National University of Singapore, Singapore
Studio Architecture as Pedagogy, Adventure camp on Coney Island, 2013
In Singapore I designed an Adventure Camp for primary and secondary school children. Coney Island, connected to Serangoon reservoir, is the location of the design. On this site no buildings, sewerage or any other civilisation is located, what is very unique for Singapore with it’s high population. It’s important to integrate adventure, active learning, team playing and sustainability in the design. First with the whole studio we made a master plan, from which we got knowledge about the program of a typical Singaporean Adventure Camp. Together with Syamimi Sudarmo I focussed on the Shower area, for which it is important to know what the water usage is when 400 children are at the Camp, how to get children aware of this use, how to make showering more sustainable and what the dimensions of the shower area are.
After the program of the whole Adventure Camp was clear, together with Beth Yaju Yang and Zhou Yuwei I did a research about the location of the Camp at Serangoon Island, the program and then made a preliminary design of the whole camp. The aim for our masterplan was to keep the ecological footprint as low as possible.
When the masterplan was finished I focussed on designing one part of the adventure camp which is the Sea Storage. Instead of creating a traditional horizontal storage I tried to avoid disturbing the natural environment as much as possible. Therefore I stacked the boats and other sea equipment. The children have to get there own boats by using a pulley system. The technique of this system is visible, so the children can learn and understand how a pulley system works. When their boat lays on the ground they have to work together with others to get the boat to the water, this is good for the team spirit. When they use the watching tower they also use a pulley system. The classroom where the children get information about the sea activities is very transparent with a roof made of steel grating covered with some vegetation. Also there’s a connection with the water so the children all the time experience the outside life.
Jet Tillmann Architectuur 