The Radiant Tide

This was my final project for Core Studio 1, in which we were asked to design a Singapore MoMA Satellite, drawing inspiration from two modern artists who are based in or around Asia. The two artists I chose were Simone Legno and Yi Hwan Kwon, both of whom displayed exhibits at ARTNOW in Raffles Hotel.

I started this design with the intent of painting across the landscape of the stipulated site, as the ground was neatly framed among the trees and against the edge of the Singapore River, nicely visible from the Esplanade Bridge. Since Simone Legno derived his designs heavily from Japanese aesthetics and traditions, I mirrored that by drawing upon Sashiko Weave patterns in my iterations, eventually settling on a vectorized version of a wave pattern.

I then created the form by extending the shape backwards across the site and distorting them around the trees using a grasshopper control point manipulation code. Once I had one surface, I extruded it and stacked it onto itself, and shifted it slightly to provide additional texture to the facade.

This choice ended up making the interior circulation unnecessarily messy, and although I appreciated the outer form, the floors being continuously curved made them difficult to work with for sufficiently modelling the internal structures like ramps, stairs, doorways, and platforms. Thus, I drew them in during post production in Adobe Illustrator where necessary.