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Eugene Tan Wei Ming
Diploma 8
The project confronts the need to emancipate space to cultivate local industries by resisting the over-reliance on foreign research corporations as dominant driver of knowledge economy within the limited corporate fabric of Singapore.By the control of infrastructure to a strict perimeter combined with foreign research programs on top, the traditional model of industrial cluster masterplan is completely inverted, leaving more space flexible to accommodate different local factory types while necessitating the possibility of foreign - local partnership to encourage knowledge exchange between them, across various scales and diversity.Inverting one of the plots along the disused railway lineThe edges of the strips are turned into a shared interface where laboratories are owned by the large corporation to be shared or subleased out to local firms. Therefore drawing all clusterings of local firms towards its edges, further frees space in the centre of the plot. All circulation is turned inside out, into a series of courtyard conditions where it forms loops of creative research, production and selling across various scales.The scalable utility infrastructure allows the shift its capacity between research heavy or production heavy segments along the stripsThe project also encourages multiple stakeholders to subvert all total control over the use of land but also more important the notion of distributed ownership cultivates sense of responsibility to maintain the knowledge environment.The project also attempts to reconcile research urban centres and suburban production techparks together within an intense urban framework that is specific to the exacerbated conditions of Singapore but yet generic for a global knowledge industry.The inverted plots along the line interconnects strategically with immediate infrastructure such as highways with direct access to the harbour of Singapore, existing technological production and knowledge centres.