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In Search of Alternate Time

Part 2 Project 2024
Matthew XinZhi Goh
National University of Singapore | Singapore
A building’s relationship with time is often labelled as an antagonistic one, a battle of endurance of sorts. Architecture tends to operate within a linear model of time, a product of a sedentary environment. Thus beckons, how could a different conception of time change the way we conceive and construct architecture?

These ideas are inquired upon through a group of sea nomads, the Bajau Laut, whose nomadic lifestyle exhibits a cyclical model of time. A group that has been systematically disenfranchised by the formation of the sedentary state. Their fishing grounds taken away by the state and by virtue of their nomadic lifestyle never gaining citizenship.

The first act was decolonising mapping, unlearning notions of completeness and continuity of cartographic maps through the lens of the Bajau Laut. Through a series of drawings and models a complex relationship with the coast emerged, anchored around clear water. The design centres around first cleaning the coastal waters. As the waters gets cleaned the architecture begins to submerge into the ocean, obeying the sea nomad’s sense of time. Lastly, acknowledging architecture’s mortality the design moves beyond its functions and investigates the value of architectural death as a landscape.

Matthew XinZhi Goh

Tutor(s)

2024
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