Archifest 2014 Pavilion Design Competition

Download/Read the full Competition Brief here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/225622084/Archifest-2014-Pavilion-Competition-Brief

[About Archifest]

Archifest 2014 is a two-week long festival from 26 September 2014 to 11 October 2014, organised by the Singapore Institute of Architects (SIA). In its eighth year running, Archifest 2014 is not only a festival that celebrates Singapore’s urban environment, but also a nurturing ground for reflection, question, collaboration and experimentation.

[Theme of Archifest 2014]

The theme for Archifest 2014 is Crowd.

Crowd will be a festival about people. It is also about process – the process of bringing
together great minds and resources to create better places for everyone. Crowd carries different meanings in different contexts. The festival seeks to open up the discussion to investigate how the notion of Crowd operates and contributes to architecture and urbanism:

Collective Intelligence

How individuals, connected by various means, can share ideas, collaborate to form collectives,make incremental changes, and produce great impacts.

Community Capital

How people, connected by the place they shared, leverage on social capital to build better places for everybody.

The festival will discuss and test how architecture, the city, and the role of architects itself can be challenged and changed by this notion.


[About the Pavilion]

Physically embodying the spirit of the festival, the Archifest Pavilion functions as the main base of operations where the various events start from or run within the space. It is a place where ideas can be discussed, shared and learnt during the festival.

Opening up as a competition to architects, the Archifest Pavilion is to be an architectural experiment to explore different ideas to redefine and innovate the spatial experience of a public space within Singapore’s context.

Specific to this year’s theme of ‘Crowd’, the pavilion centralises around the idea of people and their ability to empower change within the city. Emphasis of the design would be on the idea of an architectural experiment of how the pavilion is flexible enough to accommodate people and different activities both spatially and programmatically.


[Site and its Potential]

The site for this year’s pavilion is at Marina Bay Event Plaza. Located in the heart of the
Marina Bay Sands district, the site offers a stage appropriate for the festival to be brought to the international level.

Situated right outside of the Marina Bay Sands Shopping Mall, the Event Plaza at Marina Bay Sands is one-of-a-kind in this region. With a seating capacity of up to 10,000 people, the Event Plaza supports various themed events such as outdoor concerts and performances.

The pavilion is envisioned to be an architectural experiment where participants are encouraged to test architectural ideas in developing the pavilion while adhering to the theme of ‘Crowd’.


[Architectural Experiment]

The vicinity of the site is currently frequented by a various groups of people such as  tourists, businessmen, joggers and cyclists. This presents an interesting meeting point for these diverse crowds who use the site in different manners and at different pace.
Seen as an urban intervention, designs for the pavilion are also to be site contextual in response to the different groups of existing users of the site.

Architecturally, the pavilion could be designed as a porous space that allows visitors and frequent users of the site to permeate or weave through the pavilion from the concrete pavement to the steps. Seen as a transition point, designs can explore spatially how users interact with the pavilion and with the site.


[Space-Sharing]

The pavilion is to be planned with the idea of space-sharing for different programmes.
A newly introduced anchor programme this year is a café. Thus, the pavilion is to be designed primarily as a café that sufficiently flexible to accommodate other secondary programmes.

The basis of the Pavilion is premised on how the café area can be configured to cater to the various events and fringe activities that would be held within the space. The café area will function as an active platform, where ideas can be shared and where the public can learn about architecture.

During events such as workshops and talks, a portion of the cafe area can be segmented to allow these activities to take place. On other occasions, the cafe area would solely occupy the entire pavilion space. Furniture can be shifted around to accommodate the variety of programmes that would be present within the space.

Architecturally, designs can explore different possibilities of this strategy of programme sharing through creative ways of partitioning or demarcation to indicate a change of use.