Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Singapore architecture'

Thesis (S.M. in Engineering and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2013.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 56-57).
This paper reports results of a study done to understand the Enterprise Architecture (EA) landscape in Singapore Government Agencies, to gather some best practices in doing EA in these agencies, and to postulate how the Singapore Government might get more value out of EA. Firstly, this paper reviews the EA field on why EA is important and what are some key challenges EA practitioners face. Secondly, this paper reviews and analyzes data from a EA survey of 18 Singapore Government Agencies. The analysis is done by comparing against data from a similar survey collected from over 100 organizations worldwide. In addition, the analysis also draws upon EA research done by MIT's Center for Information System Research. Thirdly, this paper reviews best practices and a case study collected from a subset of the studied Singapore Government Agencies. This paper concludes by rounding up the key findings and hypothesizing that there is a need for stronger inhouse design/architecting capabilities within the Singapore Government.
by Ming Fai Wong.
S.M.in Engineering and Management

Thesis (M.C.P)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1989, and Thesis (M.S)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1989.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 134-137).
by Eng Khiam Tan.
M.S
M.C.P

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2000.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-85).
The thesis looks at Conservation in Singapore: how it started, what were its initial goals, how these changed over years, and the impacts of the same. These questions are dealt with by studying the three conservation districts of Chinatown, Little India and Kampong Clam, which were the original settlements for the three main populations namely, the Chinese, Indian and Malay respectively. The one thing common to all these different populations is the history of Singapore and the built fabric which represent this history. The three areas represent the unique cultures, lifestyles and traditions of the different populations that give these areas the character they possessed until conservation came about. The built fabric has been saved, but does it represent the true essence of Place? The three districts have undergone rapid changes in the last two decades and the process is questionable. It has resulted in sociocultural and economic imbalances largely due to a strong hand by the State. The thesis along with these issues, also addresses the question of whether the conservation effort is catering to the right people. Finally, based on the analysis of these impacts, current guidelines and policies, the thesis proposes strategies for making these conservation districts culturally more significant & at the same time economically feasible.
bu Sunitha Kondur Raju.
S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2011.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-226).
Water resources are essential to life, and in urban areas, the high demand density and finite local resources often engender conditions of relative water scarcity. To overcome this scarcity, governments intensify infrastructure and project demand into the future. Growth in the economy, population, and affluence of cities increase water demand, and water demand for many cities will increase into the future, requiring additional investments in water infrastructure. More sustainable policies for water will require capping socioeconomic water demand and reducing the associated demand for non-renewable energy and material resources. The thesis consists of the formulation of a System Dynamics model to replicate historic trends in water consumption for the growing city of Singapore. The goal of the model is to provide a platform for assessing socioeconomic demand trends relative to current water resources and water management policies and for examining how changes in climate and infrastructure costs might impact water availability over time. The model was calibrated to historical behavior and scenarios examined the vulnerability of supply to changing demand, climate, and cost. The outcome is a qualitative dynamic assessment of the circumstances under which Singapore's current policies allow them to meet their goals. Singapore was chosen as the case study to demonstrate the methodology, but in the future, the model will be applied to other cities to develop a typology of cities relative to water resources.
by Karen Noiva Welling.
S.M.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1992.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 184-187).
Today, with the prevailing global culture of modern technology and mass media, it is almost impossible to deal with the issue of cultural identity. Architecture, as such, has not only become a reflection of individuals, but its meanings are often diluted by the disillusioned designers. This is particularly apparent in countries undergoing intensive economic development. Singapore is just one of example of these industrializing nations. Singapore is a relatively young independent city-state with no known natural resources but its people and strategic geographic location. Its key to survival is to plug into the global market. Thus there is no escaping from the reality of global exposure. To keep up with the pace and challenge of today's economic forces, Singapore will have to shift her traditionally intermediary trade pOSition into a main role in the economic arena. To achieve this role, her existing port-city will have to gear-up to internationalize her economy, hence, the hypothetical proposal of a Singapore Trade Center in Boston. The imperative question is, how are we going to present the intrinsic qualities of Singapore in Boston, and at the same time deal with the issues of architectural identity in the present situation? This thesis will begin, firstly, with a discourse into architectural identity for Singapore, and secondly with an exploration into the critical relationship between the building and its context. The design of this trade center can be regarded as a conscious attempt to seek a physical experience pertinent to Singapore's culture in the western environment. The goal of this thesis is to raise the level of awareness in the field of architectural design, while not arriving at a conclusive solution.
by Lim, Chai Boon.
M.Arch.

Thesis (S.M. in Building Technology)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2012.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 191-197).
A study of current land use in Singapore shows that through effective long-term space planning, the island city-state has maintained an adequate stock of developable residential land to meet its most ambitious maximum population projections. Two indicators of residential land use efficiency are defined: Residential Land Use Footprint, [Lambda]r, measures the per-capita residential land requirement; Mean Residential Redevelopment Time, [Tau]r, defines the weighted average time for the government to redevelop a typical plot of residential land. A dynamic stock-and- ow model is described to calculate the historical residential land use footprint and mean residential redevelopment time between 1990 and 2011. Finding that the primary driver of residential land use footprint is the change in household occupant density, a System Dynamics model is developed to simulate the historical housing price, supply response, and occupant density. Using a stock management structure to modulate housing supply and commodity dynamics structures to determine housing prices, the calibrated model is used to forecast the behavior trends of several housing policy and population growth scenarios.
by Noel R. Davis.
S.M.in Building Technology

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1999.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-126).
This Master's thesis explores the validity of current theories of globalization through the analysis of two prominent second level global cities, Dubai and Singapore. The hypotheses of global homogenization and hybridization are studied according to their prominence and influence on the architecture of the commercial, entertainment and central business districts of these two cities.
by Deeba Haider.
S.M.

People from many different ethnic backgrounds settled in Singapore over the course of the nineteenth century, making new lives for themselves on an island with very little recent human habitation. The homes they chose to build for themselves reflected new, sometimes aspirational, hybrid identities. A close observation of these structures helps to form a more complete picture of social conditions in turn of the century Singapore.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning; and, (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1985.
MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.
Bibliography: leaves 210-213.
by Ellen Lou.
M.S.

One of the main underlying foundations of good cities is the quality of their social and public urban spaces. The needs for these quality spaces are uncompromising; if they lack rigor in planning and thorough implementation the affects and consequences can be dire upon the sustainability of these cities. The availability of and quality of such public places will take on increasing significance as we move towards 75% of the World's population living in urban areas by 2050 (Burdett & Rode, 2007). High-rises and tall buildings are increasingly becoming the solution in accommodating growing populations in areas opting for high-density development (Marcuse, 2000). With increasing and intensifying urbanization has come a growing awareness of the relative qualities of living, socializing and public life. This has increased the consciousness among architects, planners and developers to design social places for people to use for the many layers of social exchange within the design of high-rises and tall buildings. How do we theoretically approach the design of social and public spaces in these new evolving urban settlements? This thesis focuses upon analyzing attempts to design and realize place-making within social and public spaces of a recent high-rise residential development in Singapore. The Pinnacle @ Duxton Public Housing Project (2009) by the Housing Development Board of Singapore claims to succeed in achieving the concept of place-making within a high-rise settlement. This research utilizes post-occupancy methods from urban design theory in order to assess the perception of users and to record actual use and activity in these places. In doing so, this paper will attempt to identify the good and bad practices that make successful social and public places. The Pinnacle & Duxton Plain Public Housing has attained huge publicity for its design of public and social spaces vertically on a grand scale. Evaluation of this project by empirical testing adapted from urban design could provide a new theoretical platform to how and why it could work for future developers, councils, architects and planners alike.

This thesis presents a field study examining the effect of the Active, Beautiful and Clean Waters (ABC Waters) Programme in Singapore on social capital. Based on a multi-disciplinary approach and following the theoretical framework of bonding and bridging social capital developed by Robert Putnam and others, three different cases of the ABC Programme were compared, looking particularly at the level of blue-green landscape integration. The three cases comprised the ABC flagship project ‘Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park’ with high level of blue-green integration as well as the green and the grey section of the Ulu Pandan Park Connector with medium and low level of blue-green integration, respectively. Quantitative data was obtained by counting the share of park users engaged in social interaction and by surveying 330 park users on the perceptions of social interaction and integration. In addition to the quantitative data, a total of 60 face-to-face interviews were carried out in the three park areas, providing an in-depth understanding of the perceptions of the surrounding areas. The study concludes that the ABC Waters Programme is a strong generator of social capital, offering an attractive place for social bonding and to some extent also for social bridging.

This dissertation examines the emergence of racial grids, which define and organize categories of racial difference in relation to one another in a hierarchical manner, in Canada, Singapore, and Malaysia. It considers their varied approaches to embodied lived experiences of race and as belonging to a broader logic of raciality across the postcolonial world. This project focuses on three thematic points of comparison: the use of English as a mediator of racial distinction; the lasting influence of narratives of raciality that emerged during moments of inter-communal violence; and more recent recastings of these grids under forms of state-directed multiculturalism under conditions of globalization. This project examines these issues through sociopolitical theory and socio-juridical documents, as well as through Asian Canadian literature and post-Independence writing in English from Malaysia and Singapore. Drawing the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, this dissertation theorizes a figuration called the racial nonhuman in order to analyze how race organizes populations based on human types and defines them against an ideal, that is white and European, human. The racial nonhuman is engendered by historical, socio-juridical, and aesthetic discourses that render particular bodies as simultaneously within these nations and their demands for different racial types, but outside their ideal body politic. I analyze works by Fred Wah, Shirley Lim, Larissa Lai, Tan Twan Eng, and Lydia Kwa to compare how these nations have instituted and maintained their racial grids, as well as to examine how the racial nonhuman is contested and reimagined across these contexts.
Arts, Faculty of
Graduate

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited
Singapore and many parts of Asia were hit with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in March 2003. The spread of SARS lead to a rapidly deteriorating and chaotic situation. Because SARS was a new infection, there was no prior knowledge that could be referenced to tackle such a complex, unknown and rapidly changing problem. Fortunately, through sound measures coupled with good leadership, quick action and inter-agency cooperation, the situation was quickly brought under control. This thesis uses the SARS incident as a case study to identify a set of network centric warfare methodologies and technologies that can be leveraged to facilitate the understanding and management of complex and rapidly changing situations. The same set of methodologies and technologies can also be selectively reused and extended to handle other situations in asymmetric and unconventional warfare.
Office of Force Transformation, DoD US Future Systems Directorate, MINDEF Singapore.
Lieutenant, Republic of Singapore Army
Civilian, Defence Science and Technology Agency, Singapore

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture; and, (S.M. in Real Estate Development)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in Conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2012.
Page 143 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-137).
Inspired by Singapore's recent effort in building its new skyline in Maria Bay, the thesis intends to employ econometric structural modeling techniques to Singapore's office market for the period from 1975 to 2011. Using data collected from Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority, the regression models established by rent, demand and supply equations, dissect the market behavior and project an understanding of the underlying correlation and market mechanism. With which, the thesis forecasts for the next 10 years, in quarterly interval, the movement trajectory of Singapore's office market. Living and working as activities in this current milieu where role play in the system of power are essential to success was problematized; In the era when social and financial "cloud participation" has given rise to ebay, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia, what does work, live and play mean in this current environment where indulgence and consumption for its very own sake is very much part of the cultural lifestyle. Where is Architect in this financial time? In as much as it is about providing plausible answers, this thesis challenges the existing power system in the Real Estate industry, instead of taking dweller's spatial appropriation as guerrilla activities, the thesis proposes ways that channels private equity "financial cloud participation" into system of value production. Architectural proposition therefore works in way which turns these underlying power struggle scenarios into formal expression.
by Aoran Alex Sun.
S.M.in Real Estate Development
M.Arch.

The scholarly interest is the sway singular architectures can have on the collective aesthetic of a generic city: How to exploit this capacity and better orchestrate an impact? The obsession is with Singapore — a city Rem Koolhaas describes as “all foreground and no background,” without geometry, fabric or legible urban form that physically defines the city’s aesthetics. Singapore is necessarily a sum of its architectures, and is still waiting for a greater aesthetic to emerge from its heterogeneous collection. The initiative: to revitalize the former Malayan rail lands, a site spanning the full width of the country. The plan follows Singapore’s recent practice: building distinct, free-style architectures on shifting sands — only this time anchored by a formless, yet permanent and straightforward high-speed axis that induces continuity and reinforces the island’s status as a singular, cohesive entity. Only extreme differentiation, held in tension by the thinnest infrastructural line, can induce a forthright sense of direction in a capitalist city that must necessarily adopt multiple architectural solutions.

This dissertation examines the history of housing and domesticity in Singapore by proposing public housing as the prime mover in the formulation of a national identity. In so doing, it traces the network of relations and spatial practices in the decades that span the Second World War and the country's Independence (1959), reaching back to the 1930s and the implementation of the first block of low-cost public housing by the colonial Improvement Trust in 1936, to the inception of the Island Concept Plan and the consolidation of Singapore as a Garden City by the late 1970s. On the one hand, this dissertation attends to the architecture, planning, and propaganda of housing as instruments in the making of a public body that extends beyond the inhabitants of housing estates to the entire citizenry in post-colonial Singapore, particularly in those spaces designated for the public. On the other, it examines the aesthetic and technological extension and adaptation of the colonial apparatus, in which the intersection of architecture, planning, housing design, media and politics transformed the postwar landscapes of the city-state. This argument demonstrates, in particular, how the Modernist concern with social and urban planning, which entered British policy and propaganda and led to the incremental termination of the Empire, was employed by Singapore's incumbent government to construct housing as a national project. The circulation of technologies, methodologies, and mindsets within the Empire - between the Colony and the hinterland prior to 1959, and later between the postcolonial Nation-state and other territories (such as other Southeast Asian nations and Australia) - constitute a complex of power relations, knowledges, and institutions that were reproduced even after the demise of the British Empire, during the nation-building phase. This encompasses the policy relationships within the various national authorities and the industrial sector, such as the state sponsorship of research, development, production, maintenance, and support for the education and training of professionals (architects, planners, surveyors, and estate managers) and administrators, as well as the deployment of equipment and facilities within the national development policy. In conjunction with resettlement and town planning projects, educating the populace on the spaces and objects in the modern home, and the appropriate conduct of modern living, was also integral to the project of nationalism. This dissertation also considers how developments in the sphere of public housing provision realigned the social relations and collective identity of a largely immigrant population. The argument advanced here proposes that the advocacy of aesthetic and societal change within the various constituencies of the Modern Movement not only affected the gathering momentum for colonial devolution in between the wars but also underpinned the policies of the socialist government in early post-independent Singapore. Specifically, the Modernist critique of social hierarchy was adopted to replace the traditional, historical-based approach, which in Singapore's case was mainly the spatial segregation of races set in place by Raffles and the colonial planners in the nineteenth century - between the colonists and colonials, and between the Chinese, Malays, Indians, and other minorities. The Second World War had also exposed the limitations of British Imperial power already on the decline. In this respect, Modernism can be read as a disruption of those systems and networks, though they were in fact closely associated with British colonialism. This dissertation contains four main chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. The first two chapters attempt to map public housing built upon the tropes of crisis and public improvement for which the garden city became the ultimate national project of improvement. The third and fourth chapters examine the forms and spaces of housing in conjunction with the urban renewal program and how they in turn led to in a totally planned environment in which public spaces, public discourses, and identities are subsumed. The epilogue returns to the deployment of the garden city as instrumental to the domestication of the disparate voices and identities within the public by providing a specific aesthetic for urban habitation; as well, it reiterates the crucial role of the press in disseminating and sanctioning the project.

Tung Kwok Wah Henri.
"Architecture Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Master of Architecture Programme 2003-2004, design report."
Chapter 01. --- The Story Line --- p.p.01 - p.06
Chapter 02. --- The System --- p.p.07 - p.08
Chapter 03. --- Design Vol. 1 - the fabric --- p.p.09 - p.11
Chapter 04. --- Design Vol. 2 - 1/2 park + 1/2 plant --- p.p.12 - p.26
Chapter 05. --- The research part A - Newater plant (Singapore) --- p.p.27 - p.37
Chapter 06. --- The researh part B - Water Background --- p.p.38 - p.48
Chapter 07. --- The research part C - Rotomolding --- p.p.49 - p.57