Designing Resilience in Asia (DRIA)

A Master of Architecture Design Studio, led by Mauro Baracco and Imogen Fry, where students submitted an entry to the National University of Singapore’s Designing Resilience in Asia (DRIA) competition.

The competition set a site in a city facing critical pressures from a changing climate and urban condition. The studio asked students, in their competition entry, to reimagine how they might intervene to rethink and design for a more resilient future for the site and its context. The studio focused on urban solutions for droughts, flooding and issues arising from rapid urbanisation. Students were encouraged to investigate resilient environments through a design approach that was dynamic, unstable, flexible, malleable, and, thus resilient. The studio asked students to reach beyond the silo of the discipline to form new ideas about the way in which we relate to our cities, how we move and live within their unstable and unpredictable built and natural environments. The Studio emphasised the need to understand contexts through a range of scales, thinking strategically across large areas and about how smaller scale interventions might help to realise larger systems.

In 2019, the site was Chennai, India. The students’ competition entry was a daring and provocative re-think of Chennai, and it won the Architecture Prize.

Image Credit
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Students, 2019
S. Skoumbridis, G. Andrej, S. Jayakumar, R. Heyworth, J. Jordan, R.Esagunde, V. Selvam, A. Lim, J. Hiller, P. Pender, J. Wang