POROSITY IN THE CRACKS: To uncover the different aspects pertaining to the aesthetics and spatial unfolding of both explicitly capitalistic space (in this case, an office typology), and the exploration of its refutation to create new constellations.

Walter Benjamin, a philosopher in the 1920s, mentioned in his essay that porosity of the streetscape is quote “… the inexhaustible law of life, where building and action interpenetrate.”

Not only in his time but also in ours, whereby we witness capitalism’s vitality taking over, mutating and transforming itself to have a heartbeat as discernible today as in the 1930s, from the repurposing of shophouses that were never designed to host activities that now inhabit them to the utilitarian character offices exhibit now.

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By tackling the manifestations of capitalistic architecture through infusing the porosity of the city,  the cracking and pulling apart of floorplates bind the internals of a building with its exterior - the street. The resultant interpenetration of private & public domains both within and around the building challenges how buildings should be designed as an active extension of the street, belonging to the city and not as sole entities in isolation.

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In order to allow for a porous vertical podium whereby private activities are able to occur even with public permeability, we looked back onto how one experiences the street, whereby the freedom to roam is experienced by the continuous cityscape, where above reside the sky and the views that are bounded to it having no knowledge of what is happening below ground. 

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Taking reference from how the street conceals what is happening below, it now provides privacy for intimate activities to transpire. Two layers were thus determined, “above ground” and “below ground”, whereby the public street sits atop the staggered floors, with the public that traverse them having no knowledge of what is happening below where the offices reside; blurring the extents of private and public in an office development.