of the 24-month log sheet requirement for the Professional

innovative architecture. Students will then draw up group

Practice Examination; only students who intern in firms

proposals for innovative integrated building systems aimed

registered with BOA will qualify for the partial fulfilment.

and

contemporary

engineers, architectural

prepare

practice.

at achieving optimisation, performance, and aesthetic goals, in collaboration with lecturers and consultants who are architects and engineers.

Picture credit: Rory Gardiner

M ARCH PROGRAMME

Picture credit: Sarah Ng Jing Yun

MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE PROGRAMME DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE The NUS Master of Architecture (M Arch) is one of the signature

At the graduate level, students are expected to move beyond

programmes in the Department of Architecture at NUS,

the acquisition and application of established knowledge.

which is ranked first in Asia and among the world’s leading

They are asked to define the questions that guide their work,

schools of architecture. It serves as an advanced platform

select appropriate methods, evaluate evidence, and articulate

for critical design inquiry and research, encouraging students

the significance of their architectural propositions. The

to question disciplinary conventions while contributing to

Design Options Studios introduce a range of positions and

a discourse currently undergoing profound transformation.

approaches, allowing students to extend their abilities through

Building on the broad disciplinary foundations established

advanced and often unfamiliar forms of investigation. In the

through undergraduate study, the programme asks students

final year, students formulate their own questions, establish

to develop greater intellectual independence, methodological

independent positions, and construct rigorous arguments

depth, and responsibility for the positions they take. Graduate

through iterative design processes. The thesis provides the

education is therefore understood not simply as a continuation

principal setting for this transition towards self-directed work.

of architectural training, but as an opportunity to consolidate

It requires students to connect research, design development,

existing knowledge, challenge inherited assumptions, and

representation, and reflection within a sustained architectural

establish individual directions within the discipline. The

inquiry.

programme seeks to respond to mounting global challenges and to shape new directions for architectural thought and

The programme embraces a wide range of methods, media,

practice.

scales, and intellectual perspectives. This is reflected in a community of academics, practitioners, researchers, and

Climate

change,

constraints,

and

geopolitical rapid

uncertainty,

technological

resource

advances

students with diverse backgrounds and expertise. Individual

are

ambitions are strengthened through a collaborative culture

fundamentally changing the built environment. Artificial

of dialogue, critique, peer learning, and cross-disciplinary

intelligence and computational methods are redefining

exchange. The breadth of this community allows students to

the ways architects conceive, communicate, and realise

encounter positions beyond their immediate interests and

projects. Against this backdrop, the programme remains firmly

to test their work against different disciplinary, professional,

grounded in the design of buildings and cities while expanding

and cultural perspectives. Academic rigour and personal

its investigations into ecology, culture, communities, material

responsibility provide the foundation for an environment that

systems, technology, and data. These areas are not treated as

values curiosity, generosity, openness, and experimentation.

separate specialisations, but as conditions that increasingly

Students are expected to take ownership of their work,

intersect within architectural practice. Students are expected

respond constructively to criticism, and make informed

to understand how environmental, social, technological,

decisions about the tools, references, and forms of production

and material questions inform design decisions and how

they employ.

architecture may respond without reducing complex issues to singular solutions. Situated in Singapore, at the heart of

These qualities define the intellectual identity of the NUS

Southeast Asia, the programme engages a region that serves as

Master of Architecture. Building on the comprehensive

an exceptional ground for inquiry. Questions of urbanisation,

disciplinary foundations of undergraduate study, the M

climate, society, culture, resources, and innovation can

Arch places greater emphasis on synthesis, independent

be examined here with both local relevance and global

inquiry, critical judgement, and the formulation of individual

significance. The programme encourages students to work

architectural positions. It prepares graduates to contribute

from the specificity of places, communities, and practices

critically and creatively to professional practice while

while considering how these investigations may contribute to

engaging the broader transformations affecting architecture

wider architectural discourse.

and the built environment. Graduates should be able not only to respond to changing professional conditions, but also to

Design is understood as a mode of critical inquiry, and making

question them, shape new approaches, and contribute to the

is central as a means of testing, refining, and iterating ideas.

future development of the discipline. MICHAEL BUDIG, Ph.D Associate Professor Master of Architecture Programme Director

Picture credit: Huang Shao Xuan

M ARCH PROGRAMME THESIS SEQUENCE

M ARCH SEMESTER 1 & 2 ARCHITECTURAL THESIS SEQUENCE (COHORT 23/24) The M.Arch courses (thesis sequence) described below and in the following pages apply only to the current M Arch AY2026/27 (Students cohort AY23/24 and earlier). ARCHITECTURAL THESIS SEQUENCE ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE STUDIO + ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN RESEARCH REPORT (THESIS PART 1) + ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN THESIS (THESIS PART 2) The Master of Architecture design thesis spans two semesters and three courses, establishing the final design criteria for achieving the Master of Architecture degree. Students can select from a variety of thesis supervisors and either align their theses with their supervisors’ research interests and expertise or pursue their own self-directed thesis themes. The three courses related to the design research thesis are structured to enable students to develop a high level of competence in creative practice design research. This competence will lead to architectural outcomes across a wide range of topics. The first and third courses will involve creative practice research with direct design outcomes. The last course (part 2) will synthesize these design research efforts into a comprehensive design research compendium that integrates evidence with textual descriptions, theoretical writing, and other written strategies, alongside graphic, photographic, and visual material. The fundamental purpose of the Thesis Sequence is to enable students to develop a rigorous methodology and a deep focus in a specific area of design research, and to translate this research into architectural design through creative practice. Additionally, students are expected to exhibit high-level competence in creative practice research, design thinking, representation, and communication.

Picture credit: Jamie Foo

M ARCH SEMESTER 1 ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE STUDIO ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE STUDIO

THESIS STUDIO

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

(SEMESTER 1) Units: 8

Graded Course

Conducted as an architectural design thesis (Part 1), this

To understand and critically apply research methods within an individually directed thesis context. To evaluate and take a critical stance on research methods, evidence, and outcomes.

course involves creative practice research with direct design outcomes. Students explore a selected theme,

on the development of architectural propositions. 4.

situate their project in a specific context, identify relevant

practices. 5.

that will be further developed in the architectural design

To position individual research within the larger domain of architecture and to communicate how

thesis (Part 2). As with other architectural design studios, students are required to present their creative practice

To connect individual creative practice research to a broader community of social, economic, and political

issues, and curate a narrative. The course encourages students to establish a premise for architectural design

To illustrate the impact of selected research methods

creative practice advances the discipline. 6.

To critically assess the translation of creative practice

research using graphical materials, physical models,

research outcomes into architectural approaches,

video clips, artistic installations, and/or other mediums,

techniques, strategies, or tactics.

depending on the nature of the project.

To use creative practice research and conceptual tools in design and to make informed ethical judgments in architecture.

To utilise advanced digital data, visualisations, and contemporary simulations in 2D, 3D, and 4D mediums to research architectural approaches to design.

To use thoughtful digital, analog, and/or material tools to conduct creative practice research.

10. To communicate creative practice ideas through concise

and

considered

verbal,

written,

and

performative presentations, utilising a wide range of mediums.

M ARCH SEMESTER 1 ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN RESEARCH REPORT ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN RESEARCH REPORT

THESIS RESEARCH REPORT

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

(SEMESTER 1) Units: 4

Completed Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory Course

Conducted as part of the architectural design thesis (Part

To understand and critically apply research methods within an individually directed thesis context. To evaluate and take a critical stance on research methods, evidence, and outcomes. To articulate, structure, synthesize creative practice

1), is a compendium of students’ individual design research

research, and to formulate a coherent thesis argument

conducted during the course. The report builds and

as a line of inquiry.

elaborates on a body of ideas that will be further pursued

in the architectural design thesis (Part 2) through actual design practice. The main purpose of the report is to enable

the development of architectural propositions. 5.

students to articulate, structure, and synthesize their

To connect individual creative practice research to a broader community of social, economic, political

thoughts developed through research, and direct them towards the production of architectural design.

To illustrate the impact of selected research modes on

practices. 6.

To position individual research within the larger domain of architecture and to communicate how

The course supports the design thesis by critically exploring significant issues in architecture involving social, political,

creative practice advances the discipline. 7.

cultural, environmental, economic, and technological

research outcomes into architectural approaches,

considerations. Key activities include:

techniques, strategies, or tactics. 8.

To critically assess the translation of creative practice

To use creative practice research and conceptual tools

To demonstrate relevance of the topic in our

in design, and to make informed ethical judgments in

contemporary world.

architecture.

Critique and evaluation of acquired knowledge

Program statement mapping the fundamental aspects

Hypothesis delineated in a set of key issues that can be

Program formulation

Site selection

of the issues addressed through architectural interventions

g) Preliminary design studies.

M ARCH SEMESTER 2 ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN THESIS ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN THESIS (SEMESTER 2)

DESIGN THESIS

Learning Objectives:

Units: 20 1. Graded Course

within an individually directed thesis context. 2.

Conducted as the architectural design thesis (Part 2), focuses on the architectural design proposal of the entire

To understand and illustrate an architectural proposal To evaluate and critically analyze the individual research and design proposal.

To illustrate the impact of research conducted in

design thesis project. Building on the knowledge and ideas

thesis (Part 1) on the development of architectural

acquired in the thesis (Part 1), and translating them into

propositions.

architectural design issues, the course enables students

to develop a critical and rigorous design in the field of

To demonstrate that the individual proposal responds to social, economic, and political practices within the

architecture.

community. 5.

To position individual architectural design proposals

As the culmination of design education that establishes

within the larger domain of architecture and to

the final criteria for the Master of Architecture degree,

communicate how the proposals advances the

the thesis expects students to produce a design proposal that is critical, innovative, and competent in terms of

discipline. 6.

To critically assess how creative practice research

speculation and practical execution. Students will be

outcomes

required to present their design intents, contexts, and

approaches, techniques, strategies, or tactics, and to

actual design proposals with graphical materials, physical models, video clips, artistic installations, and/or other

were

translated

into

architectural

develop the design in line with these outcomes. 7.

mediums depending on the nature of the project.

To use creative practice research and conceptual tools in design, making informed ethical judgments in the individual architectural proposal.

To utilize advanced digital data, visualisations, and contemporary simulations in 2D, 3D, and 4D mediums to examine architectural approaches and design.

To use thoughtful digital, analog, and/or material tools to develop architectural design.

10. To communicate design research and the individual proposal through concise and considered verbal, written, and performative presentations, utilising a wide range of mediums.

Picture credit: Brian Lee Jia En

M ARCH DESIGN RESEARCH THESIS OFFERINGS

TECTONIC INTELLIGENCE Tutor: Michael Budig “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?” Cedric Price In a world increasingly shaped by automation, datadriven tools, and AI, this studio revisits a fundamental architectural question: What makes form intelligent? Tectonic intelligence encompasses the knowledge embedded in how buildings are made, connected, and situated. It critically explores how designs arise from the interaction of digital systems, manual processes, and material reality. Architecture is recognised as a cultural practice shaped by tools but not dictated by them.

READING THE STREET Tutor: Filip Biljecki How well do we know a street? A city is photographed at eye level, mapped, and narrated by the millions who move through it. Street-level imagery, online reviews, and other geospatial traces now offer a remarkably rich record of how urban space is seen, used, and felt. This thesis treats these everyday data as urban intelligence. Drawing on theories of place and recent advances in geospatial AI, students will ask how the experiential qualities of a place, its activity, its reputation, might inform design. Methods may range from analysing imagery and reviews at scale to fieldwork that connects those patterns in a specific site. The aim is to read the city more closely and to design from sharper evidence of how people experience it. Projects may work at any scale and in any context, from a single street to a wider district.

FORM Tutor: François Blanciak What should a significant architectural project look like? How can it exist within the current ecological context of architecture and a vstrained economy of attention? In light of current debates on what is—fundamentally—a building, this thesis topic will focus broadly on the issue of form in architecture, and more specifically on simple geometric forms and their inherited significance. Without setting aside the constraint of site, architectural history will be investigated to research precedents, understand the specific cultural context of the formation of architectural outputs, and generate theoretical models that target the accommodation of a carefully justified, strategic programme.

We will examine workflows between machine-driven processes, directed by human judgment, and physical experiments that inform digital models. Working at the intersection of digital and material practices, the studio invites investigations in hybrid materials, including renewable and synthetic materials such as hybrid timber structures, adaptable building designs, and reconfigurable construction systems for tropical climates. Timber, as a renewable resource, and reconfigurability, as a design strategy with long-term impact, both help reduce the carbon footprint of our buildings. Students are encouraged to consider how our tools – manual, mechanical, algorithmic, AI – enhance or restrict architectural agency and test how form gains meaning through informed construction, reasoning, and embedding in a regional context. This is an opportunity to experiment and rethink the relationship between form, process, and authorship. Tectonics, in this context, is not a style or grammar, but a mode of reasoning.

FROM HOMO DEUS TO ÜBERMENSCH Tutor: Chaw Chih Wen The studio began with a deep curiosity about the posthuman condition, as framed by Katherine Hayles, and its implications for architecture in an age of rapid technological transformation. Over time, our explorations revealed a strong resonance with Yuval Noah Harari’s trilogy—particularly the arc from Sapiens to Homo Deus, where the human evolves into a god-like figure through exponential advancements in science and technology. Across three consecutive years, the studio speculated on “Temples, Refuges, and Playgrounds” for Homo Deus—not as static shelters or symbolic spaces, but as living, adaptive systems that respond to the emerging realities of enhanced cognition, artificial intelligence, and post-biological existence. These projects imagined architecture as both habitat and interface—a medium through which biology, data, and consciousness might converge, and where new rituals and belief systems such as Dataism could emerge.

THE BETWEEN: RELATIONS Tutor: Lilian Chee

Yet, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life, a moment of existential reflection has surfaced—prompting questions about the trajectory of our god-like aspirations. This unease echoes Nietzsche’s warning of nihilism—not through the death of old gods, but through the rise of ourselves as gods. In response, this year’s studio turns to Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch: the figure who must overcome nihilism by forging new values. We ask—what might architecture become if it sought not just to serve Homo Deus, but to transcend it?

SITUATED STRANGENESS Tutor: Cheah Kok Ming In any creative endeavour, the deep insights of context and the responses to it produces significant and meaningful outcome. The inventive originality of these outcomes could only be informed by the specificity of the issue and its situated conditions. Sometimes these solutions are so unique and unprecedented that they are simply strange or provocative, nevertheless relevant and fit for its time, place and purpose. Health Robinson’s caricature during the two world wars brought entertainment to the British plagued by the misery of bloody conflicts. His comic relief was uplifting and hilarious in those dark times. They were always about odd, absurd inventions or overly-engineered contraptions conceived to poke fun at the enemies. His cartoons were refreshingly captivating and tinted with “anti-fragility”. He was able to harvest adverse moments to create jokes that boost public morale. Robinson’s inventions were appealing because they had strong contextual underpinnings, it captured the British brand of humour and satire, it celebrated the might of industrialization and mechanization of early 20th century as well as the British pride of the Arts & Crafts Movement in its praise for craftsmanship. The latter inspired the intricacies of his ludicrous device illustrated in each witty narrative. A successful architectural thesis is predicated on critical and in-depth understanding of the issues and the context they reside in. There is the context of the past, the present and the future and further futures. Each context of its time has an intertwining set of conditions involving geography, environment, climate, society, politics, culture, technology and economy. Thesis is an informed projective cast into the future or a speculative exploration responding to evolving temporal contexts. The study of contexts will always reveal signs that define the strangeness.

ARCHITECTURE

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DIVERGENT

Architecture rarely stands apart. It is wedged in the midst of life, things, and events—jammed between bodies, weather, infrastructures, and the creatures who pass through. This studio asks what it means to design from within that between: to treat architecture not as an autonomous object but as a relation continually composed with others, both human and more-than-human. Plants and insects colonising a room, animals reclaiming a threshold, the hybrid technologies that sense, mediate, and inhabit our spaces—each is a co-author of the architectures we make. We will work through networks, practices, sites, and theories of care, tracing how buildings are held together by social compacts, materialities, and affective ties as much as by form. Following Bruno Latour, we treat the social as a collective assembled across human and nonhuman actors. With Donna Haraway, we learn to “stay with the trouble,” making kin amid entanglement rather than seeking mastery or resolution. Across the thesis year, students will cultivate a disposition: to notice the peripheral, to design speculatively yet grounded, and to take relationality and affect as architecture’s primary materials—dwelling within divergence rather than foreclosing it.

TOWARDS A POST-CAPITALIST ARCHITECTURE Tutor: Joshua Comaroff This thesis studio proposes to extend beyond the past year’s initial explorations of the “nocturnal”—that is, the under-explored and under-valued margins of modern architecture. In this studio, we will ask how the vague outlines of a post-capitalist environment might be clarified or imagined. These are not speculative futures or illustrative exercises; their world-building will occur in the present and not in some liberated and unproblematic timeto-come. We will attempt to “borrow” alternative ways of living into the present. How might norms of space and privacy, materiality, production and re-use, be differently considered? Similar questions will be posed about the immaterial: for example, how the experience of cyclical and linear time might shape the fabric of buildings and their contents, and how the regime of the visual mat give way to other modes of apprehension.

THE MODERN CONSTITUTION: SOCIETY Tutor: H. Koon Wee

ARCHITECTURE

This studio would be exploring architecture within the framework of modern society and its politics. In such an exploration, there would be linkages between the rhythms of modern life and work, the inequalities they generate and their impact on the broader environment. It is not by accident that advanced societies are on a journey towards modernization, industrialization, and the building of sophisticated infrastructure and cities, in order to better harness human and natural capital.

THESIS STATEMENT Tutor: Richard Ho

Globalization would also be a natural outcome of such a modern project. Students could take this studio as a continuation of their formative discoveries of architectural and urban concepts of efficiency, functional zoning, systems thinking and different ways to create and rationalize the modern condition. First guarantee: even though we construct Nature, Nature is asif we did not constructit. Second guarantee: even though we do not construct Society. Society is as if we did construct it. Third guarantee: Nature and Society must remain absolutely distinct… In describing the modern condition, Latour (1993: 32) observes three guarantees. This studio draws upon the philosophical foundations of such thinking. Latour’s seminal works include how professionalized barriers of competency are created when postcolonial governments undertake modernization projects (Latour & Shabou, 1974), how scientific facts are constructed under complex sociological settings in an advanced laboratory (Latour & Woolgar, 1986), and many others.

MULTI-PERSPECTIVE DESIGN COMPUTATION Tutor: Pieter Herthogs In this thesis studio, students advance their design and research abilities by applying the Semantic Urban Elements method as described by Quintana et al. (2026). Urban Elements are families of “urban solutions,” which are generally recognizable in terms of the material objects and resulting functions they aim to support (e.g. pocket parks), used by agents (e.g. people) and integrated in public spaces. A Semantic Urban Element is the union of an Urban Element and the semantic knowledge model used to capture our understanding of that solution type. The aim of the SUE method is threefold: (1) to gain a deeper understanding of a specific type of Urban Element, (2) to improve that element’s design and implementation, and (3) to manage related knowledge and semantics in a transparent and transitive way. Together, these aims intend to enhance, or correctly assess, the overall functionality and perception of Urban Element solution types across various implementation sites. Students will learn how to turn existing design processes and solutions into more explicit, more computational implementations, and will use the SUE method as a framework to guide the scoping, selecting, formulating, adapting, and propagating of the inputs and outputs of these design processes and their design outcomes. The design scale and subject is open. Existing work in our lab would be an ideal jump-off point, and focusses on walkability, urban morphology, and street environments.

My interest has always been in how the human condition can survive in the overcrowded, ever-growing urban centres and the contestation for space in these urban centres. I feel architects and the government agencies have, by and large, failed to protect the interests of the have-nots, the underprivileged and those without a voice, preferring instead to further the myopic commercial and economic interests of developers and landowners. The evidence of deforestation, conversion of arable land to golf courses and gated condominiums, the demolition and destruction of built heritage and the over-fishing of the oceans are everywhere to be seen for those who care to look. In our local context, issues such as the inequitable distribution of land to private housing vs public housing, golf courses pandering to the leisure of a select few, priority of roads for cars over streets for people, conservation of our architectural heritage driven by commercial interests are but a few of the urgent issues that need to be addressed. We often hear about buildability and sustainability being championed, but what about cultural sustainability - how do we address that in a multi-cultural society like ours? These are pressing issues not only in Singapore but also in the other south-east Asian countries where the pressure of development in the urban centres are most felt - issues which the present generation of architecture students must question and seek redress. I welcome students who are willing to challenge the status quo, rethink the current obsession with profit and form that disregard history, culture, context, climate and the end users.

FUTURES FOR OUR MODERN PAST Tutor: Ho Weng Hin Faced with mounting redevelopment pressures, postindependence modernist structures and landscapes in Singapore are at a watershed moment. Today, imageable heroic modern megastructures such as the People’s Park Complex built barely four decades ago are threatened with obliteration, through their impending en-bloc sales. On the other hand, following estate intensification programmes, what used to be a substantial and varied building stock of modernist housing heritage – such as the pioneering Queenstown Estate – has been severely depleted. The studio proposes that this paradigm is increasingly environmentally and socially unsustainable, causing ruptures in social, cultural and urban accretion indispensable to a vibrant, liveable city. Rather than seeing conservation as opposition to progress and intensification, it explores rehabilitation and adaptive reuse as an alternative mode of urban regeneration – one that layers on rather than a demolish-and-rebuild approach. Under the guidance by a practicing conservation specialist, the studio will adopt a rigourous research-based approach to inform conservation design strategies for a site of the student’s choice, during the Thesis Preparation stage. Students will gain new skills and tools for ‘deep reading’ into heritage landscapes, structures and artefacts that will inform a robust conservation/ intervention framework to guide the Thesis Design stage.

FORM FOLLOWS SYSTEM Tutor: Nirmal Kishnani Asia is witnessing a staggering loss of human, social and natural capitals, due in part to the way we build. The problem isn’t that we aren’t Green enough; it’s that Green may be the right answer to the wrong question.

DESIGNING WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Tutor: Gaurang Khemka ‘This studio will test the limits of what AI can do within the realm of Architecture today and where it could head into the future. What agency humans will have and how will we use it with A.I. What will be the new paradigm? In my opinion, AI is a tool that needs a human counterpart to function’ and we need to handle such tools carefully to craft better solutions. I believe collaboration between human being and artificial intelligence is where we can get the best out of this technology. A Hybrid Future “I still need a sketchbook, but I also feel the need to see the 3D model take shape.” AI helps me visualize models faster. In addition, quick access to big data helps inform my design thinking and solutions. However, let’s always remember one thing: we don’t even know how our heads really work. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence programs learn to look at things and recognise them. What they see, however, is not reality nor its true representation, but their own reading of reality. And therein lies the rub: it is our interpretation of their vision that counts. We discover possibilities so unexpected that we can consider them works of art or architecture? Pause and ask yourself: what is it, in the end, that a machine reveals to us? “That there is no uniqueness, only indeterminism”. Let’s try to explain it differently: by changing the supply of data, the machine adjusts its processing. It learns to recognise what it is interested in based on different structures and providing multiple possible readings, but how it gets there is a secret kept in its black box. “It is the content of the black box that drives me crazy: inside the machine I see a processing whose rules I cannot understand with human logic”. It is the power of incoherence, we might say. “It teaches us there is not just one way of looking at the universe”. The studio will further test if AI is just a powerful tool rather than a replacement for architects since AI systems do not understand language and feelings like our ‘Carbon Minds’. Will AI still require human interface with knowledge and skill to produce useful results. It’s not unguided like natural selection but can it help process data from the evolutionary model of this planet and living species to help us craft better results leading to Augmented Design It is within this framework that this studio would like to examine how we can better shape our universe with augmented design solutions in the future.

Should we stay the course of Green and do less harm? In the time that Asia embraced the Green building movement, our collective impact on natural ecosystems was nevertheless catastrophic. Should we, therefore, faced with a crisis of ecology and climate, aspire to do good; to heal, repair, and regenerate? This studio returns to the heart of the sustainability question: how to forge Human-Nature partnerships, and restore our place in the natural world. What does this mean at the drawing board? The answer is rooted in whole systems thinking. Each building is many elements, interacting to form a system. This is embedded within a wider system that is the neighbourhood, which is in turn nested in a system-ofsystems that is the city. By understanding scale and complexity, we begin to see design as the making of systemic structure and behaviour. Good design, or design in search of good, is many systems fitted together within an efficient and beautiful form, acting in positive reciprocity within a wider system-of-systems. This approach leads to an altogether new perspective on form, one with profound implications on people and planet.

BELONGING Tutor: Thomas Kong Geography is mostly about how we strive to feel at home on Earth, rooted by place, yet…we never quite succeed.1 The longing to remain, over time, permanently or for continuity, was once rooted in geography, culture, kinship, and citizenship. However, belonging has become increasingly fluid and contested due to migration, mobility, digital technologies, climate change and geopolitical tensions. Provisional, networked, transitory, and often precarious forms of affiliation have replaced traditional notions of home and community. How can architecture respond to the urgent search for holding spaces founded on care, generosity, relationality, inclusivity, and solidarity? The thesis studio invites students to use their ethical imagination to discover new sites of belonging; spaces about each other, to be with each other, and for each other. It is envisaged that the projects will traverse a range of magnitudes, media, intimacies, publicness and disciplinary boundaries. They are manifestos of co-existence made visible, tangible and spatial at the family, neighbourhood, national and planetary scales. 1 Yi-Fu, Tuan. (2004). Place, Art and Self. University of Virginia Press.

Picture credit: Cheah Hao Yuan

ARCHITECTURE = BETWEEN INFRASTRUCTURE AND CULTURE Tutor: Adrian Lai The studio will examine typologies of infrastructures that through their persistence, either for their enduring utility or necessitating preservation past their functional expiry, become architecture. This quality of persistence will be searched, defined and argued for to become future heritage on which a society and her city is defined. From the instrumentality of infrastructures of culture like theatres, art galleries fashion and fashion houses, repurposed parliament houses, courthouses and ubiquitous information dissemination points christened as ‘heritage galleries’; to harder to pin down black mirrors, online shopping and Google Map itineraries, an atlas of each typology of cultural or culturing infrastructure will form the basis of how the studio will define burgeoning architectural types and the forms they take. The studio will focus on diagramming material and immaterial forces defining contemporary life. Speculations of how persistence has formed and could form for future heritage structures will underpin thesis proposals for architecture situated between infrastructure and culture.

A “WELL & GREEN” HABITAT FOR HUMANITY Tutor: Lam Khee Poh This thesis studio aims to explore and understand the complex ecological relationship between the human species and the built/natural environment towards designing, constructing, and maintaining a “well & green” habitat that support sustainable and healthy living. The green movement in the built environment has taken root globally over the past three decades. Many innovative technologies have emerged to enable low carbon sustainable developments. However, health and wellness considerations are relatively nascent. There are exciting opportunities to discover new insights as well as to imagine and test new holistic design concepts.

“The Greek philosopher Aristotle said this 2000 years ago: Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. Happy people tend to be healthier people due to lifestyle choices. A healthy city must therefore create inspiring and enabling physical and social environments to support such choices. So, the focus must be on the people that cities are built to accommodate and serve.” ( K P Lam).

LIMINAL TERRITORIES: MAPPING THE IN-BETWEEN Tutor: Lee Hui Lian We invite students to explore the concept of liminality as a spatial, temporal, and symbolic condition. Liminal spaces, or conditions, exist between defined categories—between public and private, past and future, memory and forgetting— and are often sites of ambiguity, transformation, and potential. Students will investigate how architecture can operate within these transitional zones, responding to complex political, cultural, psychological, or historical boundaries. The thesis will involve speculative design thinking, supported by archival research into spatial memory, contested land, and overlooked narratives. Rather than seeking definitive architectural forms, the emphasis is on creating responsive, layered interventions that embrace uncertainty and incompleteness. Students will be encouraged to work with real or imagined sites undergoing change—borderlands, ruins, informal settlements, or postindustrial landscapes—and to consider how architecture might act as a mediator in spaces of flux. Students will explore critical theory, speculative futures, and narrativedriven design processes.

ICONOMIC FORM V2.0: FROM ACCUMULATION TO SIGNIFICANCE Tutor: Victor Lee This thesis studio builds upon Iconomic Form’s earlier critique of the icon, image and spectacle, and expands it towards a broader question: how can architecture produce significance today within conditions of accumulation, excess and saturation? Contemporary life is shaped by accumulations of images and symbols, capital and technology, infrastructures and programmes, rituals and memories, materials and environmental pressures. When unexamined, such accumulations may seem excessive or wasteful, and can turn into redundancy, spectacle, noise, overflow or burden. Yet they hold cultural depth, social intensity, affective charge and latent spatial value. Through the framework of Building Economy*, the studio asks how such conditions can be critically read, organised and transformed into architectural propositions. Economy is not merely reductive nor about cost-efficiency, but a relational design intelligence: calibrating form and tectonics, communality and ritual, ecology and resources, memory and attention, image and spectacle — for coherence, necessity and meaning, across multiple constraints. Students will work through a clear thesis sequence: identifying what is accumulating, determining which architectural economies can organise it, and testing forms of significance it can produce. Through accumulation, the studio seeks to engage with a world that currently lies at the intersection of economic uncertainty, climate change and social instability. The ambition is to translate these conditions into design intelligence for architecture with spatial consequence, socio-cultural nuance, environmental stewardship, civic relevance and everyday agency.

WHAT MATTERS: EXTENDED ARCHITECTURAL PRODUCTION Tutor: Jason Lim

MATERIALITY

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What counts as a material today? Architecture has long been understood as a material practice, but materiality need not be limited to physical substances such as brick, wood or concrete. Environmental conditions, live data and atmosphere form part of an expanded field of contemporary architectural concerns. An extended conception of materiality should therefore encompass energy, information and experience in addition to matter. Sensing, modelling, programming, fabricating are some ways architects can work across these domains and draw relations between them. Technological advances open new avenues for intervening in these material processes and shaping their effects. As matter, energy, information, and experience become increasingly entangled, conventional distinctions between the physical and digital, the tangible and ephemeral, begin to dissolve, setting the ground for novel architectural production. Responsive environments, programmable materials, interactive installations, adaptive assemblies, and atmospheric architectures all occupy this expanded territory. Investigations into what constitutes materiality today must be anchored in making, experimentation, and critical inquiry.

EXPERIMENTUM Tutor: Joseph Lim Thesis explorations can be positioned as a dynamic and responsive force, where human-centred design inspires inquiry, innovation and adaptability. A strong thesis engages both investigative and intuitive processes in creating a framework for reimagining architecture and environments as spaces of creativity and resilience. Design thinking makes room for the subjective and is not eliminated by objective logic. Therein lies the art in architecture. Studio pedagogy supports thesis ambitions to make sense of specific contexts and wider agendas as questions concerning architecture. Above all your thesis preparation is to be critical and forward-thinking to explore meaning in both built and imagined worlds.

TERRITORIAL ARCHITECTURE Tutor: Victoria Jane Marshall Territorial architecture refers to design practices that engage with land, ecology, and spatial governance beyond individual buildings. It is about settlement rather than just a specific building type. Emerging from traditions such as landscape urbanism and regional planning, it treats territory as a dynamic terrain shaped by infrastructure, environment, and social relations. It often operates at multiple scales, from rural landscapes to metropolitan regions, integrating mapping, policy, and design. Territorial architecture is especially relevant in contexts of climate change, urban expansion, and resource management, where spatial thinking must extend across boundaries. I am particularly interested in territorial architecture that is emplaced in periurban contexts and iteratively created through a variety of design research methods. An important design research method in my creative practice is radical cartography, for it allows me to bring together my training in landscape architecture, urban design, and cultural geography. I am also interested in innovating in participatory methods for architects to reshape territory. We will start your thesis with a map, and you will reflect on urban political ecology analytical approaches before you do your fieldwork.

[UN]SPOKEN, [UN]WRITTEN, NOT FORGOTTEN Tutor: Christo Meyer “In any event, the spoken and written word are taken for (social) practice.”

CLIMATE, COAST & COMMUNITY – SINKING CITIES, RISING TENSIONS Tutor: Neo Sei Hwa More than a billion people live along low-lying river estuaries & coastal regions, mostly in Asia. Large proportions of these populations have traditionally relied on the water for sustenance, trade & transport. From the urbanized to the rural, communities face an increasingly challenging reality – the very source of support for life has also become a major threat to life & livelihood, stemming from over exploitation, pollution and climate impact. The studio wants to explore coastal environments in and around the region. Thesis projects must be founded on an intense understanding and appreciation of communities and their relationship with the subliminal threshold between land and water.

NATURE UNFOLD: ADVANCED ARCHITECTURAL DESIGNS FOR A SYMBIOTIC FUTURE IN THE TROPICS Tutor: Shinya Okuda Contemporary social issues are often complex and intertwined to include financial and environmental issues, which require holistic design approaches across materials, built forms, programmes, and performance. Advanced architectonics designs are to sublime them into innovative multi-dimensional architectural solutions by leveraging essential game-changing phenomena, such as carbon sequestration, and construct them into sophisticated functional advanced architectural compositions and unique sustainable aesthetics. Embracing the power of architecture, the Nature Unfold thesis studio envisions to reveal various symbiotic future relationships including nature and urbanism in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Levebre, H. (1991), The Absent Body, trans. NicholsonSmith, D., Oxford: Blackwell, p.28

INDUSTRIAL NORM(-ATIVE)S Tutor: Roy Pang

The premise of this thesis studio is to develop an architecture in response to narrative*. In-depth investigations of different modes of recording, archiving, and capturing the human condition and its relationship to the world around it, whether real or imaginary, inform a theoretical framework from which a clear discourse will be established. We will bring to the fore that which is (un)spoken and (un)written to revitalise the ordinary into the extraordinary – an architecture that through the semiotics of narrative structure coupled with design through making methodologies, posits compelling responses to some of the more pertinent questions that face us today.

We create systems to make sense of the world. They help us classify, measure, and predict. Systems are our way of framing the past, rationalising the present and projecting the future. Systems are always designed ideal. But the human condition is anything but. It is messy, biased, unpredictable. Full of contradictions, subjectivities, basking in its glorious imperfections. Today, with AI and big data, systems have grown ever more dominant. They shape how we live, work, and interact, with detached precision. Yet, beneath their algorithmic surfaces lie assumptions, proxies, and approximations. The map is not the territory.

Christo Meyer’s teaching and research focus on design through making, using exploratory and experimental models, devices, and drawings (analog, digital, hybrid) to develop narrative projects as a critique and response to cultural and spatial contexts.

The Studio continues to explore this intersection: between human systems and the human condition, the structured and the subjective, where frameworks and lived realities don’t necessarily align.

*A distinction should be made between “narrative” as everyday jargon, and narrative as applied in the fields of literature, philosophy, cinema and other forms of visual culture. This thesis studio is preoccupied with the latter.

Working within urban conditions, we focus on the edges, the slippages, the spatial tensions, the points of friction, the ‘not-quite-rightness’. Because within those cracks, we find space for the beautiful and the meaningful.

ASSEMBLAGE Tutor: Tsuto Sakamoto This thesis studio focuses on the assemblage of things and living beings—including animals, plants, and humans. In the face of disasters, pollution, and pandemics—and within an environment where intelligent technologies and pervasive networks shape our lifestyles, behaviors, and responses—we have come to recognize that a wide range of non-human entities express themselves as richly as humans do.

ABSOLUTE FORMS: COINCIDENTIA OPPOSITORUM Tutor: Federico Simone Ruberto “[…] our soul should find its own infinity within the limits of some finite thing.” John Cage. Why is an architectural form selected, constructed, invented? Why is a form better than another one? The studio investigates forms through an open framework, for each student’s individual focus to determine the scale and theoretical angle of observation. We are to look at architectural forms, at their genesis and morphogenesis, as there is something that unconditionally withdraws when we attempt at discussing their raison d’être. Forms are not trivial affairs or fancy constructs, they connect powers that are both individual and collective, geometric and mnemonic, static and metastatic. To understand the power of architectural forms is to grasp a very peculiar knowledge, a mathesis that fuses analytic (functional) and poetic (dysfunctional) syntaxes. Making form is to forge both an ecology and economy; in such regard the studio reflects on how to be “sustainable”, considering that de-carbonising requires to gradually move from ideal efficiency to ethical sufficiency. (Revolutionary) forms are the most radical and mundane at the same time. The studio searches forms that retain an eerie sense of immortality, yet they refute being omni-potent by treasuring transformation in time, collective action, and the impermanence of decay. What is to give form, determining the forms-of-life that are in space and time, possible? To what degree should we let forms emerge through participatory protocols, and how much are they instead intrinsically (always, at least partially) predetermined? What is the reason of the form of a city, of an architectural intervention, of an object? Projecting and presenting how forms engage critically the context they intend to emancipate requires a language of transmission and demonstration. Allowing the production of forms through a variety of analog and digital approaches, from computation to material experiments, the studio explores modes of making-and-saying —an engagement to enhance the poetics and agency of re-presentation, for students to develop their own “vocabulary”.

Moreover, humans are increasingly compelled to respond to the unforeseen consequences of both natural and artificial phenomena, such as population decline, economic degrowth, and infrastructural deficiencies. By scrutinizing these dynamics, the studio speculates on alternative environments and explores architectures that emerge from diverse assemblages of humans and nonhumans—assemblages that are co-functional, symbiotic, troubling, and at times, unsettling.

ANIMATE – BRING YOUR ARCHITECTURE TO LIFE Tutor: Ruzica Bozovic Stamenovic In this round of investigating the role of AI in altering built environments this Thesis Studio is looking at architecture’s capacity to act as the unique universal mean of communication. What enables architecture to become one? Can 2D images and 3D artefacts become alive and able to interact and transmit meanings? The term ANIMATE (from Anima, Lat. “spirit, soul”) means to move or bring something inanimate to life. What is the distinction between the two? To MOVE may refer to a change in position resulting in kinetic and environmentally responsive architecture. In contrast to MAKE ALIVE means to also imbue something with spirit through agency of Qualia (“the subjective, individual, and experiential components of conscious perception”). The elusive (ARCHE) and the strict (TECHNE) meet again in animated architecture to establish a better dialogue with Men, Environment and the Universe. Key questions to be addressed through design process: (1) Can it be done? Role of new technologies & creative design in elevating architecture to a living entity; (2) Can it be understood? Nature, content and reach of animated design language and syntax; (3) Does it make sense? Impact of animated architecture on personal, societal, cultural and economic levels. Any topic is eligible if Thesis approach encompasses critical enquiry, elaborate design research exercises, novel investigative methodology and presentation techniques.

ARCHITECTURAL AND URBAN PROTOTYPING Tutor: Rudi Stouffs This thesis studio explores computationally intelligent methodologies and processes of architectural and urban planning, design and analysis. We are particularly interested in explorations that aim to address current threats of increasing shocks and stresses such as induced by climate change or an ageing population. Other design considerations and objectives are welcome as well. Notably, the elaboration of the exploratory process should be considered more important than any single outcome, instead aiming at achieving multiple, alternative outcomes. Exploration is a data-driven process and serves to achieve better-informed designs. Considering performance as a guiding design principle in this process aims to define the design object not by what it is or how it appears, but instead by what it does or how it performs—by its capability to affect, transform and serve a given function. Identifying both the parameters and boundaries of this exploration allows to define the design space under consideration, thereby guiding the exploration toward the desired performance.

IMBUED WITH BEAUTY Tutor: Peeraya Suphasidh Building in the ways that contribute to the human need for comfort, while pertaining qualities of beauty and idiosyncrasy - can such conditions exist for all, namely, can novel ideas and innovation perpetrate cultural and logistical barriers to support people of all circumstances in different geographical, cultural, and climatic backgrounds through shared human commonalities? What would such methodology look like? In addition to its technical performance, can the resulting work achieve a high level of idiosyncratic expression, remarkable enough to invite curiosity and wonder to the passerby and inspire a degree of awe for people who experience the resulting spaces and body of work? Our physical surroundings constitute our culture and identities, necessitated by our need for place and belonging – in what ways can they be the reflection of our very beings? Can this work be made akin to that of a written language (alphabetic composition), as a mean of communication and a mode of expression. Working in ways that evokes something akin to a kind of photograph with the capacity to summons familiar feelings. A kind of poetry which momentarily transpose the senses. A kind of knowledge, not unlike pages of books, written line by line with meaning inscribed with a quality of care and attention. Blurring the boundary between the physical act of making, drawing and writing, this body of work is comparable to an abstraction of the written language. Precisely, what is language, without an agreed upon interpretation?

ARCHITECTURE IN A POST-REALITY ERA Tutor: Tan Teck Kiam In an era defined by the erosion of boundaries between truth and falsehood, and between the real and its representations, architecture emerges as a critical medium through which these ambiguities can be examined, interrogated, and rendered visible. This thesis studio begins with the premise that architecture is not merely a mirror of societal conditions, but a generative tool for revealing, critiquing, and re imagining them. The studio investigates how architectural design can articulate concealed cultural logics, expose contradictions and misreadings, and unveil underlying meaning. It explores architecture’s capacity to challenge dominant narratives that shape our understanding of space, identity, and perception. Central to this inquiry is the question of authenticity i.e. how it is constructed, contextualized, and perceived within a landscape saturated by simulations and mediated experiences. The studio considers how architecture can navigate the increasingly unstable boundaries between the authentic and the artificial, the factual and the fabricated, and what it means to search for the “real” in a post-reality condition. In doing so, it reframes architecture as an intellectual and cultural project capable of both revealing contemporary complexities and offering new ways of seeing and understanding the world we inhabit.

PROGRAMMING THE NEGATIVE Tutor: Teh Joo Heng Rapid urbanization has intensified challenges such as population density, environmental pressures, and increasing demand for public amenities and green spaces. As land and resources become increasingly constrained, cities require innovative strategies beyond conventional expansion. This thesis investigates the strategic repurposing of urban leftover spaces—including interstitial voids, underutilized building interiors, and aging infrastructure— as a viable approach to urban regeneration. By reconceptualizing these overlooked spaces as interconnected three-dimensional assets, the study explores their potential to address urban deficiencies, strengthen community engagement, and enhance urban resilience. Drawing on theories of adaptive reuse and tactical urbanism, the research examines how dormant spaces can be transformed through context-sensitive interventions. It further highlights the role of advanced technologies, particularly 3D spatial analysis and generative design, in identifying opportunities and informing design solutions. Ultimately, the thesis proposes a comprehensive design agenda that leverages the latent potential of urban leftover spaces to foster more equitable, sustainable, and resilient urban environments.

THE OTHERS: CONDITION OF THE ISLAND PEOPLE Tutor: Tiah Nan Chyuan Across different cultures and time, the island condition has been described historically and mythically as an outpost that is defended, surrounded, contained, isolated, quarantined or hidden. The inherent vulnerability and siege mentality of islands imbue their inhabitants with both a deep awareness of their identity and their relationship with the surrounding externalities. This thesis will explore the “island condition” through both physical and abstract notions, looking at operative conditions from isolation to protectionism, access and rights, equality and equity. Non-linear enquiries would be conducted across multiple probes, to unravel deep mindsets that define the unique behaviour of “islands” and their people, “the others”. The hope is that these insights will suggest alternative strategies to engage geopolitical issues related to collective identity, shared responsibility and ownership over contested territories, space and time.

OTHER BODIES Tutor: Wu Yen Yen This studio is built on rigorous inquiry and an openness to where research leads. Students are challenged to investigate counter-anthropocentric perspectives and the visceral, often invisible forces that shape existence — and to translate those investigations into original architectural design methods, spatial strategies, and material vocabularies that are both expressive and buildable. We start at the edges of conventional architectural thinking. Through sustained research into alternative formal histories and non-normativemodes of perception, students develop a sharpened architectural intelligence earned through close reading, critical unpacking, and the willingness to follow unfamiliar threads of thought with discipline and rigor. We will push beyond policy-driven briefs and familiar design and context narratives, toward a deeper engagement with forms of corporeality that exist largely unnoticed yet carry profound resonance. The methods and outcomes here are not prescribed but will instead emerge from each student’s own investigative process, shaped by both intellectual honesty and hard, iterative work of giving form to ideas that resist easy representation.

TECTONICS IN ARCHITECTURE Tutor: Shin Yokoo Kenneth Frampton, in Studies in Tectonic Culture (2001), quotes Aris Konstantinidis (1913–1993): “Good architecture starts always with efficient construction. Without construction there is no architecture. Construction embodies material and its use according to its properties; stone imposes a different method of construction from iron or concrete.” This understanding of tectonics in architecture integrates structural principles, textiles, metallurgy, earthworks, and local construction culture, recognising the aesthetic significance of construction within modern architecture. Arata Isozaki, in Japan-ness in Architecture (2006), frames Japanese architecture as an integrated and relational design process rather than a purely formal composition. Accordingly, this thesis vision supports an interdisciplinary and practice-based learning approach grounded in structural principles. In Japanese, this approach can be described as “Kōchiku Suru Shikō”, meaning a mode of architectural thinking in which structure, spatial quality, material expression, and environmental relationships are developed simultaneously through the design process. CLIMATE SENSITIVE SUSTAINABLE CITIES Tutor: Yuan Chao

DESIGN:

LIVEABLE

AND

With the rapid urbanization and climate change, the key challenge in front of architects is clear: it is a difficult balancing act to achieve between unstoppable human desire for development and the finite environmental carrying capacity of cities. This design studio engages students to explore ways to conduct climate-sensitive design to create buildings that are more human centralized and environmentally responsible. The studio emphasizes the impact of environmental analysis on design. The knowledge delivered in this studio allows students not only to develop climate sensitive design concepts and ideas, but also to practice the corresponding design strategies and skills.

Picture credit: Caden Swe

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M ARCH DESIGN RESEARCH THESIS SUPERVISORS

FILIP BILJECKI Associate Professor, PhD (TU Delft), PI of the NUS Urban Analytics Lab FRANÇOIS BLANCIAK Associate Professor; PhD, M Arch (University of Tokyo), DPLG (École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble), Registered Architect, France MICHAEL BUDIG Associate Professor in Practice, M Arch Programme Director; PhD (RMIT University), Dipl-Ing (M Arch, University of Innsbruck), Registered Architect, Austria CHAW CHIH WEN Adjunct Associate Professor; M Arch, B Arch (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore LILIAN CHEE Dean’s Chair Associate Professor, Research by Design Cluster Leader, Assistant Dean CDE; PhD (Bartlett, UCL Scholar), MSc (Arch. History with Distinction) (Bartlett, UCL), B.Arch (Hons.) (NUS), BA (Arch. Studies) (NUS) CHEAH KOK MING Associate Professor, Deputy Head (Academic); B Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); Registered Architect, Singapore JOSHUA COMAROFF Deputy Head (Student Life); Assistant Professor; PhD (UCLA), M.Arch, MLA (Harvard University) H. KOON WEE Visiting Associate Professor; M Arch (Yale University), B Arch (University of Western Australia), BA Arch (National University of Singapore); FRSA, Registered Architect, Singapore and the Netherlands PIETER HERTHOGS Assistant Professor; PhD (Engineering) (Vrije Universiteit Brussel); MSc, BSc (Architectural Engineering) (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) RICHARD HO Professor in Practice; B Arch (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore HO WENG HIN Adjunct Associate Professor; Dip Specialista in Restauro dei Monumenti (Universita’ degli Studi di Genova), M Arch, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore)

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GAURANG KHEMKA Adjunct Associate Professor; Master of Urban Design (UC Berkeley), M Arch (National University of Singapore), B Arch (Sushant School of Art & Architecture, India); MSIA, AIA, IIA., Registered Architect, Singapore, India and US NIRMAL KISHNANI Associate Professor, MSc ISD Programme Director; PhD (Curtin University of Technology), MSc (Env Psych) (University of Surrey), BA Arch (National University of Singapore) THOMAS KONG Associate Professor, Deputy Head (External Relations); M Arch (Cranbrook Academy of Art), B Arch (National University of Singapore); Assoc. AIA, Registered Architect, Singapore ADRIAN LAI Adjunct Associate Professor; AA Dip, BA Arch (National University of Singapore); MSIA, ARB Registered Architect, Singapore and the UK LAM KHEE POH Provost’s Chair Professor of Architecture and Built Environment, PhD (Carnegie Mellon University, USA), B Arch (University of Nottingham, UK); FRIBA, Registered Architect, UK, FIPBSA LEE HUI LIAN Adjunct Associate Professor; M.Arch, B.Arch Studies (National University of Singapore), MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore VICTOR LEE Adjunct Associate Professor; AA Dip, BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, ARB, Registered Architect, Singapore and the UK JASON LIM Adjunct Associate Professor; ScD (ETH Zurich), M Eng (Stevens Institute of Technology), B Arch (Cornell University) JOSEPH LIM Emeritus Professor; PhD (Heriot-Watt University), MSc (University of Strathclyde), B Arch (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore VICTORIA JANE MARSHALL Senior Lecturer; Director, MLA Programme; PhD Geography (National University of Singapore), MLA, UD Cert. (University of Pennsylvania), BLA (University of New South Wales).

CHRISTO MEYER Associate Professor in Practice PG Dip PP (RIBA Part III) (University College London), PG Dip Arch (RIBA Part II) (London South Bank University), BA Arch Studies (RIBA Part I) (University of the Free State); ARB, RIBA, Registered Architect, UK NEO SEI HWA Adjunct Associate Professor; B Arch (National University of Singapore), BA Arch Studies (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore SHINYA OKUDA Associate Professor; M Eng, B Eng (Kyoto Institute of Technology); Registered Architect, Japan and the Netherlands ROY PANG B Arch (RMIT University); GMM, UDA, DfSP, MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore FEDERICO SIMONE RUBERTO Senior Lecturer; BA Architecture Programme Director; PhD Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought (The European Graduate School); MSc Architecture, BSc Architecture (Politecnico di Milano) TSUTO SAKAMOTO Associate Professor; MSc (Columbia University), M Eng (Waseda University), B Eng (Tokyo University of Science) RUDI STOUFFS Dean’s Chair Associate Professor; PhD, MSc (Arch Comp Design) (Carnegie Mellon University), MSc (ArchEng), Ir-Arch (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) RUŽICA BOŽOVIĆ-STAMENOVIĆ Associate Professor; ScD, MSc (University of Belgrade, Serbia), Spec Arch, Dip Eng Arch (University of Belgrade, Serbia); Registered Architect, Serbia

PEERAYA SUPHASIDH Assistant Professor, Master of Architecture II (Harvard University), Bachelor of Architecture (Rhode Island School of Design), Bachelor of Fine Arts (Rhode Island School of Design) TAN TECK KIAM Adjunct Associate Professor; B Arch (Hons) (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore TEH JOO HENG Adjunct Associate Professor; SMArchS (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), B Arch (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore TIAH NAN CHYUAN Adjunct Associate Professor; AA Dip, BA Arch (National University of Singapore); MSIA, Registered Architect, Singapore WU YEN YEN Adjunct Associate Professor; M.Arch (Columbia GSAPP), B.Arts (Arch Studies) (NUS), Registered Architect Singapore (Genome Architects), Green Mark AP, MSIA SHIN YOKOO Senior Lecturer; PhD (Tokyo University of Science), M Eng, B Eng (Tokai University); Registered Architect, Japan YUAN CHAO Associate Professor, Deputy Head (Research), Director of PhD Programme, Director of Urban Climate Design Lab (UCDL), Co-Director of Integrative Urban Solutions (IUS), NUS Sustainable Futures. PhD in Architecture (The Chinese University of Hong Kong); MPhil in Architecture (Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture).

Picture credit: Brian Lee Jia En

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M ARCH / BA ARCH DESIGN STUDIO REVIEW CALENDER

Design7 /

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AY2026/2027

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Picture credit: Rory Gardiner

PUBLIC AND GUEST LECTURES FOR AY2025/26

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VISITING PROFESSORS & EXTERNAL REVIEWERS FOR AY2025/26

Picture credit: The Architectural Society (TAS)

_VISITING PROFESSORS_________________ _(FOR AY2026/27)_______________________ RACHAPORN CHOOCHUEY OSM Visiting Professor

LU XIAOXUAN

SHIN EGASHIRA

OSM Visiting Professor

CASEY NAI-HUEI WANG Visiting Senior Fellow

JAYDE LIN ROBERTS

H. KOON WEE

Visiting Associate Professor

_EXTERNAL REVIEWERS_________________________________________________________ _(FOR AY2025/26)_______________________________________________________________ Over the course of each academic year, DOA also invites leading international practitioners and experts in the field to serve as external reviewers. _BA ARCH EXTERNAL REVIEWERS________ _AY2025/26 SEMESTER 1________________

_BA ARCH EXTERNAL REVIEWERS________ _AY2025/26 SEMESTER 2________________

AR. KULTHIDA SONGKITTIPAKDEE Co-Founder and Principal Architect of Jenchieh Hung + Kulthida Songkittipakdee/ HAS design and research

AR. PACHARAPAN RATANANAKORN Co-founder of PAVA architects

DR. SAM CONRAD JOYCE Associate Professor, Singapore of Technology and Design Design and AI Head of Meta Design Lab DR. CAMELIA MAY LI KUSUMO Associate Professor, School of Arch, Building &Design, Faculty of Innovation & Technology Taylor’s University

AR. LEONG LAI PING Senior Associate at K2LD Architects AR. MELVIN KENG Principal Architect and founder of Kaizen Architecture (KZA) ASST. PROF. DONN HOLOHAN Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong Director of Superposition

AR. YAP LAY BEE Group Director (Architecture & Urban Design) Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA)

_M ARCH EXTERNAL REVIEWERS_________ _AY2025/26 SEMESTER 1________________

_M ARCH EXTERNAL REVIEWERS_________ _AY2025/26 SEMESTER 2________________

EVA CASTRO Professor of Practice Co-founder, FormAxioms lab, Plasma Studio Professor of Practice, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) Director CCA (Centre for Climate Adaptation)

GRAHAM CRIST Associate Professor, RMIT University Program Manager, Master of Urban Design Founding Director, Antarctica: Architects

MADHURA PREMATILLEKE Principal, team Architrave, Sri Lanka ALAN TAY Principal Formwerkz Architects, Singapore WAN SOFIAH WAN ISHAK Director, Design Evolution Architects Sdn Bhd Fellow Lecturer, Universiti Putra Malaysia

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CHARU KOKATE Senior Partner, Safdie Architects Singapore JASON LIM Director, Yume Architects, Singapore VERONICA NG Professor, Head of Department of Architecture, Sunway University SIM CHOON HEOK Director, WOHA, Singapore

STUDENT EXCHANGE PROGRAMMES (SEP) NUS DOA aims to make the most of Singapore’s strategic location and its networks to prepare our graduates to engage in the global practice of design. We create opportunities for our students to enhance their academic experience and cultural exposure through our extensive list of Student Exchange Programmes (SEP)* with leading architecture and industrial design schools. We have in place various school-level and department-level exchange programmes with the following universities:

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Budapest University of Technology and Economics Chinese University of Hong Kong, CUHK Chongqing University Chulalongkorn University Cracow University of Technology Czech Technical University Delft University of Technology Ecole Speciale D’Architecture Eindhoven University of Technology ETH Zurich Ewha Womans University, Seoul Hanyang University Lund University McGill University Meiji University National Cheng Kung Polytechnic University of Turin Technical University of Munich The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The University of Manchester The University of Melbourne The University of New South Wales The University of Sheffield The University of Sydney Tianjin University Tongji University Tsinghua University Tunghai University UIC Barcelona Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Spain) University of California University of Hawaii, Manoa University of Navarra University of Seoul University of Strathclyde University of Waterloo Yonsei University Zhejiang University

*List of SEP partner university refreshes each semester within the academic year

Picture credit: Shim Yean

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CONTACTS NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE (DOA) Address NUS College of Design and Engineering 4 Architecture Drive, SDE1-03-01 Singapore 117566 Telephone +65 6516 8736 Website https://cde.nus.edu.sg/arch/ Facebook www.facebook.com/nus.aki Instagram NUS Department of Architecture | @aki.nus The Architecture Society | @thearchitecturesociety AkiVAL 2026 | @akival26 NUS Studios | @nusstudios NUS M Arch Show 2025/26 | @nusm.archgradshow For more information on our programmes and on the DOA in general, please feel free to get in touch with the following persons: DEPARTMENT UPDATES, ADMISSIONS AND GENERAL ENQUIRIES Email:

askdoa@nus.edu.sg

STUDENTS ENROLLED IN BA ARCH PROGRAMME Management Assistant Officer (Academic): CHUA Lay Peng Lyn akiclp@nus.edu.sg Executive Sheryl GOH sheryl_g0h@nus.edu.sg Huda ILYASA huda.ily@nus.edu.sg STUDENTS ENROLLED IN M ARCH PROGRAMME Management Assistant Officer (Academic): Jason CHONG Woon Siong akicws@nus.edu.sg Senior Executive: Vhaishnavi D/O V SELVARAJAH vhaish30@nus.edu.sg Executive Sheryl GOH sheryl_g0h@nus.edu.sg Huda ILYASA huda.ily@nus.edu.sg

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Advised by

Assoc. Prof. Thomas KONG Assoc. Prof. CHEAH Kok Ming Ms. WONG Foong Foong Alicia

Edited by Dr. Federico Simone RUBERTO Dr. Michael Budig Mr. Muhammad Akmal BIN MOKSIN Mr. LIU Heng

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