Two young Singapore designers shoot for Harvard summer programme
Ms See Ying Jia, 23 (left) and Mr Ong Xiang An, 25. The two will be representing Singapore at the AYDA Summit and Award Ceremony on March 21 and 22 this year.
SINGAPORE — When she visited Hanoi in 2017, Ms See Ying Jia was inspired by its vibrant street culture.
When she learnt about the Vietnamese authorities’ enforcement against illegal street vendors, Ms See, 23, began to think about solutions.
She came up with the idea of a communal kitchen and street market sited within the confined space of a “tube house”. Tube houses are extremely narrow and long houses that can be found in places such as Hanoi’s Old Quarter. They were built as a tax-saving measure centuries ago when the government determined property taxes based on the width of a development’s street frontage.
Such a concept would address the authorities’ hygiene concerns by allowing better regulation of food preparation processes, said Ms See, an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore’s School of Design and Environment.
Her design clinched the Gold award for architecture at the Singapore leg of the Asia Young Designer Award (AYDA) last month.
Along with Mr Ong Xiang An — who won the Gold award for interior design — she will be representing Singapore at the AYDA Summit and Award Ceremony on March 21 and 22 this year.
The event, which will be held here, will see finalists from 15 locations across Asia competing for an all-expenses paid summer stint lasting six weeks at Harvard University in the United States.
Other finalists this year hail from places such as Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia and Malaysia.
This is the first time that two spots in Harvard’s Design Discovery programme will be up for grabs. In previous years, the competition offered only cash prizes.
“This will be a big opportunity. Harvard University Graduate School of Design is a leading architectural school, and it will be good exposure,” said Ms See.
Mr Ong’s futuristic submission, called Alexandria 2050, imagines a library in a post-apocalyptic world. In his library, books are replaced by a cloud system and can be viewed in an amphitheater, with the aid of Augmented Reality projectors.
The 25-year-old student from LASALLE College of the Art’s School of Spatial and Product Design was inspired by how local libraries are affected by digitalisation.
He fused that with the idea of the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the most significant libraries in the ancient world that was accidentally burnt in a fire ordered by Julius Caesar in 48 BC.
“This is a global initiative. It works with any region. Even on a smaller scale, this idea can be applied to neighbourhood libraries (and) school libraries,” said Mr Ong, who looks forward to networking and exchanging ideas with other designers at the summit.
The AYDA is organised by NIPSEA Group, which owns Nippon Paint. The awards, which started in 2008 with 87 submissions, received over 8,000 entries this year.
Architect Law Yoke Foong, 43, was a judge in the Singapore leg of the AYDA. A director at RSP Architects Planners & Engineers, she said the submissions show how the world is moving ahead. “I have a lot to learn from (the young designers),” Ms Law remarked.
She will be mentoring Ms See to improve her present design.
Ms See, whose interest is in sustainability and social impact, said she hopes to one day tackle the integration of migrant workers in Singapore, “starting with the design of their housing”.
