Sunday 9 March 2008

RESPONSES TO KHOO KONGSI SITE

After the tutorial with Ian that day, he told me some things that we can response to and how to do it efficiently.

1. There are two main entrances that we can fully make use of. We can build something along the paths or do anything you can think of to attract people to come in. The entrances are shown in the picture attached below. We should not limit ourselves in the site area. Our site should include the whole area around including the Khoo Kongsi’s area. Try to make use of them.

2. As picture attached below, the right wall of Khoo Kongsi is very interesting. Ian suggested that we can make use of it by making it as a background.
See the google earth plan below. The part highlighted in blue colour below serve as the platform, and then there are people play traditional musical instruments there, or maybe even Chinese Opera or anything you can think of. And then there are people watching the show from the yellow area. You can build something there for shading such as umbrella or some structures there. That area also can function as communal area where they can have drinks or eat there.
From that spectator area, besides watching the small play, it is also a good spot to view the performance at the Khoo Kongsi’s stage.(yellow arrow)

3. Interact with neighbour buildings. By building our building at the site, we should interact with the neighbours, make use of the small paths. We can propose to the neighbours to sell nyonya kuihs or anything behind their houses to make the paths a live space. By making it a live space, we can say that to prevent some bad activities such as rape cases, robbery cases, etc.

4. The last thing is, do not worry too much about the built up floor area. If your building need 700sqm to achieve what you want to do, then SO BE IT.

1 comment:

ian ng said...

That's a reasonably good summary for those areas mentioned.

We also talked about the remaining bits between your blue platform and the Admin building which is where your proposed "building" will be with your super modern skin structure. That's probably the more crucial part as it's the most visible from Cannon Square. How you handle that will either make or break your scheme.

Also your blob-like visitor space here can also eat into the Admin building--like a leech or some multi-celled organism, or like the black creeping thing from Spiderman. If they can have roaring dragons on the Kongsi building then I reckon it's ok to have sucking sub-creatures this side.

Look at the google map closely and see how the green site can be extended at one end (the lower end) through the existing shophouses (which look as if they're taller than their adjacent ones)to give you a major street face. This is important. From the looks of it, if this google map is correctly scaled, you could have linearity on this site to rival the Wall Site. Rawk-man!

I have to see your full scheme on Tue.