Urban Village

We always in the dilemma how to create a successful Urban Village in new township planning process. Place making and city comforts always the key factors that make urban life pleasant; places where people can meet, methods to tame cars and to make buildings good neighbours, art that infuses personality into locations and makes them into places.

An urban village demand an unique characteristics that can promote, not only a sense of community, but also diversity and environmental sustainability.

KLAF2018 - Catalouge _ Urban Symphony

 

Kuala Lumpur Architecture Festival KLAF2018 was an amazing event, We are honoured to be part of the event. Being one of the speakers line up, we glad to see how success of the event, and to managed to bring the event to be more relevant to the architecture and building industry. Highly appreciate the effort of the organizer has managed to elevate the standard of the event to another high for this annual event.

Also, we are glad to share our place-making project in Official KLAF2018 catalogue, with the article that managed to record our approach in promoting awareness of quality public space, in conjunction with WUF9.

Urban Symphony

Who doesn’t remember makeshift telephones made of wire and cans? Urban Symphony interactive sculpture is inspired by this childhood toys, but a bit more complex and a lot cooler looking!

In conjunction with WUF9 Kuala Lumpur, we had been invited to collaborate with UNHabitat to set up a pop-up art installation intended to promote awareness of quality public spaces in Kuala Lumpur city. 2 days on-site installation works conducted by the team, as we remarked that erecting the arts work on the street allowed passers-by to engage with their artistic process, ask question about the work, the process and goals.

UPVC pipes given the designer great flexibility in forming the angle and shape with its off-the-shelves angle joint. This interactive art formed by the combination of 36 vertical modules of various heights. As people speak into these modules, their voices are amplified and carried out into the air. The breeze carries these words and ideas into the atmosphere to create a collective voice. Trumpet-shaped listening devices are installed at the end of the each module, where painted Symphony Horns standing high – some angles toward the sky, some is pointed to the human level. Children can explore the playful qualities of sound by talking into one end of the sculpture to produce sound for the listener on the other end.

The installation work intended to bring the community together; it is the place that people meet with friends, stop for lunch, enjoy the time with family; The material used for seats and benches are 100% recyclable, these seating has been landscaped with 55 recycled pallets placed in between the Symphony Horn intended to break down the conventions of standardized seating patterns, utilizing height and space, as well as offering a large amount of external seating in this familiar urban space.

Tape arts be part of this installation work to entice, delight and direct the pedestrian flow and experience this public space. The colourful lines arts borrows from the language of KL-city metro map vector as it is a vibrant and memorable wayfinding indication of this growing urban legible city. 

Urban Symphony, a fundamentally demonstrated versatile space that hold any kind of public activity. The installation allowed all kinds of interactions, and allowed visitors to participate in the exhibition and programs organized by UNHabitat for WUF9. It has also successfully offered pedestrians a new experience with its symphony and optical sensation, inverting and magnifying the urban landscape.

Project info:

Architect: Garis Architects Sdn Bhd & GAde Design Workshop

Collaborator: UNHabitat (represented by David A. Sagita & Mitiku Woldesenbet)

Lead Designer: Ar Steven Ngu Ngie Woon

Design Team: Albert Chua, Daniel Tiong, Loh Kwan Seng, Ng Zhia Zhing, Jonathan Lim, Tan Chew Yee

Photographs: Steven Ngu, Ng Zhia Zhing

Comic & Architecture

 

Sometimes we encourage the designers / architects in our design studio to express a complex message in a readily understandable diagrams  or images to supplement their conventional architectural visual representations. Although traditional architectural drawings are well suited for identifying problems, or great visualizing for design idea. Somehow, they are often difficult for laypeople to understand.

Recently, we get an intern to use the comic strip mediums , a very first try in our design studio to express our design idea. The combination of comic strip and diagrammatic drawing makes it possible to express our idea in a very distinctive and succinct manner, in a unique visual style that is accessible to wider audience.

Design team: Garis Architects

Comic Artist: Jonathan Lim

(Ar Ngu Ngie Woon, Albert Chua, Daniel, Kwan Seng) 

Research Campus & Retirement Home Village

Located within the lush tropical landscape at Malaysia, the site is characterized by lakes and water channels. The design of this research based campus is responds to the physical landscape of the site and to the weather patterns particular to this tropical environment.

To allow students to move around the campus freely, while shaded from the sun or protected from downpours, spaceship-shaped canopies shelter the pedestrian paths that wind around the eastern of the site. These canopies intersect to encircle a landscaped park. Arranged around the edge of the canopies are buildings of teaching and research, contained in institution blocks that tuck beneath the edges of the canopies.

Besides, retirement home village has been designated at the western side of the development. Community and the existing landscape natural world became the inspiration for this elderly village, which provides residents with easy access to the outdoors and plenty of the space to gather. The aims of the design is to provide "a sense of belonging in an era of uncertainty" for this group of residents.

Design Architects: Garis Architects S/B (Ar Ngu Ngie Woon)

The Arc - Winner of Place Making & Public Space Award (MIPPEA)

The winners of the Malaysia Institute Planners (MIP) Planning Excellence Awards were revealed at a ceremony at Kuala Lumpur on 25th November 2016. Fifteen projects from across the state were acknowledged from a total entry pool of 68.

Congratulation to Garis Architects Sdn Bhd and the whole design team. We are honoured to be awarded as Winner in Place Making & Public Space Award - MIP Planning Excellence Awards (MIPPEA 2016).  

 
project info:
project name: the arc at bandar rimbayu
location: bandar rimbayu, selangor, malaysia
architect: garis architects sdn bhd
design team: ar tang hsiao seak, ar steven ngu ngie woon
client: bandar rimbayu sdb bhd, IJM land berhad

#KLAF2016_GARIS_AFFORDABLE HOUSING-COMMUNITY STRATEGIES

This presentation outlines an approach to planning and design of affordable housing  scheme recognising that some aspects of the development and living community may change while some are more timeless.  It is presented as a series of principles, methodology framework and guidelines encompassing action plans and prototypes - laid out across a spectrum of the two extremes of “unchanging" and “changing" parameters related to affordable housing development and its community and life therein.

 

All above Description by: Ar Tang Hsiao Seak

Design Architects: Garis Architects S/B

(Ar Tang Hsiao Seak / Ar Ngu Ngie Woon)

 

 

#KLAF2016_GARIS_URBAN HUB COMMUNITY

Urban centres in sub-urban districts and suburban townships have evolved from their original purpose of providing local level services to the surrounding regions, connected mainly by road.  The shop-lot typology alone can not serve the increasingly complex roles and functions, and the exchange of people and information that occur on daily basis.  Emerging from this change and demand certain ideas and approach to urban planning and design, architecture and engineering are becoming prevalent:

•    Transportation and mobility integration

•    Connectedness of the community

•    Architecture-public domain-infrastructure integration

•    Design intelligence and smart technologies

 

As transport-oriented-development become the hub, design parameters need to cover integration with vehicular network and parking design strategy to avoid the loss of urban character.  Personal mobility solutions also become relevant in addressing the issues of traffic congestion and sustainability - it is a new approach that mediates between public transport and cars that is environmentally sensitive and socially sustainable.  As people transit through the hub, between homes - workplaces - shops, the journey is placed under the spotlight in its connectedness, quality of experience, amenity and facility - such as shops, services, recreation, safety, security, convenience, practicality, handling cross-section of users, environmentally friendly design, quality/character of public domain, value to community building, placemaking potential, etc.  The role of architecture is further challenged by the necessity to answer the needs to integrate and connect using new and hybrid typologies - last millennium paradigm shift in design for cars needs an up-shift to meet a new paradigm of public transport, autonomous vehicles and personal mobility devices - that would change spatial layout and visual experience of space due to different speeds of travel within and across buildings.  This compels the incorporation of intelligent and adaptive design strategies and the use of smart technologies to serve the built environment rather than to be dictated by it conversely.  Architecture will need to be seamless and all-encompassing to integrate the public domain and infrastructure to optimise land use and efficiency, and critically to propound the importance of placemaking for the people and the value of the public domain as the common denominator of the city.

A common typology has been evolving on the drawing board - a 'link' that is based on a flexible linear structure that integrates a multitude of services, predominantly used for movement of people, activated by activities at key nodes while drawing closer the relationships between inside and outside.  It functions on ground plane at the most rudimentary level, but key to its versatility is its transmutability to flex up and down vertically and twist laterally - for multilevel, multi-block connectivity - opening up new levels of accessibility and flexibility when coupled with personal mobility solutions within an architectural spatial configuration.

 

All above Description by: Ar Tang Hsiao Seak

Design Architects: Garis Architects S/B

(Ar Tang Hsiao Seak / Ar Ngu Ngie Woon)

Composed by: Albert Chua

 

 

Avian Sanctuary

 With this Urban intervention idea that trying to utilise the concrete viaduct structure that running throughout the entire city, not just a few but hundreds of various kinds of birds come to this citizen-created ‘sanctuary’. City that has been flattened by concrete jungle, massive infrastructure and nasty human being, where is the little space for wildlife?

 

 

 Design by :  Ngu Ngie Woon & Too Kean Kong

dated: 2016

Project Title: Avian Sanctury

Ecology Spine - Urban Connector

Ecology Spine offers a new dimension of experiencing nature with various activities within the proposed Urban Hub, such as walking, cycling, dining and leisure. Not only that it serves as a mode of linkage, it is also an element to restore the soul of the development from busy and fragmented contemporary life to a comfortable, robust and relaxing environment.

 

A fresh perspective is given to the landscape, where it is seen not only as a form of ornament but as a living organism that feels, grows and changes one's experience. It is about creating a place for people; not just to pass through or to sit within, but to entice and draw the users to always come back. The vision of making a modern city of quality, green and convenient living inspired by culture and nature gives birth to an organic city structured by a well-articulated order.

 

Interweaving the landscape with its surrounding architecture is not just about being green, conserving and connecting people with nature, rather it is rooted within the context and spirit of the area as a place to congregate and meet, shop, work, relax and to hold celebrations and take part in cultural events, concerts, festivals, education sessions and emerging artistic exhibitions. It is a place to take part in and be a part of its making.

 

The landscape is utilised as connective element throughout and beyond the whole development, bringing different spaces and elements together, making the development accessible and user-friendly for the benefit of all. The idea recognises the significance of crucial green connection and intends to tap into the feeling of continuity by integrating a comfortable and safe moving experience within the development's fabric, revealing its culture and getting in touch with nature.
 

 

Design Architects: Garis Architects S/B

(Ar Ngu Ngie Woon)

Project Title: Urban Hub

Post Commonwealth Games - Sports-anchored development

The 1998 XVI Commonwealth Games were held in Bukit Jalil National Sports Complex. It is somewhat complicated to assess the net economic impact of major sporting events on a country's economy. Even though it is a known fact that mega-events can nonetheless leave substantial legacies in the form of infrastructure and urban renewal, much depends on the extend to which new facilities fit broader economic interest.

 

Post-Games redevelopment of the Sports Venue city always a big challenge for the host countries to ensure the legacy and economic growth of the city. Urban regeneration and repositioning the perception of cities is a central aspect of game bids.

 

 

 

A task came to my drawing board to see the prospective development to the city to avoid "white elephant" city effect at post-games phase. So it is essential to design sites for sustained legacy use, long after an event has passed. We have create concepts that make venues themselves more adaptable.

 

 

 

Integrated urbanism, and our approach to masterplanning acknowledges the interdependence of urban systems and communities as well as economic on the future. We understand how placemaking can shape the future of the location, and delivering urban working and living environments that will attract local and international investment, transforming the future of the city.'

 

 

 

Re-imagination of the city's central waterfront corridor at sport city - as a series of diverse, thriving neighbourhoods. Designated plans open space for development, and also bring focus on delivery of a new commercial district and sports festive arcade.