Urban Design Festival – Microcity/Hyperfurniture - Architecture & Interior Design

Urban Design Festival – Microcity/Hyperfurniture

Our first urban intervention consisted of a series of colorful objects shaped like buildings for the Urban Design Festival, a brainchild of our friends from Lopelab with the support of the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA).

We aimed to scale down the city around us and bring its archetypical elements closer to the human scale while allowing people to inhabit these objects, which serve as urban furniture providing shade and privacy. Each type is also shaped to accommodate different ways of the body inhabiting it.

Through this project, we explored the relationship between the body, public furniture, and our conception of what a building is. Public space is defined as something that belongs to us as a collective, but more often than not, public space is what belongs to nobody.

To activate the public space and make it usable and recognizable by users, there must be an element of mediation. Street furniture in the shape of buildings can provoke and exploit the ambiguity of scale, as well as the ambiguity of having an intimate place to sit in the middle of a generic space in the city.

Microcity/Hyperfurniture is an attempt to domesticate the city.

Our first urban intervention consisted of a series of colorful objects shaped like buildings for the Urban Design Festival, a brainchild of our friends from Lopelab with the support of the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA).

We aimed to scale down the city around us and bring its archetypical elements closer to the human scale while allowing people to inhabit these objects, which serve as urban furniture providing shade and privacy. Each type is also shaped to accommodate different ways of the body inhabiting it.

Through this project, we explored the relationship between the body, public furniture, and our conception of what a building is. Public space is defined as something that belongs to us as a collective, but more often than not, public space is what belongs to nobody.

To activate the public space and make it usable and recognizable by users, there must be an element of mediation. Street furniture in the shape of buildings can provoke and exploit the ambiguity of scale, as well as the ambiguity of having an intimate place to sit in the middle of a generic space in the city.

Microcity/Hyperfurniture is an attempt to domesticate the city.

  • Location

    Singapore

  • Size

    N/A

  • Team

    Natta Sawetwanachoti, Ermanno Cirillo

  • Client

    URA (Urban Redevelopment Authority)

  • Photo Credit

    Ron Greve