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Vessel and its Content

Part 2 Project 2001
Chloe Lih Yin Hiyu
Chloe Lih Yin Hiyu
National University of Singapore | Singapore
This project looks into re-interpreting architecture with an adaptive reuse program by exploring the relationship between a vessel and its content. The context for this interpretation is to investigate old warehouses as a vessel to perpetuate old films and art-house films; and this content as a narrative for a cultural urban pocket along the Singapore River.

The nature of relationship between the vessel and its content began in the exploration of a series of episodic diagrams. A dimension of motion is added to these static relationships by drawing the reference of a dynamic vessel. The design then develops into analyzing the event of film watching under the framework of this motion kit of parts.

The two central screening rooms are the instruments in animating the form and events within the facility. When the screening rooms are in the ‘open’ mode, they gather an amorphous space in which temporary events can occur. The physical boundaries of adjacent defined function spaces are eroded when events begin to spill and collide.

Similarly, the outdoors film projection onto a screen located on the river is a case where the event spills out of the vessel that contains it. This event then becomes a gathering force in this urban setting, where people can gather outdoors and participate in an event that has gone beyond the confines of the building.

The architecture therefore has the capacity to be constantly animated because of the dynamic nature that it shares with the events happening in and outside of the building.

Chloe Lih Yin Hiyu
Chloe Lih Yin Hiyu


This modestly scaled work is engaging on several levels. Firstly, the work is extremely well positioned, both physically and ideologically. It is located along the Singapore River promenade, a public space that is being developed of recent.

The work is also timely as a venue for fringe arts culture as it coincides with the city’s drive to promote the arts. This provides a realistic context in which the work can be evaluated.

While the context is realistic, the architecture is an exploration into spatial ideas that are transformational and fluid. In this project, static blackbox spaces can be transformed into spaces that are capable of taking on diverse uses.

The physical envelope of the old warehouses are kept in a state of tension, being affirmed and denied simultaneously by a series of planes that can be moved into different positions depending on the event’s requirement. Its spatial dynamism also allows it to exert an urban scale presence that is much larger than itself during outdoor projection, when the city becomes the backdrop to the event.

2001
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