Architecture Of Sedimentation: Water Cities and Living Grounds

The project probes the shifting temporalities of ground, asking what new ways of inhabitation might alternative conceptions of ground structure? Contextualized within Singapore’s Boat Quay—a historic seafront that no longer shifts with the tides, the project rethinks the port-city’s large-scale land transformations. Ground is challenged as a passive, inert, and peripheral space to architectural design. Instead, a new paradigm of sedimentary processes begins to inform alternative urban operations. My design thesis tells a new story of ground, through an architecture of sedimentation.

Referencing natural sedimentary process of reef-making, my design intervenes in a collective of small-scale ground-making “protagonists”, to hypothesize how a slower-paced but more adaptable water-oriented form of inhabitation might emerge. Opportunities for design derive from reimagining the outputs of urban debris—namely, decommissioned marine vessels, construction rubble, and the stone-like shells of oyster dinners—as regenerative reef-makers keeping the ground alive and eternally shifting with the changing sea. My design explorations are recounted through a collection of stories telling of these shifting reef grounds, dialoguing personal memories with archival histories, scientific facts with fictive storytelling, to place more-than-human oyster reef-makers in relation to the humans inhabiting these unstable reef grounds. The research process reveals a different flow of time to fast-paced urban development that we have become accustomed to, referencing the slow and miniscule temporalities of reef ground formation. This architecture of sedimentation also conjures up the port-city’s historical and intricate relations with the sea—former testaments to the port as contingent grounds (re)shaped by the watery movement of not only soil and sand, but also plant and animal life, germs, diseases, people, ideas, technologies and cultures, upon the boats that brought them. These contingent grounds begin to shake the island-city’s land-centric framing of architectural ground as a stable territory, that persist to reinforce evolutionary ideas of the Modern City as land-oriented and unmoored from their shaky watery roots. We are reminded how the sea has returned to the evolutionary movements of our future cities, especially with the changing seas of climate change.