#FOTM - The Hiatus, Landscapes of Tea

by Joel Lam Wei Min

Studio Raymond Ang

Y3S2 Design Studio 2022

Here lies the gateway to the arts district of Singapore, where this junction is the beginning of the epicentre between award-winning art campuses of SOTA, LaSalle School of the Arts and NAFA. In addition, there is no other location within Singapore which consists of many art institutions within this same district. Due to the rising intensifications of the growing economy along the fringe edge of this business city and with many educational arts campuses being placed in the surroundings of the site, how can we enhance the well-being of people to break their daily work cycle and create a live and play environment within their lives?

My Intervention focuses to become a portal, an urban sanctuary, where there is a Hiatus; break-in time from the daily grind which allows officegoers and students from these surrounding districts to arrive and utilize these spaces of solitude and recharging: empowerment and relaxation.

A “Call for Calm” juxtaposes this busy work culture and aims to enhance Live and Play through a collective of Tea Tradition Spaces from all over the world that enhances the overall spirituality and wellbeing of each visitor. Ultimately, conceived to be the urban sanctuary where spaces of reconciliation and re-definition could take place depending on the individual's state.

Purity of Tea Pavilions: Pavilion Type 0 addresses the sense of purity and naturalness considered for each Tea pavilion where it consists of under-floor storage, foldable stools which act as a table or chair respectively, hotplates to boil the Tea and a collection metal basket which vertically transports the Tea down to each Tea pavilion through a pulley system which travels around the column.

The Neutrality of the Tea within the landscape harnesses a multi-tradition Tea pavilion setting for each Terroir. This allows visitors to choose their designated Tea pavilions where these pavilions become a multitude of selected Tea traditions that function together within each landscape across the tower.

The Forest Facade - Inspired by Kengo Kuma’s Sao Paulo Japan House’s welcoming forest facade of vertical wooden slats. My intervention utilizes the same iteration to harness the different amount of openings on the facade in response to the type of tree and the type of pavilion within the Terroir which eventually wraps around each Terroir and utilizes the scattered light to perform similarly to that of an actual forest floor.

The Colours of the Landscape are derived by the amount of sunlight hours required for each specific tree and plant species, they are then placed appropriately on each terroir at different heights to provide the optimum position to capture the required amount of sunlight.

Ultimately, in order for each tea pavilion, on the respectively Terroirs, to not be distracted by the mechanical nature of the building structure and to obtain a sense of purity and naturalness, the relationship with the floor, ceiling, column and landscapes play an important role to determine the unification for the space to perform the optimum tea pavilion experience settings for each visitor.

Special Thanks to Joel Lam Wei Min