From June 27th to 29th, Designing Resilience In Asia (DRIA) 2016 was held at National University of Singapore, bringing 19 entries of anti-disaster design from 10 universities in Asia, Europe, North America and Australia together to discover the best designs of social systems that respond and recover from disasters adaptively.
After three days of academic discussions and competition debates, Vigor of Vacancy, a work designed by senior undergraduates from SCUT School of Architecture, was awarded the Architectural Design Excellence Award, whichwas one of the three major awards in this competition.
After 2015, this is the second year for SCUT students to win the same honor, as another SCUT students’ work “X Ark" won the Judge Recommended Award. Both two teams were instructed byProf. Xiao Yiqiangand Dr. Xu haohao.
The competition aimed to encourage the participants to propose plans and designs for the suburban area of Valenzuela City in the Philippines, where with urbanization and the serious threat of climate change, waterways have become draining systems of sewage and storm waters, leading to water pollution and flooding.
All proposals were required to address the main focus of the competition, which is the utilization of urban and architectural design, building technologies to endow, support, amplify, and maintain a community’s resiliency in light of natural disaster event, namely, a typhoon and its associated effects like high winds, storm surge, flooding, and excessive precipitation.
To build the best system that can adequately respond to disaster threats, complicated factors were to be considered in these proposals, including disaster relief, environmental pollution, industry, poverty, management and religion.
To complete “Vigor of Vacancy”, a team consisted of Yang Yuelun, Ma Zishu, Tang Shuai, Pei Lingjing and Xie Jiaheng started their study by working on the water system and local social organizations. They then optimized the existing scheme in the area and designed a detailed plan for community organizations and public service nodes. Their adequate response to the system within architectural measures left a deep impression on the judges.
Meanwhile, the authors of “X Ark”, including Li Haozhuo, Li Wanting, Liang Zhihao, Wang Yicheng and Zhou Zhenggu, chose the topic on reconstructing the shanty towns on water’s edge. Managing to use the floating raft system to build a waterfront public community and residences, the team was praised by the judges for their elaborated study on technical and operational issues.
During the event, the above SCUT students took part in a wide range of discussions with faculty and students from other countries, sharing experiences and developing academic visions in fields like environmental governance, material utilization and community building.
DRIA is an international competition launched by National University of Singapore, encouraging worldwide universities to make foresighted urban and architectural design proposals, as well as to promote innovation in building technologies to insure a community’s resiliency particularly prior to and during a disastrous water-based event such as flooding.
After exchanging ideas with the local government of Valenzuela City, the entries of DRIA 2016 will be exhibited in overseas universities in the future.
From the SCUT News Network
