Editor
MARSHALL Victoria Jane
GUO Lehana
Editoral Assistant
DU Xinyang
KARTHIKEYAN Shruthakeerthi
Graphic Design and Layout
GUO Lehana
DU Xinyang
© National University of Singapore, 2026
E-Magazine ISSN: 978-981-94-6690-0
Title: Fifth Nature: The Enclosed Garden
The Enclosed Garden
Design Studio Report
AY 2025/ 2026
Semester 1
Landscape Architecture
Department of Architecture
College of Design and Engineering
Studio Coordinator
MARSHALL Victoria Jane (Dr)
Studio Instructors
GU Tiantong
GUO Lehana
TUNG Janice
THAM Waihon
Teaching Assistant
DU Xinyang
Guest Lectures
Muhammad
Since 1965, nature has been central to urban policy in Singapore. What nature? is an important question, for there have been various interpretations on the topic, each with powerful spatial outcomes and roles for landscape architects. Given the variety of interpretations, it might be reasoned that ideas of nature and society are not stable here. Might this be a positive trait? For it offers an opening for imagination. Learning from and with the nature-society ecologies that have been mobilised so far, the Fifth Nature studio will explore what other nature practices are needed for the immediate present and future.
Acknowledging that there is creativity and simplification in any act of categorisation, the Fifth Nature studio narrates four nature-society ecologies of independent Singapore; The Garden City 1971; City in a Garden 2004; City in Nature 2012; and Go-Green 2023. These four ecologies are distinct and form a useful comparative basis for discussion. As you will learn, each nature-society ecology is a state-led campaign that is imagined in relation to power, the lived landscape at a certain moment in time, and toward an aspirational future. Unlike those stateled campaigns, your fifth nature-society ecologies will explore expanded definitions of power (including nonhuman agency), it will be situated in your historic present, and arc toward a mode of practice that you wish to explore in your landscape architecture career. It is a creative research project.
Each state-led nature-society campaign has generated landscape design projects for landscape architects, making them more than just social ideas and more like lived ecologies. This linear statement – from urban policy to landscape design – might also be imagined the other way. Landscape architects not only respond to urban policy, but urban policy is informed by place. Meaning that everyday settlement ecologies and certain innovative landscapes created by residents, artists, and landscape architects can be prescient – and inspire novel ideas of nature-society relations, that are then formalised by the state. The Fifth Nature studio is positioned in this productive dialog between design and policy. Might you be open to the fact that your creative research project can have impact in ways that you cannot yet know?
While we are often told that Singapore is small, you will not be searching for a one size fits all solution. Supported by an assignment dedicated to theory development, each student will generate an individual project (paired projects are allowed with permission) on a given study area. Your project will demonstrate a distinct, locality-level transformation in urban form with a clearly articulated and spatially defined expression of emplaced nature-society ecologies. An important motivation for your designed transformation is the old-fashioned concept of “place” and the notion of designing with and for “incremental change” – you will not be creating a masterplan for a fixed future.
Overall, the studio emphasis is to function as a creative research hub that produces many scenarios. That is, the fifth nature studio is a space of multiplicity – a shared container full of many possibilities. Fifth nature(s), plural.
That is, the fifth nature studio is a space of multiplicity – a shared container full of many possibilities. Fifth nature(s), plural.
It is helpful to summarise the existing four nature-society ecologies. While they are presented here chronologically, they all coexist. Your fifth nature study area will surely interact with all these in emplaced ways.
The first nature-society ecology in independent Singapore is embedded within the Garden City. The Garden City is an urban model which was introduced in 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard (1902) in the United Kingdom and later interpreted into the Singapore context. In Singapore, the Garden City is first expressed in the 1971 concept masterplan, which has since undergone revisions in 1991, 2001 and 2011. Described by urban designers Peter Rowe and Limin Hee (2019, p. 43), the Garden City of Singapore in 1971 included many of the tropes from Howard.
First, there is the division of land into zones, particularly separating industry from the other uses. Second, there is the large catchment areas at the centre and both eastern and western sides of the island, which provide for extensive natural conservation areas, as well as public parks and recreation areas. Third, there are the major expressway and transit corridors that form the armature of connection between and among satellite communities and new towns. Fourth there is the idea of self-contained communities and in a manner similar to the Garden City ward and centre arrangement proposed by Howard in 1902.
It is important to grasp that the Garden City urban model was thought to solve the supposed problem of the congested and polluted city. The Garden City urban model as proposed by Howard is not to be confused with an image making campaign also entitled Garden City launched in 1967 by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.
In the initial phase, the Garden City image campaign launched by Lee Kuan Yew was implemented in with a vision of “clean and green”. It was expressed in the form of annual treeplanting, which is a practice that continues today. According to landscape architect Edmund Waller (2001, p. 53), the tree planting campaign was used to promote Singapore’s image abroad - to show foreign investors that the new government could “get things done”. Later, from 1971-1991, the garden city focused on residents through the development of small parks and landscaped pedestrian malls. These early aesthetic campaigns
were considered a success, which resulted in their scaling up as part of the vision of the Garden City Action Committee in 2004 and rebranded as City in a Garden policy.
City in a Garden is our second nature-society idea. Again, the summary by Rowe and Hee (2019, p. 45) is helpful for understanding the various dimensions to this policy and its designed landscape outcomes. The first goal was to “establish world-class gardens”. The Singapore Botanical Gardens and the Gardens by the Bay we created at this time. The second goal was to “rejuvenate urban parks and enliven the streetscape”, which is later seen in a Green and Blue Plan that focuses on networked landscape infrastructure. The third goal was to “optimize urban spaces for greenery and recreation” and fourth, to “enrich biodiversity in an urban environment”. As such, Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, the Water Catchment Area, the Labrador Nature Reserve, and Sungei Buloh were all created within this policy. The fifth goal was to “enhance competencies of the landscape and horticultural industries”, for example the Pasir Panjang Nursery, located adjacent to HortPark. The final goal was to “engage and inspire communities to co-create a greener Singapore”, which we will see later in the Go-Green initiative. The City in a Garden is thus an ambitious, multifaceted policy.
The landscape outcomes of The City in a Garden have been reflected upon. Geographers Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh (1996) outline three “social constructions of nature” in Singapore that exist concurrently. On the topic of “salubrious nature, aesthetic landscape, and public playground” they argue that the language adopted to describe a pleasing “natural landscape” of The City in a Garden include “colour, variety and orderliness” (1996, p. 413). They state, while colour and variety were introduced into the city through natural vegetation, this was done with a clear objective of “order and system, and specifically, of not encouraging an indiscriminatory profusion of foliage and verdure”. This orderliness is seen to be “a form of nature acceptable to urban living, one in which there is no unruliness, and one which is managed by human hands”.
This maintained orderliness of the “natural landscape” of The City in a Garden is an intense experience of contrasts. For instance, landscape architect Joshua Comaroff and architect Ong Ker-Shing (2012, 2024) reflect upon the dual landscape practices of clearing “greening” so that it can appear like a garden and importantly, does not form “jungle” on the
one hand. And on the other hand, producing secondary forest “jungle” as reserve land through benign neglect. They argue that landscape construction (the clearing, “jungle”, and the garden) in Singapore of the early 2010’s is “a form of warfare” and an example of “paramilitary gardening”. The next nature-society ecology can be seen as an extension of the “environmentality” analysis by Comaroff and Ong (2024, p. 174; Also see Foucault, 1970), for the “return to nature” in the next nature-society idea is also highly prescribed.
The third nature-society ecology is entitled City in Nature, which was introduced in 2020 by NParks (2024). In this scenario, as Rowe and Hee (2019, p. 37) argue, the usual dominance of constructed over “natural” environments in city making is inverted. They state,
More recently, more of a convergence into a “city in nature” is emerging, with greater emphasis strongly on the identity aspect of an altogether tropical landscape in which living takes place befitting Singapore’s geographic and otherwise natural location. This latest “turn” on “garden” and “city” also argues for greater complementarity of green and blue aspects of Singapore’s intrinsic environment. It involves efforts to intensify the planting of more native and more diversified plant species; and through multi-layered heights of plants to emulate the forest structure and to create more ecosystems providing niches for different fauna species. The plantings are thus carefully curated in the beginning but will be left to grow and evolve naturally to produce a naturalistic rather than garden-like setting.
Thus, “tropical”, “intrinsic”, and “naturalistic” nature is given new value in the City in Nature. As Kong and Yeoh (1996, p. 416) note, nature as an economic resource is an idea that has been present in Singapore since the Colonial era. In the City in Nature campaign, mimicry of “primary” nature is an economic resource and “[tropical] nature is hence heritage”. It is conserved as part of “the nation’s consciousness of its own unique identity” and as a “magnet to draw tourists [and residents] who seek to escape the press of urban life to find the pure and pristine”. Such nature is now quantified digitally, for the City in Nature also brings with it technological optimism and environmental finance schemes. The (anthropocentric) biophilic approach and nature-based solutions are all present in the Active Beautiful, Clean Waters Program sites, Park Connectors, Nature Ways, the old Rail Corridor re-wilding, and the greening of many building facades and rooftops.
The fourth model is entitled Go-Green SG, which is led by the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment and is championed by the new prime minister Lawrence Wong. Go Green is defined as a “whole-of-nation movement” to rally the community to take collective action for cleaner and greener Singapore experiences, based on individual lifestyles, personal interests and goals (Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, 2024). Designed landscape projects in this nature-society ecology include tours, workshops and talks, volunteering, dining experiences, and events. GoGreen is thus, distinctly different than the previous nature-society ecologies. With its focus on personal responsibility, it marks a shift from the state-led construction of a scenic, orderly nature (City in Garden) and a tropical, heritage nature (City in Nature).
The curated, environmental action experiences of GoGreen can be thought of within a post-political frame, and as such critiqued as superficial. As geographer Harvey Neo (2021, p. 111) explains, postpolitics presents an “aura” of political openness without necessarily ceding political ground and political legitimacy to non-state elements, both in the way political issues are identified and defined, and in how they might be resolved. Thus, he argues that “there are limits to which environmental engagement as seen in Singapore can bring forth an emancipatory societynature relationship in the age of the Anthropocene”. Another way to learn about the critique of a campaign like Go Green (and city in Nature) is to look at what sociologist Alexander Stoner claims. He says, the “autonomous ecoconsumer” is an environmental subjectivity prefigured by neoliberal environmentalism (2020, p. 6). That is, while individualistic market actions can appear in opposition to environmental unsustainability, such “happy consciousness” (2020, p. 9) instead reproduces the social order of capitalist societies.
In order ground your fifth nature(s) creative research and have a productive engagement with the above four nature-society ecologies, we offer two prompts. The first prompt is the enclosed garden. Rather than the more often used spatial types of park, infrastructure, or “greening” our studio will relook at the earliest, spatial type of the enclosed garden. An enclosed garden is approached, entered, something happens that is an expression of an idea of nature, and one then exits, different. As the name describes, it is enclosed, which may be formed by a wall, but enclosure might also be shaped by vegetation, topography or a sensed condition like shade or sound. Importantly, an enclosed garden is open to the sky.
The second prompt is an introduction to critical nature-society theory, which might assist you to imagine anew within the present post-political impasse. You will read a book entitled More-than-Human by geographers Jamie Lorimer and Timothy Hodgetts (2024). More-than-human is an approach to critical environmental research that asks, “what happens to geographic thought when the separation of humans from the natural world is rejected”? Although more-than-human work is diverse, three shared concerns are identified in the book.
- First, an interest in the power of nonhuman organisms and material things to shape worlds, alongside actions by human beings.
– Second, an assertion that knowledge is not universal but is situated in time and place and therefore that different forms of knowledge are possible, and that these might conflict.
– Third, a close attention to the relations and processes through which worlds come together.
The studio is an individual and a collective research endeavour. Morethan-human geography is an emerging body of scholarship from cultural geography not landscape architecture, meaning that it is an analytical approach rather than a projective tactic. Thus, there are few intentionally built, “more-than-human landscapes” that we can point to as precedents. You must make the leap from analysis to projection in your own way, and in relation to your study area. In our exploration of the multiplicities of the fifth nature society-ecology we ask that you have an open mind and take your design research methods seriously. We also ask that you to trust in an interactive and collaborative design process across the whole five-studio collective. On the completion of the course, we will reflect as a group and see what we have made. Maybe there are some design outcomes, tactics, or practices that emerge as thematic? We do not know yet, and so all we must do is try and see what we can create together. This studio is the second of a three-year pedagogy project. Your projects form the middle-phase of a 2024-2026 community of practice on the topic of Singapore’s fifth nature-society at the Department of Architecture.
The reserve lands of Singapore can be thought of as “wooded” reserve land, “mowed” reserve land, “voided” HDB reserve land, “tidal” reserve sea. All these lands are in flux in the historic present and will be thought about in playful flux in our studio. They are in “reserve” for what nature-society ecologies? For instance,
• Since the 1800’s, “primary” forest land has been removed in Singapore, but some small patches remain (in conserved land and military land) and humans are (mostly) excluded.
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• “Wooded” reserve lands have grown and might stay in place (as “jungle”), be cultivated as “park” or “enclosed garden” or might be cut down and become “mowed” reserve land or buildings with “voided” HDB reserve land (for example, Dover Forest).
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• Future (“third forest”?), wooded reserve lands might be cultivated on “mowed” reserve land or on “voided” reserve land in HDB estates, or in parks (for example, “wilding” initiatives that “mimic” primary forest ecology). In such instance humans might be included or excluded.
•
• “Mowed” reserve land might stay in place or become buildings with “voided” reserve land, or as above, might by cultivated as (“third forest”?) wooded reserve lands. In such instance humans might be included or excluded.
•
• Similarly, “mowed” reserve land might stay in place or be cultivated as “park” or “enclosed garden”. Again, humans might be included or excluded.
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• HDB buildings and “voided” HDB reserve land might get demolished, becoming “mowed” reserve land or be cultivated as “park” or “enclosed garden”. Again, humans might be included or excluded.
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• Alternatively, “voided” HDB reserve land might be imagined as being cultivated as (“third forest”?) wooded reserve lands with HDB buildings being partially demolished, retrofitted, or relocated on site with increased verticality. Again, in such instance humans might be included or excluded.
•
• Lastly, who knows what will happen with our remaining sea?
Overall, your creative research project will be prompted by these guiding questions:
What if future urban form at the locality level is arranged in response to secondary (or third?) forests reserve land and place, rather than hard infrastructure like roads and MRT?
How might an enclosWed garden shape reserve land flux in an incremental way, rather by masterplan? Who or what does what, when, and how?
What spaces and practices does your enclosed garden afford? And how might surrounding incremental reserve land change shape such spaces and practices as “place” in time?
What modes of creative research are needed to explore such future imaginaries of garden, nature, society, and urban form? For instance, what fieldwork might you undertake, what archives might you explore, what exploratory drawings might be made, for whom or what?
What modes of representation are needed to communicate such future imaginaries of nature and urban form? For instance, what drawings, objects, or digital media might best express your project? What narratives might best orient a diverse audience?
How might an enclosed garden shape reserve land flux in an incremental way rather by a master plan? Who or why does what when and how?
Comaroff, J., & Ong, K.-S. (2012). Paramilitary Gardening: Landscape and authoritarianism. City Axioms: Urban (In)security, Department of Social Anthropology, Sweden.
Comaroff, J., & Ong, K.-S. (2024). Paramilitary Gardening: Landscape and authoritarianism. In A.-S. Springer & E. Turpin (Eds.),
Seeing Forest: Robert Zhao Renhui (pp. 160–176). K. Verlag & Singapore Art Museum.
Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An archaeology of the human sciences; Tavistock Publications.
Howard, E. (1902). Garden Cities of Tomorrow. S. Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd.
Kong, L., & Yeoh, B. (1996). Social Constructions of Nature in Urban Singapore. Southeast Asian Studies, 34(2), 402–423. Lorimer, J., & Hodgetts, T. (2024). More-than-human. Routledge. Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment. (2024). Go Green SG [Government]. Go Green SG. https://www.gogreen.gov.sg/
Neo, H. (2021). The post-politics of environmental engagement in Singapore. In Jobin, M. Ho, & H.-H. M. Hsiao (Eds.), Environmental movements and politics of the asian anthropocene (pp. 109–137). ISEAS Publishing.
Rowe, P., & Hee, L. (2019). A city in blue and green: The Singapore story. Springer.
Stoner, A. (2020). Things are Getting Worse on Our Way to Catastrophe: Neoliberal Environmentalism, Repressive Desublimation, and the Autonomous Ecoconsumer. Critical Sociology, 47(3), 1–16.
Waller, E. (2001). Landscape Planning in Singapore. NUS Press.
LEGEND
Housing Development Board
Reserved Sites with Trees (WoodedDominant Human Management)
Reserved Sites with Trees (WoodedLimited Human Management)
Reserved Sites without Trees (Mowed)
Reserved Seas (Tidal)
Open Spaces (Voided)
Waterbodies
1. Chapter Overview
2. The Living Memory Arunachalam Kothai
3. Hacking into Semakau Cai Jiaheng
4. Earthing Dang Van Trang
5. Refracted Organism Dong Yukun
6. Remembering / Forgetting Melissa Tang
7. Shifting Grounds Ong Qin Hui
8. Forest Beyond Fear Tan Jiayi Joey
9. Living Shores: Reclaiming With Nature Wang Mu Qing
10. Caring Portal: A Multispecies World Wu Han
11. The Anatomy of the Intertidal Lee Luyi
1. Chapter Overview
2. Re-Rooting Orchids Arya Muthukumar
3. Selective Control Boddapati Krishna Sri
4. Council of Gardens Calyn Chia Xin Mei
5. Cultivating a Secondary Forest Ding Hao
6. Celebrating Untidiness Danea
7. Making Decay Visible Soh Seh Ting
8. Pigeonhood Emily Jing Jiaxin
9. Spontaneous Assemblage Su Ju Hui
10. Siglap Forum Wang Lu
11. The Growing Ground Yu Yun
12. The Tamarind Trail Wu Yilin
13. The Garden of the Nightwalker Wu Qiqi
14. Kebun Bahru Bird Singing Union Zhou Chenyang
3 4
1. Chapter Overview
2. Among Others Clara Choo Wei Ling
3. The Fig Sanctuary Maydalene Chee Shi Jia
4. The Whampoa River and the Afterlife of the Garden City Bao Yihan
5. Where Seeds Ride the Wind Guo Churui
6. Fuelled by Foul Jasmine Eng
7. Perch City Jonald Khaw
8. Replacing Replacement Lee Huei Min
9. The Last Sand BargeLi Jingyao
10. The Consumed Path Lin Keyu
11. Let It Flow Liu Yunqi
12. Sand – Reclaimed Bhagwat Ruchira
1. Chapter Overview
2. Re: Waste Khoo Zhi Luo
3. Current Current Chen Qingsong
4. The Three Engines of Everyday Urban Life Gao Xinyu
5. Ecology Mixology Ian Hiedie Zuraimi
6. Fern Humus Li Yuanhao
7. For Cricket Ng Junhao
8. Strange Energy: Beyond Greening Yan Linhao
9. Where Faith Meets Water Again Zhao Fuhan
10. Two Futures, One Forest Zhou Qianya
11. Strait Garden Yue Jingqiu
Projects:
1. Arunachalam Kothai – The Living Memory
2. Cai Jiaheng – Hacking into Semakau
3. Dang Van Trang – Earthing
4. Dong Yukun – Refracted Organism
5. Melissa Tang– Remembering / Forgetting
6. Ong Qin Hui – Shifting Grounds
7. Tan Jiayi Joey– Forest Beyond Fear
8. Wang Mu Qing – Living Shores: Reclaiming With Nature
9. Wu Han – Caring Portal: A Multispecies World
10.Lee Luyi – The Anatomy of the Intertidal
Projects in this chapter foreground the ways in which fifth nature produces spatiality through process rather than form. Here, fifth nature is not understood as an additional layer superimposed onto earlier concepts of nature, but as a dynamic field in which ecological, social, legal, and temporal forces are continuously translated into spatial expressions. The enclosed garden operates as the primary device through which these often-intangible processes are made perceptible, framed, and experienced.
Situated under the shared theme of the “Garden of Spatialised Processes,” the projects in this chapter engage with abstraction as a generative condition. Cycles of life and death, legislative boundaries, ecological rhythms, and social practices are not merely represented, but operationalised within space. Through spatial design, these processes are given form without being fixed, allowing landscapes to emerge through ongoing negotiation rather than static composition.
Projects such as The Living Memory Garden, Refracted Organism, Remembering/Forgetting, and Caring Portal: A Multispecies World translate the social rituals of care, mourning, and gathering into spatial patterns that are continuously inscribed and reworked over time. In these works, landscape becomes a medium through which memory, loss, and relationality are both held and reconstituted.
Other projects turn to processes of accumulation and material transformation. Earthing reframes maintenance as an active ecological and geological practice, revealing the often-unseen systems that sustain urban environments. Shifting Grounds traces the movement and redistribution of sand, exposing the fluid ecologies embedded within extraction and stockpiling while speculating on new forms of landscape that arise from such flux. Similarly, The Anatomy of the Intertidal repositions human activity within a broader metabolic system, where development is no longer conceived as an external imposition, but as a shared process of exchange between human and non-human agents.
Taken together, these projects articulate fifth nature as a condition of continuous becoming—where landscape is not designed as a finished object, but as an evolving interface shaped by the interplay of multiple, often invisible, processes.
Student Name: Arunachalam Kothai
Tutor: Wai Hon Tham
Nestled at Singapore’s eastern edge, Changi Village stands as a rare enclave where history and modernity coexist. Established during the British colonial era to house Royal Air Force personnel, the area gradually evolved from a quiet military settlement into a vibrant coastal community. The shoreline remains one of the few places where the coast still feels human in scale -green, slow, and open to the sea. Yet beneath its recreational calm lies a quieter, forgotten layer of meaning. Until recently the coast was the Hindu sea-burial ground, where ashes were released into the tides as a final act of return.
Reimagining this ritual in an ecological way, The Living Memory Garden envisions the Changi River as a contemporary Ganga, where the sacred act of release becomes an act of renewal. Human ashes are no longer scattered into the water but merged with soil and seedlings, forming biodegradable pods that give life back to the coast. The project transforms remembrance into regeneration a landscape that heals through time.
Within the garden sits a multifunctional prayer court, a quiet, shaded space that serves both practical and reflective roles. It provides a place for visitors to pause, gather, and learn about the ecological processes that shape the site how tides, sediment, and roots sustain this living memorial. From here, the path meanders toward a reflection zone where small ceremonies can take place beneath the trees, in the dappled shade of the living landscape.
A meandering path then leads through the mangrove nursery, where young saplings grow in carefully nurtured soil. At the edge, an ash-mixing zone opens toward the river—its gravel surface embedded with raised stone blocks for placing and mixing the ashes of loved ones into the earth. The act is intimate yet grounded, reconnecting human life with the material of land and water.
Beyond this threshold, a field of ecological sediment fences from bamboo stakes, brushwood bundles, and coir ropes extends into the tidal flats. These permeable structures slow the flow of water, allowing fine silt to settle and new land to emerge. Over decades, as mangrove roots take hold, the biodegradable fences will gradually decay, leaving behind a self-sustaining landscape shaped by nature itself.
After a year, families return by boat from the Changi jetty to outplant their saplings at the river’s edge completing the ritual of remembrance. Each visit becomes both an offering and a reunion, where grief quietly transforms into growth._ Ultimately, The Living Memory Garden envisions a living coastline where death nourishes life and memory becomes forest. Through the union of ashes, soil, and tide, Changi becomes not only a place of mourning but a breathing archive of people and place a fifth nature where love, loss, and landscape intertwine.
This plan maps the spatial choreography of prayer courts, nurseries, eco-fencing, and outplanting banks. A connected system where hydrology, planting, and human ritual form one continuous landscape.
These sections map the intertwined processes of sedimentation, replanting, and ritual practice. Together, they shape a landscape where ecological repair and human memory unfold as one
Student
Name:
Cai Jiaheng
Tutor: Janice Tung
Semakau is Singapore’s only offshore landfill, where coral ecologies, landfill engineering, and the erased maritime culture of the Orang Laut intersect, overwrite, and contradict one another. The island remains highly restricted under the National Environment Agency (NEA), preventing any long-term ecological or cultural practice from external actors. Therefore, the project does not start from formal design, but a negotiation of access.
Drawing from the idea of legal grey area in Post-Growth Planning, the project proposes a sequence of institutionally permissible actions that use research permits, temporary authorizations, and monitored activities to gradually shift how Semakau is managed.
Through incremental and reversible interventions, new forms of shared ecological and cultural agency can emerge from within the existing governance structure.
Permission Hack (2025-2027):
A temporary NUS research studio operates inside the NEAcontrolled zone. Coral nursery units are installed, and stabilized incineration ash is tested as marine substrate, justified through research necessity. Ongoing NUS studies that already use Semakau ash and cultivate corals provide scientific grounding.
Ecology Hack (2027-2030):
As corals grow, an online platform invites involvement. Orang Laut descendants adopt corals for free and gain priority access to monitoring data; the public participates through paid adoption that funds research. Corals become operational mediatorsshifting management from ownership to shared care.
Cultural Hack (2030-2035):
Ecological results strengthen the negotiation for timelimited access under the research permit. A tri-party charter (NEANUS-Orang Laut) establishes spatial use, cultural rights, and ecological thresholds. Orang Laut conducts workshops and temporary programmes on Semakau, transforming symbolic acknowledgement into physical presence and cultural agency.
Stabilized ash transitions from waste to co-designed materialpaths, platforms, and certified marine modulesdeveloped with the Orang Laut. Coral outplanting scales up; ash reuse slows landfill expansion and forms a circular ecological system. Semakau shifts from a terminal infrastructure to a shared ecology-culture-governance commons.
Fifth Nature is not a state but a negotiated order produced through reopening access, decision-making, and proving that institutional constraints can be reshaped through situated interventions.
Tutor: Janice Tung
Earthing. proposes a rethinking of Singapore’s longstanding culture of “finished” landscapes - spaces perfected through decades of nation-building and the four Nature–Society ecologies. Such landscapes produce more than an aesthetic of perfection; they reinforce the belief that land must remain stable, predictable, and easily maintained. Yet beneath this manicured surface lie restless geological layers - old formations weathering quietly into soil. At the same time, extractive practices such as sand importation, earth relocation, and construction accelerate erosion–deposition cycles while distancing people from the material processes that shape the nation.
Earthing. reframes maintenance as relational and participatory. The design brings hydrology, human disturbance, soil health, microbial activity, and habitat niches into dialogue, treating them as co-shapers of the ground. The intervention begins with a sunken ground: a deliberate cut where grass is selectively removed to reveal textural, hydrological, and ecological variability. Rainfall and upstream runoff gather in this depression, forming a temporary sedimentation basin where material settles in shifting, legible layers. In this shared space, human and nonhuman movements intertwine. Micro-erosion channels, sediment fans, and spontaneous vegetation patches emerge as both indicators and agents of ongoing change.
A simple spatial framework - slopes, mounts, shallow pools - guides how water, organisms, and people redistribute material across the site. Different groups take on overlapping roles: residents carve desired paths; scahool groups observe and document soil cycles; community gardeners test compost–soil amendments; migrant workers share tacit knowledge of shaping earth; microbes and invertebrates continually restructure the substrate. Maintenance becomes a shared choreography of harvesting sediment after rains, forming earthen structures, redistributing biomass, and responding to ecological cues.
The title earthing. stands for the practice of grounding in my Fifth Nature - of being with the soil, responding to its changes, and recognising it as a living partner in shaping urban space. By embracing disturbance, impermanence, and co-creation, the project imagines a new social-ecology of maintenance for Singapore. Resilience emerges not from holding the ground still; similar to how a rock is, it is from allowing human and non-human to shift, respond, and learn new ways together.
Student Name: Dong Yukun
Tutor:
Victoria Jane Marshall
Originally a Chinese burial ground established in the early 20th century, Bukit Brown Cemetery is located on a hill beside Macritchie Reservoir. After the official closure of the cemetery in 1973, over decades, as many ancestor worship practices continue, the forest vegetation has woven through the graves, nurturing a dense and complex web of nonhuman nature agencies. Following a more-than-human approach, these intertwining and coexisting processes form a mutually beneficial connection between all of the living and the dead, what I term bizarre vitality.
However, as the last remaining Chinese cemetery in Singapore, it continues to face an uncertain future of possible erasure, just as other similar burial grounds have undergone. My project renders its bizarre vitality that are values, but easily overlooked and even to be forgotten—visible and clear— through the concept of a Refracted Organism garden. In doing so, the enclosed garden becomes a refractive medium that invites residents, visitors, and even policymakers to recognize Bukit Brown’s value.
The main design strategy, clarifies and reconfigures bizarre vitality’s agencies and present them within a multi-perspective ecological field (a space with many designed viewpoints for human and non-human natures). Their designed, spatial fragmentation and their emergent relationships mirror the broader dynamics across this cemetery-in-a-secondaryforest. For example, I first used rocks and found statues to mark the fragmentations from existing trees. Using the monkeys’ habitat of moving through connected canopies, some paths are placed in gaps where the tree crowns do not touch. When monkeys come down to the ground to cross these gaps, visitors are more likely to encounter them. These designs encourage rich, predictable or potentially accidental encounters to occur. Within this magnified kaleidoscope, people can sense the multi-layered, bizarre vitality of Bukit Brown.
The site’s spiritual meanings are brought back into physical space. By doing so, it turns intangible beliefs into visible, experiential elements that help sustain cultural and spiritual continuity. For example, in ancestral rituals, light serves as a vital bridge between humans and spirits, guiding the departed to see the offerings and the paths before them. Yet, in the context of future urban life, these connections will be severed or forgotten. Borrowing from this symbolic act, light installations are placed to guide both the visibility of human movement, the direction of spirits, and to convey spiritual presence and transmission within contemporary space.
Overall, as a refracted organism, my project intensifies the bizarre vitality of Bukit Brown. This intensification will make Bukit Brown more visible, and perhaps more recognized. In the present, the garden is designed to be a destination for observation and to bring recognition of Bukit Brown.
Student Name: Melissa Tang
Tutor: Gu Tiantong
This project proposes forgetting as another way of remembering, using the Japanese Cemetery Park as both a site and a teacher. The cemetery has lived through cycles of care and neglect: from its origins as a burial ground for Japanese prostitutes and soldiers, and later to its restoration as a heritage park. Today, the site holds visible unevenness, where some tombs preserved and tended, others softened by vines, moss, and time. The site itself already demonstrates how memory is held, released, and transformed.
The proposal does not aim to freeze the cemetery in one era or restore an original state. Instead, it treats the park as a living archive, where time, climate, and vegetation continue the work of remembrance. The park is neither a leisure park nor a museum; it is a slow memorial landscape, where visitors participate quietly as caretakers, observers, or simply passers-by who allow memory to surface at its own pace.
Three spatial strategies shape the design. Layers of soil, stone, and planting are revealed and reshaped to express memory over time. Where tombs remain intact, the ground is open and legible. Where inscriptions have faded, vegetation is encouraged to gather and settle. Caretakers and community volunteers maintain certain paths, while other areas are left to self-seed. The enclosure is formed not by walls, but by shifts in density, from tree canopies overhead to groundcovers at the feet.
Planting expresses states of remembering. Clear, airy canopies and spaced understory planting mark places of active remembrance. Dense, layered vegetation, including ferns and climbing vines, marks zones of forgetting, where memory is allowed to blur. Visitors choose their movement through these gradients rather than being directed.
Stone tombs record slow time through weathering. Wooden markers and seating decay faster, returning to soil and nurturing plant growth. Material change becomes a visible timeline of remembrance.
The Fifth Nature here is not a monument, but a relationship: humans, plants, climate, and materials co-produce memory. In this cemetery, remembering and forgetting are not separate acts, they are ongoing exchanges between people and the more-than-human world, shaping one another across time
Student
Name:
Ong Qin Hui
Tutor: Gu Tiantong
This project transforms Seletar’s sand stockpiles into a landscape where invisible forces become visible. The quiet piles appear static, waiting for future reclamation, their form reveals traces of movement shaped by wind, water, and labour. Each pile holds an unspoken journeys where grains carried by rivers, extracted from distant beds, transported across borders, and finally rested on Singapore’s shore. These piles reveal Singapore’s expansionist ambition and the parallel erasure of ecologies and communities both abroad and at home.
The project acknowledges extraction as irreversible and asks how new ecologies might now emerge from its ground. The enclosed garden is defined by a shifting field of sand in constant flux, animated by atmospheric, biological, and human forces that make it continuously reconfigure over time.
Wind becomes a key collaborator that sculpts and redefines the sand surface. By studying the dominant wind direction and speed in Seletar, the project identifies potential zones where sand can shift naturally to form dunes, ridges, and depressions. These changes occur slowly over time, making erosion itself part of the design’s intent. The barriers made from dead logs are setup to allow micro-topography formation that will take decades to form. These structures serve as nutrient sources, contributing to future soil layers. The sand surface becomes a live archive capturing the negotiation of planned intervention and natural drift.
Nitrogen-fixing vegetation is introduced to stabilise shifting ground by trapping sediment and begin soil formation as mycorrhizal fungi bind grains and enhance nutrient cycles. Fungi emerges as vegetation establish, supported by inoculated mulch and leaf litter introduced by hand. These living agents grow, decay, and regenerate, they enrich the sand with organic matter, enabling succession. Over time, the piles evolve into habitats that support greater biodiversity.
In sum, the project foregrounds wind, vegetation, fungi, and humans as co-workers, framing Seletar’s dunes as a fifth-nature landscape where design collaborates with evolving processes. Neither pure wilderness nor a controlled garden, it is an adaptive field of relations that embraces instability, reveals interdependence, and allows renewal to unfold through time. Within this landscape, care takes form from human intervenes such as introducing vegetation, scattering organic mulch, and creating conditions for fungal networks to thrive. Here, regeneration emerges not from dominance, but from co-production where humans and the more-thanhuman world act with distinct agencies while shaping the landscape together.
Student Name: Tan Jiayi Joey
Tutor: Janice Tung
Landscape in Singapore has historically been shaped by forms of fear. In the pre-colonial period, nature was understood as a spiritual force, respected and feared for its power. Under colonial administration, fear shifted towards wilderness, where forests were cleared for plantations and economic gain. Following independence, the fear of disorder led to the restructuring of landscapes into controlled plantings and infrastructure. Later, the fear of detachment produced curated gardens and park connectors that aimed to mediate the relationship between citizens and green spaces. Today, the fear of loss dominates, as Singapore faces the continued decline of biodiversity and primary forests. These shifting fears demonstrate how policy and design have been shaped by human anxieties rather than a shared relationship with the living world.
Forest Beyond Fear, explores what it means to design landscapes without letting fear dictate action. Rather than seeing humans as separate from nature, it positions them as active participants in forest processes. The project is situated in Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, one of Singapore’s last remaining primary forests. Within it, Shorea curtisii, a keystone dipterocarp species, faces regeneration failure . Its seeds are large, dispersed only by gravity and shortrange wind, and often predated by wild boars and small mammals present in the forest . As a result, seedlings rarely establish beyond the parent crown.
It proposes a community-based system of forest participation, where volunteers become part of the forest’s ongoing life cycle: production, dispersal, germination, sapling growth, maturity, and decay. During the production stage, participants identify potential regeneration sites and prepare the soil while setting markers and access paths. During dispersal, which overlaps with the monsoon season, rainwater collects along sunken paths, creating muddy areas that trap fallen seeds. The mud allows seeds to stick to shoes and animal fur, spreading them farther. Volunteers collect the seeds, planting healthy ones and clustering damaged ones to redirect predators.
During germination, participants monitor sapling survival and improve soil with decomposing logs and leaf litter. As the trees mature, they are tagged and documented. When they decay, the fallen trunks are repurposed for craft workshops that raise awareness and funds for conservation, while leftover wood is used to mark new regeneration zones, restarting the cycle.
Ultimately, Forest Beyond Fear transforms fear into understanding. It acts as a portal for re-learning coexistence, shifting from controlling the forest to moving with it, where humans become allies in the ongoing life of the land.
Student Name: Wang Muqing
Tutor: Gu Tiantong
Over the decades, Coney Island’s shoreline has been continuously reshaped-initial large-scale reclamation replaced the mangrove-dominated, tide-responsive natural coast with rigid artificial boundaries of concrete seawalls. Traditional land reclamation relies heavily on imported sand and local hill excavation, using dredged sediment and foreign aggregates to harden the coastline into rigid, immovable concrete embankments. While this approach allowed rapid land expansion, it disrupted natural sediment transport, erased intertidal habitats, and left shorelines more vulnerable to sea-level rise. As sand resources become increasingly scarce and expensive, the environmental and economic sustainability of this model are being seriously questioned.
This project asks: What if we let the tides lead? What if we open a dialogue with water, sediment, and vegetation? What truly matters now is not how to control nature, but how humans can become part of its process-shaping the coast together with tides, sediment, and time. This project proposes an alternative—a nature-based reclamation srategy in which tidal forces carry sediment while human design guides its movement and deposition, allowing the shoreline to grow and transform over time.
Phase 1 ：Instead of building large, impermeable seawalls, low offshore structures are placed near the breaking waves. These structures dissipate wave energy, allowing sand carried by the sea to gradually settle and form tombolos—curved sandy extensions that redefine the coastline. Mangroves, as native species, stabilize the sediment, reduce erosion, and absorb wave energy through their intricate root systems.
Phase 2 ：As tides and vegetation interact, the shoreline becomes more stable, with beaches and mangrove belts interwoven. The gradual rise of the land and the shifting water depth push mangroves to expand outward, while older mangroves near human zones decay naturally and are replaced by other species, creating transitional spaces for human access and recreation.
Phase 3 ：Over time, the earlier-formed land evolves into stable terrain, while new mangrove buffers continue to grow outward, forming a dynamic and living shoreline. Human and ecological systems coexist and evolve together, merging natural sedimentary processes with intentional design. Through this ongoing interaction, the shoreline remains resilient and continuously renewed by both nature and human guidance.
The sea is never still. Its tides pull sand from one place, release it in another, reshaping the edge of land with each rise and fall. Yet for decades, Singapore’s reclamation projects have sought to silence this movement-straightening shorelines with walls of sand and stone, fixing the coast into rigid lines. The result is a boundary that resists change, but also resists life relations.
The axonometric drawing illustrates the sediment transport and deposition process, revealing how sand gradually accumulates behind the offshore structures.
Student Name: Wu Han
Tutor: Victoria Jane Marshall
My project, entitled Caring Portal transforms the sloping area, parking lots, and building edges of a reserve site in Novena Rise Park in Singapore into an enclosed garden of care. Historically, the reserve site transitioned from a cemetery to a slope surrounded by medical buildings. Past “cleaning” efforts created a clean, manageable space but also made it marginalized and neglected, lacking potential for rest and care. According to Ivanova (2016), in Care in Place, care keeps a place alive and connected to everyday life. Following a more-than-human approach, I add plants and animals into the mix. Surrounded by medical buildings, the site’s quiet and enclosed setting allows it to be reimagined as a place for care. In contrast to the city’s fast and active rhythm along the North–South Corridor - a green infrastructure promoting efficiency and mobility - the garden offers a slower, caring pace. Based on this “fast and slow” relationship, I propose my fifth nature as a transformation of site relations that prioritizes care. My spatial strategy is garden-as-portal, where the rhythms of plants, animals and people meet, allowing care to unfold as a multispecies relation. My portal expands care from medical practices to daily interactions, enabling neglected sites, such as this, to regain social importance, cultural meaning, and ecological importance, especially in supporting plant growth, renewal and small habitats on this site.
My enclosed garden has four spaces: a gate, a corridor, a center, and an edge. First, the gate at the building’s entrance separates the garden from the traffic and commuters along the North–South Corridor. Passing through, visitors slow their pace and enter a quieter space. Second, I transform the parking lot into a care corridor, providing shaded seating that supports rest and interaction among patients, doctors, and residents. Third, the slope’s flat area utilizes existing trees to create a restful, enclosed center for sensory experience. The final edge removes fences to reconnect the slope with the park. This transition promotes the flow from a restful care garden to an active park, transforming isolation into connection while acknowledging the different roles of the adjacent public spaces.
In the care corridor and the center, layered planting and seating create a rich care experience and a multispecies world. The planting strategy is based on tree age - older trees are preserved in the center, while younger trees are distributed outwards. This layering creates varying canopy heights and microclimates, forming transitional spaces from shady to bright areas, reflecting concern for plant growth and time. Additionally, diverse seating caters to varied user needs, including animals and plants. These rest areas encourage habitat formation as well as inviting people to stay, observe, and interact, turning care from a routine service into a shared, daily experience.
Student Name: Lee Lu Yi
Tutor: Lehana Guo
This project reprograms human participation within the environment, redefining development as a collective metabolism shared between human and nonhuman systems. Together with the adjacent Sembawang Park, Eagle’s Point endures as one of the last natural beaches in Singapore. More than just a fishing zone for humans, the shore sustains a network of terrestrial, intertidal and microscopic communities, interconnected by temporal rhythms of shifting tides and monsoons.
By connecting the functional systems of the intertidal participants, the project repositions the zone as an organism, where human and nonhuman actors form interdependent networks that sustain its metabolism. Prescribing agency to nonhumans and magnifying their processes serves to dampen anthropocentric ideals that privilege human dominance in national planning.
The Anatomy unfolds through various bodily systems magnified by a skeletal system built from fishing gear. Framed as an instructions manual for fishermen, the project transforms ghost nets into intertidal infrastructure by inviting fishermen to anchor unwanted seine and cast nets onto fixed poles along the shore. These structures form the stable framework that hosts the different systems of the organism:
A. Skeletal system: formed by abandoned fishing gear that lend structure to the body.
B. Circulatory system: shifting tides circulate nutrients and sediments between ocean and shore.
C. Digestive system: bivalves and mussels growing on thick seine nets ingest and depurate microbes.
D. Waste recycling system: bacterial waste attach to plankton, seaweed and algae, which are then consumed by detritivores; thin cast nets accumulate and trap this suspended matter.
E. Nutrient regeneration system: concave pockets formed by footpaths of foragers trap debris, forming microhabitats where bacteria decompose organic material and release nutrients.
F. Immune system: alternating sunlight and shade regulate UV exposure across the sand, sterilising exposed bacteria.
As the organism assembles, we observe its responses to the surrounding environment through shifting patterns of the monsoon, tide, sun and moon, revealing the temporality of the landscape as a living pulse.
As state policies continue to write and rewrite boundaries between the human and nonhuman, The Anatomy of the Intertidal dissolves this dichotomy, uncovering the hidden networks that binds species, materials and systems together. It positions the human not as the centre, but as one organ within a larger ecological body, where national development is understood as an ecological process rather than a human endeavour.
Projects:
1.Arya Muthukumar – Re-Rooting Orchids
2.Boddapati Krishna Sri – Selective Control
3.Calyn Chia Xin Mei– Council of Gardens
4.Ding Hao – Cultivating a Secondary Forest
5.Danea – Celebrating Untidiness
6.Soh Seh Ting – Making Decay Visible
7.Emily Jing Jiaxin– Pigeonhood
8.Su Ju Hui – Spontaneous Assemblage
9.Wang Lu – Siglap Forum
10.Yu Yun – The Growing Ground
11.Wu Yilin – The Tamarind Trail
12.Wu Qiqi – The Garden of the Nightwalker
13.Zhou Chenyang – Kebun Bahru Bird Singing Union
This chapter examines the enclosed garden as a selective frame through which the larger landscape is not simply viewed, but critically distilled, interpreted, and reconstituted. Within the lens of fifth nature, these gardens operate through the extraction of a singular element—ecological, cultural, or temporal—from the site, which is then amplified and multiplied to generate spatial transformation, allowing a fragment to stand in for, and reframe, the whole.
Projects such as Selective Control, Spontaneous Assemblage , and Growing Ground engage closely with site-specific ecological systems—waterways, vegetation networks, and tidal dynamics—using these as primary generators of design. Through processes of scaling, repetition, and abstraction, these elements are rearticulated within the enclosed garden, transforming functional systems into spatial and experiential constructs.
In contrast, other projects foreground collective memory as a critical fragment of fifth nature. Works such as Council of Gardens, Cultivating a Secondary Forest , and The Tamarind Trail draw upon shared histories and social narratives embedded within the site. While memory represents only a partial reading of place, it is mobilised here as a generative force—one that invites imagination and reconstitutes a sense of community through spatial practice.
A further group of projects turns to absence as a point of departure, engaging with what is no longer visible yet remains embedded within the landscape. Making Decay Visible traces the imprint of a lost stream, using its erasure as both a spatial framework and a metaphor for cycles of growth and decay. Similarly, Re-Rooting Orchids reflects on the decline of the nursery as a social and educational institution, reimagining the dispersed culture of domestic gardening as a hybrid public–private landscape. In these works, the enclosed garden becomes a site where absence is rendered present, and where lost or overlooked conditions are reactivated as drivers of design.
Together, these projects position fifth nature as a practice of selection and amplification— where fragments of reality are not diminished by their partiality, but gain significance through their capacity to reshape how landscape is perceived and inhabited.
Student Name: Arya Muthukumar
Tutor: Tham Wai Hon
In Singapore, domestic gardening (Zeroth Nature) has long played a quiet yet integral role in shaping social and ecological relationships. Once, potted plants were living companions that demanded patience and reciprocity, fostering neighbourly exchanges and embodied forms of responsibility. However, this culture of care has gradually eroded. Today, domestic gardening has become increasingly superficial, valuing plants as aesthetic possessions rather than living companions. My Fifth Nature argues that this shift from cultivation to consumption stems from the diminished presence of the nursery as a social and educational institution within residential neighbourhoods, such as with Katong Flower Shop in Bedok.
Nestled within Bedok South Neighbourhood Park, ReRooting Orchids responds to this condition by reimagining Singapore’s landscape of potted plants as a public-private nursery garden, a fusion of this Zeroth Nature landscape in residential and commercial spheres. Rooted in the legacy of Singapore’s pioneering orchid industry, the project positions orchid propagation as the symbolic and spatial core of a renewed domestic gardening culture, transforming its act from one of ownership to stewardship. As a shared site of learning and mutual care, the public space for orchid propagation brings residential and nursery gardeners together. This collective visibility of nurturing fosters relationships and sparks a renewed sense of community rooted in everyday gardening.
The design centres on a dual trellis system that interweaves community and commerce. The lower residential trellises provide an open, climate-suited structure for orchid growth. This institutionalised space - an extension of their domestic space - enables them to keep and cultivate their orchids permanently in optimal conditions, fostering neighbourly interaction and shared stewardship. Suspended above, the commercial trellises support the nursery’s propagation work, strengthening the nursery garden’s resilience, while creating reciprocal community involvement through a coupon system to participate in garden programmes. The Plant Library, Plant Exchange and Adoption Zone, and the Plant Clinic democratise cultivation through accessible learning, sharing, and caring. Altogether, these elements of this nursery garden form a nested ecology of care, with the orchid as the primary pedagogical tool.
Altogether, Re-Rooting Orchids envisions a new model for nursery gardens within Singapore’s neighbourhoods that celebrate everyday gardening as a shared practice of care and responsibility. It redefines the nursery as a social infrastructure for cultivating stewardship and ecological literacy. Moreover, it positions orchid propagation as the nucleus of a community-driven nursery-garden ecosystem, reaffirming the orchid’s enduring role as a cultural and ecological emblem of reciprocity.
Student Name: Boddapati Krishna Sri
Tutor: Gu Tiantong
Fifth Nature examines how selectively managed mowed sites in Singapore can be transformed through an ecological, processbased design. The project studies site terrain, hydrology, water flow, and existing native and non-native but naturalized vegetation to understand how these living systems can guide site transformation when their ecological roles and adaptive capacities are recognized. Instead of viewing such areas as unused or ecologically passive, the proposal reframes them as spaces capable of improving soil health and supporting biodiversity. Over time, these systems weave themselves into the landscape, forming a naturally evolving garden shaped by minimal but intentional human intervention. By carefully analyzing existing vegetation patterns and natural water movements, the approach enables wetlands to emerge that filter and purify water, strengthen habitat quality, inviting birds and humans partially and enhance site ecology. By allowing natural processes to unfold with gentle and informed guidance, Fifth Nature envisions a landscape that gradually blurs the boundary between designed and naturally evolving environments.
Through careful analysis of the site’s terrain and watershed patterns, it was observed that wetlands could naturally evolve with minimal human intervention, guided by limited cut-and-fill processes. Existing vegetation was studied to understand each species’ ecological role, allowing plants to be classified for retention or removal. New species, including wetland vegetation, were introduced according to hydrology and water-flow patterns, while naturally resilient vegetation requiring minimal maintenance was prioritized. Along the waterline, existing soil-stabilizing plants and additional natives were proposed to create one level of enclosure by dense vegetation and Bio-swales are integrated to collect and purify runoff, complementing the site’s existing enclosure of water and vegetation to establish a second level of enclosed boundary.
In the second approach, the site vegetation is allowed to grow naturally, enabling resident and nesting birds to gradually establish themselves. As bird presence increases, their movement patterns and behavioral cues can be studied to design accordingly. Over time, this understanding supports the creation of learning that respects how birds perceive and occupy space. Ground-level bird hides camouflaged within vegetation, discreet observation points, and purpose-designed nesting structures allow humans to observe without disturbing habitat functions. Through this process, the landscape becomes both a refuge for wildlife and a setting where people learn from their behaviors unfolding within the enclosed garden.
In sum, Fifth Nature envisions an enclosed garden where vegetation, birds, and other organisms coexist and improves the site’s biodiversity. Through selective control of natural dynamics, space evolves as a living system. Humans are partially invited in, fostering closer observation and deeper learning from nature’s behavior.
This project explores how everyday actions quietly shape collective landscapes, challenging the notion that public spaces are solely defined through top-down design. In Bedok, the in-between spaces of HDB estates show how residents negotiate shared environments through informal gestures like caring for potted plants, assembling bonsai displays, or leaving personal items in corridors. These actions subtly claim ownership and reveal how spatial agency arises through daily interactions, mutual understandings, and unspoken rules of coexistence. Building from this, the speculative narrative “The Council of Gardens” imagines a future where grassroots agency becomes a foundation for collective decision-making. The project explores how small but intentional acts like planting, arranging, modifying synthesize into forms of shared governance. Through an open circular ground and evolving garden rings, the design becomes a metaphor for civic participation rooted in reciprocity, dialogue, and shared responsibility.
An open circular deck designed as a spatial symbol of equality and collective participation serves as a nonhierarchical platform . Without a front, back, or elevated position, the circle removes hierarchy and establishes a democratic ground for gathering, discussion, and shared decision-making. It serves as the starting point of the evolving garden, inviting users to stand, sit, meet, and act on equal terms. The form encourages fluid negotiation, positioning the deck as a civic stage where agency is distributed rather than imposed. This spatial neutrality becomes the foundation for cooperative growth and shared authorship of the surrounding landscape.
This strategy explores three distinct planting modes derived from the behaviours of the three narrative figures, each representing a different way of caring for and shaping space. Together, they illustrate how diverse forms of agency can coexist and complement one another. As users add plants, objects, or paths inspired by these modes, the garden grows outward in new rings that reinterpret the initial patterns. This creates a living landscape record of participation, where ecological and social growth unfold through continuous contributions from the community.
In sum, the project speaks to landscape as a dynamic, participatory process shaped by everyday agency and shared decision-making. It highlights how environments evolve through small acts of care and collaboration, and encourages people to move beyond passive observation or complaint and to recognise their individual capacity to act and influence, to be more politically engaged in their environment.
The landscape transforms over time, shaped by the collective decision made by the council. It also explores the possibility of an evolving garden, expanding out of the intially defined edges.
EDIBLES
ORNAMENTAL
ECOLOGICAL
MATERIALS THRESHOLD
BRICKS AND WOODEN BOARDS
Student
Name: Ding Hao
Tutor:
Victoria Jane Marshall
This project envisions the York Hill secondary forest in Singapore as a test ground for forest cultivation, broadly defined. Rather than a wasteland awaiting demolition, this fifty-year-old forest is re-imagined as a vegetative space where public life, collective memory, and ecological growth continually shape one another. The diverse elements of the forest are intricately entangled, with human presence already integral to its ecology. As more-than-human perspectives increasingly recognize such complex inter dependencies, people must redefine their role and responsibility within situated urban natures. The project investigates how enclosed garden design can reveal, organize and sustain the future forest. In so doing, I view design as a process of translation between the cultivation of urban nature practices and cultural meaning.
As with any act of co-creation, the fifty-year-old, York Hill forest is dynamic over time, with no permanent solution. Therefore, a flexible framework is needed to facilitate adjustments and cope with unpredictable future changes.
The design framework unfolds through a pathway which connects three parts of the forest. The path way is an indexed space that based on the forest gaps found in my fieldwork. In my project, I propose that my pathway be further cleared for people to access this previously inaccessible forest. The enclosed garden is marked with tags and paint to define its shape. The pathway serves three key functions. First, it guides people into the forest interior, enabling encounters that may later support ecological monitoring, art installations, or other urban-nature activities. Second, it introduces a light human order that legitimizes subtle interventions by everyday visitors and nearby students, while still aligning with the forest’s own rhythms. Third, it creates spaces where people may cut, rearrange, and use vegetation for small, hand-made constructions—activities usually discouraged in Singapore but valuable as experimental, plant-based practices.
Three fieldwork sites from different parts of the forest were selected to illustrate how the design adapts to specific conditions. A dark, decomposing area with many fallen trees invites ground-level markings and learning about decay. A dense zone of shrubs and vines benefits from a guided path for movement, insect observation, and vine removal. A relatively open area near the school is suited as a nursery or for basic educational use.
Overall, the York Hill project positions the enclosed garden as a mediator of nature cultures rather than an instrument of repair or erasure. Through the interplay of spatial intervention, ecological observation, and civic practice, the garden afford space for novel ideas and needed practices of cultivation. It can let a piece of isolated secondary forest, considered to have low ecological value, gain vitality and a better future through connection.
Student Name: Danea Binte Mohamad Khalid
Tutor:
Gu Tiantong
Sengkang is a neighbourhood where parks, gardens, and recreational green spaces are generously distributed, offering residents a landscape that feels open, verdant, and accessible. Yet, hidden within this orderly network of greenery lies a long-abandoned community garden— an unusual pocket of wild growth that has continued to thrive despite years of neglect. Plants spill over cracked brick planter boxes, creepers wrap themselves around rusting fences, and self-seeded greenery fills every available gap. In Singapore, where community gardens are usually governed by strict maintenance guidelines and tidy arrangements, such naturally evolving spaces are extremely rare. This project seeks to preserve the beauty of this organic unruliness by concealing it within a familiar layer of Singapore’s streetscape planting vocabulary, allowing it to exist quietly while remaining visually integrated with its surroundings.
This project begins with a light clearing and planting a dense perimeter of common streetscape plants. Planting palette includes species frequently seen along roadsides and public pathways, or plants that form a green buffer around the space. Unlike the linear, uniform layouts seen in typical community gardens, the new design will introduce curving pathways and retain selected remnants of the original hardscape, such as broken planter boxes and weathered fencing. The garden will be fully open to the public, encouraging casual exploration rather than restricting entry to a designated group of gardeners.
Within the site, planting beds will be intentionally left empty, inviting residents to contribute freely by planting what they wish. The garden will also serve as a sanctuary for unwanted household plants, offering them a final chance to take root. Design elements, including the fencing and modular planting structures, are tailored to accommodate everyday supermarket-sold plants such as orchids, allowing even novice gardeners to participate. Over time, the space will become a living, shifting tapestry created by the community and shaped by natural forces. Some plants may flourish, supported by favourable conditions, while others may gradually disappear and contribute to the garden’s evolving identity.
Ultimately, this project reimagines the community garden by embracing informality, spontaneity, and untidiness. It challenges the predictable order and rigid structure typical of Singapore’s gardening spaces, celebrating instead the value of untidiness and ecological unpredictability. Through this approach, the garden becomes not only a shared communal space but also a testament to the beauty that emerges when nature is allowed to lead.
As the space embrace informality, spontaneity, and untidiness, it has a facade that conceals it to make it more acceptable according to Singapore green spaces’ standards and blend in with the surroundings.
Student
Name:
Soh Seh Ting
Tutor:
Victoria Jane Marshall
Making Decay Visible begins with the Orh Kio Tau Bridge in Bukit Ho Swee, one of the few remaining traces of colonial landscape infrastructure in my study area. Built around 1920 as both bridge and water pipe, it once crossed a swampy stream that has since been filled, buried, and levelled. Today, this former stream lies beneath buildings and, beneath manicured lawn. Under this grassy surface rests compacted soil and construction debris, quiet evidence of Singapore’s long history of reshaping land through demolition and reclamation. This buried stream becomes both site and metaphor: beneath every ordered landscape lies a living archive of ecological and cultural transformation.
My enclosed garden responds to the City in Nature vision, which recalls an imagined pre-social “tropical nature” while producing two contrasting modes of cultivation: first, planting practices (planned, trimmed, and maintained landscapes for ‘native’ biodiversity), and second, rewilding practices (spaces left to grow freely, also for ‘native’ biodiversity). The enclosed garden occupies a space between these two modes. Shaped by both human and nonhuman forces, it adapts through cycles of growth and decay without collapsing into disorder. Rather than reproducing an image of “original nature,” it reimagines our nature cultures through ongoing negotiation.
Visitors enter through a linear grid of Rain Trees, an echo of the Garden City’s ordered landscapes. Moving inward, the ground shifts from grass to sand to gravel, marking a gradual release of control. This sensory transition invites contact with soil, roots, and the layered materiality hidden beneath the uniform lawn.
Inside the garden, decaying Rain Tree logs, soil mounds, and bare patches of lawn form a dynamic mosaic. A caretaker manages decay, replacing the traditional act of planting. After periodic pruning, new logs are introduced or older logs repositioned. Over time, some logs decompose beyond movement, merging into the ground. The caretaker may re-seed or replace bare patches while allowing spontaneous plants to emerge elsewhere. In certain areas, Hügelkultur-inspired mounds (constructed from decaying wood to enrich soil) are formed, making decomposition three-dimensional and spatially legible. These interventions create a living ground and support a shift in the cultural meaning of cultivation. The caretaker becomes a choreographer of relations, making-with plants rather than controlling them.
People exit along a path that ends in loose gravel. Footsteps and rainfall shift its surface, recording each interaction. Change becomes visible - compacted one day, soft and sprouting the next.
Student Name: Emily Jing Jiaxin
Tutor: Janica Tung
Pigeonhood is a new spatial and ecological framework for humane pigeon management within Singapore’s public housing estates. Instead of relying on the existing complaint-driven system—where pest management contractors capture pigeons, remove them from their habitat, and transport them off-site for sterilization or euthanasia—this Fifth Nature model reframes pigeons not as pests, but as cohabitants sharing the same lived environment as residents. The current cycle is fundamentally unsustainable: it generates public resentment, causes stress to the animals, and repeatedly resets the ecological balance without addressing root behaviors or community relationships.
The selected site demonstrates a different behavioral reality. Residents—particularly the elderly—regularly feed pigeons at predictable locations, offer railings for them to perch on, and maintain informal routines of care. These unplanned interactions have already shaped a microecosystem within the estate. Instead of disregarding this behaviour, the design incorporates it as a functional component of a more controlled management system.
The proposed process begins with resident volunteers, who conduct controlled feeding within designated outdoor stations. These stations regulate timing, food quantity, and hygiene, reducing random feeding across the estate. As pigeons become accustomed to space, feeding points are gradually reduced and shifted towards the void decks, encouraging flocking within a safe, managed boundary.
Once pigeons begin nesting within these structures, onsite surgical sterilization is performed by veterinarians from nearby clinics—allowing humane control without relocation of trauma. After sterilization, pigeons enter a care phase, where volunteers assist in monitoring health, cleaning, and socializing the birds. Some pigeons may even be adopted as companion pets, integrated into rooftop aviaries, or used in therapeutic programmes for elderly residents, expanding the human–animal bond beyond feeding.
In conclusion, Pigeonhood converts the HDB void deck and underutilized gardens into a purpose-built engine for pigeon regulation. Its sequence—feeding, nesting, sterilization, post-care—locks pigeon activity into a controlled loop, guiding residents and wildlife through a managed spatial script. By tightening spatial boundaries and mobilizing resident participation, Pigeonhood introduces a disciplined method of population control that finally breaks the cycle of capture and culling.
Student Name: Su Juhui
This project reinterprets the closed garden as a space defined by emotions and boundaries. The site is located on the grassland adjacent to the foreign workers’ dormitory, and it is a place where foreign workers gather on a daily basis. The design uses the rhythm of time, spatial density, and bamboo structures to make the abstract emotion of belonging concrete in the space.
The site is located on a narrow grassland outside the dormitory for foreign workers. After clearing the original vegetation, this area gradually became an informal gathering place for migrant workers. Workers would stay, rest, gather and carry out activities here, forming a recognizable daily usage pattern. At the same time, birds, insects and small mammals moved along the edge vegetation, constituting an ecological presence that coexists with and interacts with human use.
Strategy A - Time Fragmentation Mapping: Time Fragmentation Mapping adopts the enclosed garden design philosophy by analyzing human and non-human activities across three time periods: morning, afternoon, and evening. This reveals high-density, overlapping zones, highlighting areas perceived as “home-like” and moments of interaction. This approach emphasizes temporal rhythms and spatial overlaps, offering insights into when and where shared use holds greatest significance.
Strategy B - Derived from the temporal rhythm of human space: The daily sitting, standing, gathering, lying down and moving behaviors of the workers are regarded as the dominant rhythm of the site. Through the analysis of the time, scale and density of these behaviors, the ground-buried holes form different density spatial grids, suggesting potential activity patterns. Using traditional bamboo framework familiar to the migrant workers, to create a lightweight, movable and reusable scaffolding structure is constructed, allowing workers to use it spontaneously according to their own needs. The form of the space is not pre-fixed but is constantly “updated” through the immediate actions of the users, thus forming a dynamic enclosed garden based on the daily rhythm.
Strategy C - Ecological Patches for Spontaneous Growing Vegetation: By utilizing soil areas and climbing structures to guide the natural growth of plants in the low-usage zones. It evolves flexibly through the spontaneous activities of nonhuman workers, and the ecosystem can naturally form in the gaps left by human activities.
In summary, this project defines a closed garden as a dynamic space that is jointly formed by human spontaneous activities and non-human self-growth. It makes “enclosure” a process that is constantly being updated and reshaped. Thus, it proposes a landscape production method based on temporality, adaptability, and multi-species coexistence.
Student
Wang Lu
Tutor: Wai Hon
In Singapore’s Siglap estate, a patch of mown slope beside a public carpark and private condominiums become the spatial design site. Thus, inspired by the “desire line,” these everyday plantings become a tool of spatial agency, formed along the terrain’s contours, and are reframed as a community-led infrastructure in which movement and cultivation generate space rather than top-down planning. As desired paths expand while following the terrain contours, they morph into a co-produced infrastructure, a shared system balancing solitude and community. Over time, this patch of land transforms into a self-organised allotment garden, cultivated through care, resistance, and adaptive spatial usage.
A diagonal desired path initially links the northern car park to the southern lawn, but as residents respond collectively, the path evolves. It widens, shifts, or branches according to traffic patterns, garden growth, or site-specific needs. Modular planter boxes (ranging from 10 x 2.5 m to 2.5 × 1 m) are positioned along contours to support circulation and soil protection. At the car park boundary, civic thresholds emerge; the expanded car park and public sports facilities emphasise the protesting, declaring for no redevelopment. Shell and DBS Treasures supported the early stages of infrastructure, including an enclosed educational garden shed, compost, recycling, and a tool shed. The threshold, Siglap FORUM, educates the public about the recent increase in allotment gardens and the history of Siglap. The hub will be used for event hosting and public sports activities in the next 16 years. When the allotment garden started to decrease due to the rise of public housing reserved for future HDB development, the temporary fifth nature allotment garden will decrease in scale and size. Near the lowest slope, water-retention ponds help manage stormwater, recycle irrigation, and enhance the biodiversity of adjacent sports fields.
In sum, the Fifth Nature manifests as a form of cultivated resistance, where adaptive gardens become living infrastructures for resistance, coexist with humans and more-than-human species in ecology.
Student Name: Yu Yun
Tutor: Gu Tiantong
This project transforms the existing beach in northern Singapore into a breathing, co-producing system that grows through time. Coney Island’s beach is a vibrant system includes subtidal zone, intertidal zone, supratidal zone, and the dune zone, formed by reclamation, maintained by human, shaped by human and non-human, visible and invisible actors. However, the upper supratidal zone and the dune area are now dense with Casuarina trees and unmanaged growth towards the supratidal zone, restricts the growth of the beach. The project reinterprets this condition as a chance to modify human and non-human processes.
The first step clears selected overgrown vegetation in the supratidal and dune zones, mainly removing Casuarina trees. Nearly 2,000 Casuarina trees grow in Coney Island, forming a dense woodland that was originally planted as a coastal windbreak and sand-fixing barrier but now has become too dense, limiting the natural movement of sand and reducing the space for other species. The selective removal action re-open the space for beach development— allowing the system to breathe again instead of remaining constrained. Along the upper intertidal zone, a line of timber stakes is installed. These stakes gradually trap sand and mark the shifting line of accumulation as the tides rise and fall, making the previously invisible process of beach change visible. As sand continues to build up, the intertidal zone is slowly pushed seaward, widening the entire beach system and creating more space for different actors within it. The beach becomes enclosed by the forest on land and the tide at sea.
The logs from Preparation are reused to form a wooden access placed along the boundary between the supratidal zone and dune zone. The log walkway provides human an access toward different co-produce activities such as beachcombing, a light participatory activity that gently stirs sediment and promotes material exchange. Over time, the logs sink and decompose into the system, enriching the sand with organic nutrients while continuing to trap sediment and sand for beach growing. Gradually, they disappear into the beach ecosystem.
In sum, this project recreates the beach as a living, selfenclosed system. It shows how humans can participate in beach growing through care, observation, and leisure. The beach becomes an enclosed world, an evolving interface where both human and non-human agents co-create new ground over time.
Student Name: Wu Yilin
Tutor: Gu Tiantong
At the heart of the Hougang HDB estate stands a heritage-listed tamarind tree, an orchard tree from the early 20th century once cultivated by Chinese and Eurasian residents who lived in nearby villages. By 1976, the orchards had vanished, transformed into Surin Avenue Neighbourhood Park, while the houses of the villages were replaced by HDB. This solitary old tamarind tree now stands as a silent witness to Hougang’s changing landscape and community. Interviews with multi-ethnic residents reveal that people still hold collective memories before the HDB was built—when neighbors worked together and children played among the orchard trees—and of this tamarind tree. Interviews recalled, “If the fruit fell under the tree, we were allowed to take it home and eat. We often pick fruit from ‘Uncle Tamarind Tree’ to soak in water and drink.” They also described an old orchard path that once extended from the tamarind tree, connecting houses, fields, and fruit groves. Although the path has disappeared, its original direction still subtly aligns with the site’s everyday layer. This project takes the tamarind tree as a string to connect past, present, and future collective memories. The goal is to uncover hidden communities’ collective memories while generating new shared experiences with trees—what I define as the Fifth Nature.
By analyzing Memorial Layer& Everyday Layer, we can identify areas with strong memory but weak present use, areas with weak memory but strong present use, and areas where both overlap. This leads to my two design strategies.
In Strategy One, the current hard paving—an outcome of postindependence modernization—not only restricts the tree’s roots but also obscures collective memories. By removing the hardened surface and reintroducing the plant species most vividly remembered by residents, the design restores the soil conditions beneath the tamarind tree and evokes memories of past landscapes for the community.
In Strategy Two, the reconstructed “old orchard path route” does not attempt to go back to the past; instead, it uses fruit trees, fragrant plants, and touchable vegetation to create new shared moments along the paths residents walk every day.
In this project, the Enclosed Garden is an open, psychological space around the heritage tamarind tree, where strong memory and strong present use converge. Past and present connect, and residents rediscover collective memories while creating new shared experiences.
Heritage-listed tamarind tree Tree species planted after 1976
Step 1: Remove paving to uncover roots and hidden community’s collective memory
Step 2: Plant orchard species to evoke memories of past landscapes
Student Name: Wu Yilin
Unintentionally traversing the trees
A brief pause
Interaction with the tamarind tree
Student Name: Wu Qiqi
Tutor: Lehana Guo
In modern cities, the night is rarely dark anymore. Streetlights, billboards, and illuminated façades push back the shadows, making darkness feel out of place. Artificial light has become so common that it now disrupts the behavior of nocturnal animals, affecting how they move, feed, and reproduce, and slowly disrupting the balance of the night.
In Singapore’s HDB estates, this condition is readily apparent. At night, light levels often stay above 20 lux. Only the drains, building corners, and thick vegetation still hold small patches of shadow, where nocturnal animals can find brief shelter. The site in Woodlands was once covered by forest and wetland, home to the native tree frog Polypedates leucomystax. As housing expanded and lighting spread, wetlands were drained and trees became scarce. Tree frogs are now rarely seen in this area. Their decline suggests how urban light may have changed the way the night functions as an ecological space.
This project begins from that silence. The tree frog is not chosen as a symbol of conservation, but as a way to study how light, sound, and humidity shape the kind of life that can exist after dark. Its needs—moisture, shade, and space for calling—reveal the hidden structures of an environment built mainly for human sight. Instead of restoring a lost habitat, the project asks how these conditions might This project begins from that silence. The tree frog is not chosen as a symbol of conservation, but as a way to study how light, sound, and humidity shape the kind of life that can exist after dark. quietly return within the bright order of the HDB estate.
Two strategies shape the design. The first, Designing with Darkness, treats light as something to be softened and guided rather than removed. Landforms, dense planting, and textured ground absorb or scatter stray illumination, creating zones where brightness drops below 5 lux. Reflections from water, moonlight, and night-blooming plants create a slow rhythm of light and shadow, replacing visibility with atmosphere.
The second, Nocturnal Ecologies, reorganizes the site’s drainage edges and vegetation to form moist, shaded structures. Shallow wetlands, moss beds, and low shrubs offer space for insects and amphibians to feed and rest, creating a loose network of dim, active zones. These places are designed to support the quieter rhythms of other species that still move through the city unseen.
The Garden of the Night Walker invites us to look again at urban night—not as a blank space to be illuminated, but as a living condition shared between light and darkness.
Along the drainage channel, large-leaf species such as Colocasia esculenta increase ground humidity and generate shade pockets. These darker zones provide safe resting and movement areas for frogs, shielding them from exposure to artificial light.
Flowering and nectarproducing plants (e.g., Hibiscus tiliaceus, Lygodium spp.) encourage night-flying insects. These species contribute to the food chain of the garden’s nocturnal residents, including frogs, bats, and other small animals.
Subtle terrain depressions collect rainwater during wet periods, forming temporary ponds. These spaces support amphibian behaviors such as sheltering, foraging, and potentially breeding, without requiring a permanent water feature.
Species within the micro-basins are selected for short-term inundation tolerance—for example, Cyperus spp. and flood-tolerant ferns. They stabilize edges while maintaining moisture that keeps these features ecologically active after rain.
Existing vegetation forms the basis of the low-light areas on the site. Additional shrubs are placed to close gaps where illumination penetrates. This gradually creates longer and more continuous shadow corridors for nocturnal movement across the garden.
Tutor: Gu Tiantong
The Ang Mo Kio area features rich natural and urban landscapes, with abun- dant natural bird resources. The bird-watching culture on this site dates back decades— caged singing birds once served as a bond for community connec- tion. However, over time, the relationship between humans and birds has gradually diverged: some regard birds as tools for profit in competitions, ignor- ing their survival needs; others hold sincere affection but are constrained by the lack of scientific care spaces.
student name:
CHENYANG ZHONG tutor name: TIANTONG GU
The Ang Mo Kio area features rich natural and urban landscapes, with abundant natural bird resources. The bird-watching culture on this site dates back decades—caged singing birds once served as a bond for community connection. However, over time, the relationship between humans and birds has gradually diverged: some regard birds as tools for profit in competitions, ignoring their survival needs; others hold sincere affection but are constrained by the lack of scientific care spaces.
The core issue with the existing site is that it fails to meet the refined needs of caged birds for temperature, ventilation, and light, while also overlooking the ecological interactions between caged and wild birds.
Based on this, the design centers on balancing the needs of both caged and wild birds. It re-plans vertical and horizontal bird-hanging spaces around caged birds’ preferences for temperature and wind, supported by a Bird-Hang- ing Space Guidebook. Leveraging the east side’s high thermal comfort and the dominance of easterly winds, it integrates plant buffer zones to mediate interactions between the two bird groups, ultimately turning the space into a medium that balances instrumental utilization, ecological care, and cross-spe- cies coexistence. Through field observations of wild birds’ habitat trajectories and vegetation dis- tribution patterns on the original site, potential interactions between wild birds and caged birds (such as shama and merbok) are analyzed. Accordingly, plant buffer zones (Duranta erecta hedges, spiraea) are established between their activity areas, avoiding direct interference while maintaining ecological con- nections via vegetation density gradients, allowing the artificial space to ac- commodate the survival logic of both wild and caged birds.
The core issue with the existing site is that it fails to meet the refined needs of caged birds for temperature, ventilation, and light, while also overlooking the ecological interactions between caged and wild birds.
Spilopelia chinensis
Yunngipicus moluccensis
Acridotheres javanicus
Lanius cristatus shama (JUN)
& jambul
puteh (JUN)
Based on this, the design centers on balancing the needs of both caged and wild birds. It re-plans vertical and horizontal bird-hanging spaces around caged birds’ preferences for temperature and wind, supported by a Bird-Hanging Space Guidebook. Leveraging the east side’s high thermal comfort and the dominance of easterly winds, it integrates plant buffer zones to mediate interactions between the two bird groups, ultimately turning the space into a medium that balances instrumental utilization, ecological care, and cross-species coexistence.
Through field observations of wild birds’ habitat trajectories and vegetation distribution patterns on the original site, potential interactions between wild birds and caged birds (such as shama and merbok) are analyzed. Accordingly, plant buffer zones (Duranta erecta hedges, spiraea) are established between their activity areas, avoiding direct interference while maintaining ecological connections via vegetation density gradients, allowing the artificial space to accommodate the survival logic of both wild and caged birds.
The design includes three-tiered upper and lower platform corridors—3m, 6m, and 5m high—along the mountain slope from north to south: shama (which prefers sunlight yet needs shade) are hung under the 3m northern platform; the 6m middle platform has hollowed-out sections to let in light, covered with climbing vines for merbok and jambul, with enclosed areas for shelter on rainy days; mata puteh (favoring dense shade) are placed under the 5m southern platform. Pistacia chinensis and Golden Panda trees run through the plat- forms, their branches used for hanging birds (continuing tradition), with bird-preferred plants grown on upper and lower levels to integrate function and ecology.
The design includes three-tiered upper and lower platform corridors—3m, 6m, and 5m high—along the mountain slope from north to south: shama (which prefers sunlight yet needs shade) are hung under the 3m northern platform; the 6m middle platform has hollowed-out sections to let in light, covered with climbing vines for merbok and jambul, with enclosed areas for shelter on rainy days; mata puteh (favoring dense shade) are placed under the 5m southern platform. Pistacia chinensis and Golden Panda trees run through the platforms, their branches used for hanging birds (continuing tradition), with bird-preferred plants grown on upper and lower levels to integrate function and ecology.
Centered on caged birds’ physiological needs while accommodating wild birds’ survival logic, the design resolves spatial mismatches and cross-species interference through precise zoning of three-tiered upper and lower platform corri- dors, ecological mediation via plant buffers, and functional reuse of native trees.
Centered on caged birds’ physiological needs while accommodating wild birds’ survival logic, the design resolves spatial mismatches and cross-species interference through precise zoning of three-tiered upper and lower platform corridors, ecological mediation via plant buffers, and functional reuse of native trees. It balances instrumental utilization with care for both bird groups, fostering coexistence, ultimately making the space not just a bird habitat but a catalyst for reshaping harmonious human-bird and interspecies relationships.
Projects:
1.Clara Choo Wei Ling – Among Others
2.Maydalene Chee Shi Jia– The Fig Sanctuary
3.Bao Yihan – The Whampoa River and the Afterlife of the Garden City
4.Guo Churui – Where Seeds Ride the Wind
5.Jasmine Eng– Fuelled by Foul
6.Jonald Khaw– Perch City
7.Lee Huei Min – Replacing Replacement
8.Li Jingyao – The Last Sand Barge
9.Lin Keyu – The Consumed Path
10.Liu Yunqi – Let It Flow
11.Ruchira – Sand – Reclaimed
This chapter examines landscape in Singapore as an entanglement of society and nature. Within this condition of fifth nature, the enclosed garden operates as a device of disentanglement—one that separates, frames, and renders legible the otherwise complex interrelations that shape contemporary environments. Through acts of selection and amplification, these gardens do not valorise imbroglios, but transform it into focused spatial experience, allowing specific forces to emerge with clarity.
Projects such as The Whampoa River and the Afterlife of the Garden City, The Fig Sanctuary , and The Consumed Path exemplify this approach by magnifying singular agents—plants, roots, water, and movement—to reveal landscape as a condition of ongoing negotiation. In these works, disentanglement is not an act of isolation alone, but a means of exposing how human and non-human agency continuously shapes and reshapes one another over time.
Similarly, Among Others and Perch City isolate the layer of pest control, bringing into view the often-overlooked networks of dependency, tension, and cohabitation between species within the urban environment. By foregrounding these dynamics, the projects reveal pest management not as a peripheral concern, but as a critical interface where control, coexistence, and conflict are negotiated.
In Sand-Reclaimed and TheLastSandBarge , sand is repositioned from inert material to active agent, shaping territory, memory, and ecological transformation. Through the lens of sand reclamation, these projects disentangle the relationship between development and depletion, exposing the material and geopolitical entanglements embedded within processes of land-making.
Together, the works in this chapter articulate fifth nature as a condition of selective revelation, where disentanglement becomes a method for understanding the complex forces that constitute contemporary landscape.
Tutor: Lehana Guo
Among Others transforms an enclosed garden in the heart of Yishun Central into a portal that redefines our relationship with the species we relentlessly police and call “pests” — rats. It proposes a fifth nature of Co-living, reimagining Singapore’s reserved lawns as habitats that embrace the city’s inevitable entanglement between cleanliness and contamination, control and adaptation.
The project challenges Singapore’s long-standing “clean and green” nature, where the pursuit of sterilised landscapes has bred hostility toward synanthropic life. Our architecture and waste perpetuate rats even as we try to erase them, and evidently, harsh extermination has only bred resilience. Instead of waging war on our creation, Among Others reframes rats as urban citizens, participants in the city’s metabolism with a right to exist and exercise their agency.
The garden functions as a self-regulating ecological loop shaped by rats’ behaviour and their natural predators. Two state-owned lawns form this system: the Nest Zone beside the HDBs and the Food and Predation Zone beside Yishun Pond, together forming one continuous garden.
The Nest Zone consolidates the rats’ dispersed urban presence into a concentrated habitat. Concrete slabs recreate familiar burrowing conditions, while a small cluster of fruiting plants offers an initial lure. To prevent uncontrolled burrowing, the lawn’s perimeter is lined with steel-mesh gabions that extend 1.5 m underground, doubling above ground as seating edges that support existing communal activities such as Getai - a live song stage during the Hungry Ghost Festival. The gabions and slabs follow a grid derived from the adjacent HDB pillars, integrating the garden into the wider urban fabric. Beneath each slab, steel pipes link directly to the site’s drainage network — a route already frequented by rats — guiding their migration toward the next lawn. One-way drainage blockers are also placed at key junctions to ensure rats do not stray beyond the lawns.
The Food and Predation Zone continues this grid, consisting of permanent and temporary gardening plots. Permanent plots grow fruiting plants — sweet potato, papaya, banana — as rats’ primary food source. Temporary resident plots cultivate plants rats avoid, such as mint, chilli, basil, and aloe vera. When a plot rests between leases, it becomes an open clearing, exposing rats to predators. Perching poles built on existing street lamps attract raptors from Yishun Pond Park, completing the predation cycle. The staggered rotation of resident plots ensures these clearings shift over time, preventing habituation.
Ultimately, Among Others replaces eradication with designed Co-living. The enclosed garden becomes a living theatre of shared urban survival.
Student Name: Chee Shi Jia (Maydalene)
Tutor: Wai Hon Tham
Strangler fig trees were once a revered spiritual symbol of protection and longevity. These trees were worshipped for the way their aerial roots grew from the sky towards the ground and were believed to be a bridge between the underworld and our physical world, where time is suspended. Over time, as Singapore grew and developed into the city-state it is today, our continuous need for urban expansion turned us against the strangler fig, making it an adversary of the state. The strangler fig became feared, a symbol of the unruly, unpredictable and untamed side of “nature” that had to be kept under control. In Changi Point, this attitude towards “nature” can be seen not only through the regular maintenance of towering strangler fig trees around the site, but also through the militarystyle fences around long-vacated buildings from the colonial era, regularly maintained and protected against being reclaimed by the natural elements. Changi Point is a space trapped in limbo of progression and preservation, manifested in the constant battle between man and “nature”. These colonial buildings, shells of a bygone era, have earned Changi Point its reputation for being a hotspot for supernatural activities, centering around the infamous old Changi Hospital, located at the top of Hendon Hill. A few strangler fig trees encircle the base of the hill, providing refuge and a sanctuary for those that feed on the fruits they produce all-year round, a habitat for those that take refuge in their network of roots, and possibly those that still believe in its spiritual protective abilities.
The Fig Sanctuary is an enclosed garden around the highest point in Changi Point, Hendon Hill, that empowers strangler fig trees, restoring them to their role as protectors and mediators between our physical and spiritual world, using the trees to enclose a physical and spiritual sanctuary for man and animal and pushing for the role of nature as mediators between all things natural, including the supernatural.
The enclosed sanctuary is created through encouraging the germination and growth of strangler fig seeds on the facades of the colonial buildings by situating jute cloth screens on the walls of Changi Hospital that provide a suitable germination site for the tiny and hardy ficus seeds. Trails of fruiting and flowering shrubs lead birds from the existing strangler fig trees on site up the hill and towards Changi hospital, encouraging these flighted dispersers to bring the ficus seeds past the Changi hospital perimeter fence. Fruiting trees are also planted around the hospital to encourage birds to nest around the area and building. Over time, the strangler fig trees slowly take over the building, creating a spiritual sanctuary for us and a feeding and nesting habitat for birds, where both visitors coexist in a shared space of rest and nourishment. The building slowly disintegrates as the roots of the strangler fig trees encase the walls and ceilings, returning Changi hospital back to “nature”.
Student Name: Bao Yihan
Tutor: Victoria Jane Marshall
The project reimagines a lawn-dominated reserve site surrounded by the Whampoa River, Whampoa Community Club, and the National Kidney Foundation Centre. It is reimagined as a plant-led, resident-led, enclosed garden. I call it a “living collage” and it is a response to the history of the area and the way that nature has been produced here to date. For instance, the Whampoa River was channelised in 1958 and the reserve site was Singapore Improvement Trusts (SIT) first Balestier public housing estates from the 1930s-1960s. Both interventions, which happened during the early Garden City plan, embody an ethics of modern landscape management and control. Water was seen as a problem and thus, it was redesigned to drain quickly and efficiently. Similarly, housing was seen to be a solution to overcrowding and the untidiness of self-built settlements. In both cases, woody plants were used sparingly, and straight lines and hard edges were inscribed. The previously lived, river edge was reformed into two distinct, master planned zones, that of the water zone and that of residential zone. My project embodies a different ethic, that of plant-led entanglements, where water, the home, and self are reinscribed anew. I not only do this with the repurposing of house plants and the agency of the proposed garden club, I also do this with planting plan that intentionally reinterprets Garden City plants for the present. That is this garden is designed to receive or “adopt” unwanted plants long-lived potted plants, (some kept by residents for decades, even up to 40–50 years), and through its soil and human care, they are nurtured to grow bigger and more freely with few straight lines or hard edges.
The enclosed garden is has three agents . The first botanical agent, Bougainvillea, is an interweaving of plants above ground – “web in the sky”. Bougainvillea plants are adopte into the garden, planting a few on each side of the boundary of the garden and then a few elsewhere within the interior of the garden.In time, the Bougainvillea vine will connect these internal and boundary points with a web in the sky. Later, People bring mature and tall plants from their yards, balconies and corridors that have broken the original climbing supports, as well as those that are not enough to grow in the space at the door of their homes, into the garden. As soon as they enter the site, with bougainvillea acting as managers to guide them in their direction.They begin to mingle with the bougainvillea, and eventually they weave the web together.
Secondly, another botanical agent are Plumeria (also known as Frangipani) and Pterocarpus indicus, which forms an intertwining of ground-level plants. The garden is composed of nine mounds that have a depressed peak, where the Plumeria and Pterocarpus indicus are planted. Divide the site into several hills. The top of the mountain sinks slightly. Reintroducing garden-period frangipani tandem sites, planting them in the center of these hillsides.The foot of these mounds are surrounded by wooden porous planters. Residents can replant outgrown potted plants here so that their roots can continue to grow. Plumerias and Pterocarpus indicus need a small amount of water, and so when it rains, the overflow water provides irrigation for these flower pots. I time, the plumeria’s roots are allowed keep breaking out of the border, directing water flow and providing some shade to the plant at the bottom, acting as agents to care for the potted plant at the bottom, and the roots of the potted plant do the same, and eventually they intertwine. The third agent is rainwater. One of the hills is converted into a sunken water storage space. During heavy rains, the water that cannot be drained from the site is collected and stored.
Student Name: Guo Churui
Tutor: Janice Tung
This project transforms the spaces around the Tuas Checkpoint viaduct—areas within a shared wind field—into an adaptive garden. Its structure is organized by wind, rain, and daily traffic. The work begins with close observation of the underviaduct ecosystem, where a self-organizing plant community has emerged in this space: groundcovers, ferns, and climbing plants, such as Sphagneticola trilobata and Mikania micrantha. These plants root where no one planned for them, or wither where light is insufficient.
The project draws inspiration from these “self-growing” or “self-withering” plants, and, analyzing their propagules and habits, the project recognizes their reproduction is affected by wind, while their death is controlled by light. Coupled with the viaduct’s landform, this leads to a cyclical model of TransmissionSettlement-Establishment: Seeds are dispersed by wind pulses, deposited in settlement zones, and then take root and grow. This project creates a self-driven, low-input, highly free garden, showing how biotic and abiotic factors together create a natural ecological environment.
Schedule the Monsoon Window:Analysis of the regional climate (wind speed, wind direction, rainfall) shows that December to March is the most favorable period for this cycle, with a stable northeast monsoon and stronger winds. At the same time, abundant rainfall keeps the ground surface sufficiently moist for rooting.
Build Wind-Led Belts: Based on the wind field of the whole site, along with large woodlands and buildings as well as road infrastructure, Transmission Areas (High-wind-speed areas) and Settlement Areas (low-wind-speed areas) are identified. Transmission areas are used for seed broadcasting; settlement areas capture seeds and support establishment. In the transmission areas, multiple seeding belts are created with seeding structures aligned to the wind. Between these belts, salt-tolerant plantings form semi-permeable filtering strips that arrest seeds and generate small return eddies, evening out distribution. At night, the seeding structures emit a soft light that attracts insects, further supporting dispersal. Within the belts, graded densities of coconut coir create a surface-roughness gradient—increasing toward the seeding line—to slow nearground flow and reduce re-entrainment. In settlement areas, fallen branches and leaf litter trap and hold seeds.
In conclusion, this project articulates a deep understanding of more-than-human elements such as seasonal wind, rain, and light as active agents in shaping and unshaping the enclosed garden. The project celebrates their agency and synchronizes with the rhythms of human movement and traffic. By choreographing vegetation, airflow, light, and occupation as coproducers, everyday ecological and social exchanges are turned into a dynamic, evolving system of renewal.
Student Name: Jasmine Eng
Tutor: Janice Tung
‘Fuelled By Foul’ transforms Pandan Reservoir’s future floating photovoltaic (FPV) system into a hyperproductive, more-than-human system shaped by ongoing negotiation within the actors of the site. While the reservoir has been repeatedly optimised for food, water, and energy, each iteration has increasingly isolated it from ecological complexity, turning the reservoir into an input-output system. An issue consistently faced by any submerged object in a water body is the process of biofouling, where organisms like algae and invertebrates colonise these submerged surfaces. This project positions the Asian green mussel, which is a marine biofouling organism, as a tool and a co-actor whose rhythms, needs and behaviours drive the system’s productivity and design. The mussel destabilises human control over the reservoir. This challenges the view of biofouling and decay as the failure of a system, instead positing it as an instrument for production in land-scarce Singapore.
The design centers mussels in three different strategies.
The first strategy positions the mussel as a foodproducing agent within Singapore’s land-scarce context. Elevated bird perches draw birds away from solar panels, preserving energy efficiency while directing their guano into phytoplankton tanks that sustain mussel farms. Suspended ropes set the stage for mussels to attach onto, while harvest decks and floating restaurants turn production into a visible process. Waste from birds fuels growth of food for mussels which fuel food production.
The second strategy makes use of the mussel’s physiological nature as a filter feeder to cleanse the water, removing harmful bacteria and toxins from the reservoir. Harvested shells are crushed and made into weighted bags that help anchor the floating modules, creating rough surfaces on the reservoir bed. Over time, living mussels adhere and create reefs that cleanse the water throughout the reservoir.
The third strategy responds to the uncertain and poorly researched timeline of FPV degradation, where ageing panels can leach heavy metals into the reservoir. Because the rate of contamination is unpredictable, mussels are introduced as bioindicators whose tissues naturally accumulate metals present in the water. By analysing their physiological response, researchers gain a real-time measure of water quality and FPV impacts, which guides adjustments to the module maintenance, design and placement, turning the mussels into a warning system for the reservoir’s health
Student Name: Jonald Khaw
Tutor: Victoria Jane Marshall
Kampung Kayu lies in the south of Singapore, a small corner in the larger Mountbatten Estate. While it is a residential area, it also hosts a hefty daily footfall as people transit to and from the nearby Mountbatten MRT station. The SIT-era housing here, well over 50 years old, stands in contrast to the surrounding newer and taller HDB buildings towering above. Planted in the Garden City era, large Rain Trees line the walkways and roads, providing shade and shelter not just for us, but a powerful non-human natural entity as well. Introduced in the 1920s by the pet trade, the Javan Mynahs are present in everyday life, forcing others to work around them. The hawker centre at the heart of this site stands as a testament to this. Wrapped up in a mesh net, layers of chains acting as doors, the hawker centre has taken rather ironic measures to keep the Mynahs out, by instead caging the people in.
This provides a glimpse of the evolution of this dialogue between humans and Mynahs, as they try to grow and negotiate with each other within this shared space. My aim is to amplify this “livingwith”, as they evolve from pets to pests towards a refreshed Garden City.
To start, the design of the hawker centre is reimagined. While I cannot change the Mynahs’ love for food, I can provide other, better alternatives for them. By including other food sources and resting sites in close proximity, plus a vegetated buffer around the hawker, the design influences where they would rather be, drawing them away from the hawker itself and allowing us humans to still live aside them without the need for harsh barriers and nets. This shift in behaviour and mindset from both parties is what I envision my fifth nature to be, where we evolve together beyond the Garden City legacy that sought to distance us from natural nature.
In my design, this reimagined hawker scene and behaviours is then used to shape the future larger reserve site of Kampung Kayu, where the aging SIT-era housing is selectively retired over time. This larger, estate level refigure is what I consider my enclosed garden. In their place, their plots will be redeveloped to reflect this change in culture, amplifying this coexistence by providing shared spaces for all parties. Temporal changes, like tree regrowth, will form a steady platform for them to evolve together and with the landscape, refreshing the landscape imagery.
The en-bloc process starts happening once a HDB building ages past 50 years old. As its residents move out and the space is redeveloped, cultures shift and refresh habits and lifestyles of the new residents. By facilitating the shift in social behaviors of the main parties involved in this site, I will ensure that this space, standing since the Garden City era, will model other en-bloc processes and support a refreshed, multispecies city. I consider this a much needed “update” on what is considered a resilient city.
Student Name: Lee Huei Min
Tutor: Victoria Jane Marshall
The Enclosed Garden of Tanglin Halt reframes urban nature as an act of uncovering and revealing rather than greening. The project transforms a HDB courtyard in Tanglin Halt, where traces of the site’s natural heritage and redevelopment co-exist. My enclosed garden allows people to inhabit with and experience the groundwater flux hidden beneath the ground. To make groundwater flux present is important because it is always covered up, to leave land “open” is a challenge to the culture of replacement here in Singapore. My garden does not conceal but rather, it reveals the layers of land into something that is real and tangible. In my design, people are guided to a clearing amidst the urban jungle, where they encounter my enclosed garden.
A hole is dug in the courtyard. and it is encountered through a slow choreography —anticipation, excitement of discovery, the journey, and the encounter. First, people are led away from the familiar rail corridor path, guided by manicured hedges. Within this passage, the ground transitions into a dimly lit, marshy forest that draws life from the site’s high groundwater table. Here, people navigate an immersive, sensory landscape of sound, moisture, and scent. Each step deepens their attunement to the terrain’s living materiality before culminating in a clearing of exposed ground. Second, at the clearing, a reflective pool occupies the centre of the hole. What appears at first as a weird/uncommon sighting, to understand the space, gradually reveals itself as an intentional act of exposure. Third, the water mirrors the sky while revealing the irregular, earthen base beneath—turning the pool into both mirror and lens amplifying the enclosed garden. Within this bounded field, people and animals confront a landscape stripped of embellishment, where traces of redevelopment and decay coexist. The garden is no longer a backdrop but an instrument of reflection of nature, memory, and change.
My enclosed garden is also political. Amid the planned Selected En-bloc exercise at Tanglin Halt, where old residential buildings are demolished to make ways for new residential buildings, the enclosed garden makes an argument for the removal of some blocks and the keeping of others.
In sum, by digging, my project redefines nature as that which is uncovered, exposed, and in flux. The garden becomes both an archive and a living organism—one that invites residents to form a relationship with the buried ecologies that foster a sense of blurry wonder with muddy ground, amphibious creatures, and wet vegetation.
Student Name: Li Jingyao
Tutor: Wai Hon Tham
In the past sixty years, large-scale land reclamation has pushed Singapore’s shoreline ever farther into the sea, turning soft tidal edges into engineered borders. Each gain of land concealed the loss of another coast, another ecosystem, another way of life.
My project begins with a simple question: what do we gain and what do we lose after the boundary — I imagined three possible futures: one where the city retreats and returns space to the sea but progress halts; one where expansion continues without end; and one where development persists until the ground beneath it completely disappears. Yet these are not mutually exclusive choices, but different stages of the same destiny. Brief moments of retreat are soon replaced by new waves of expansion, until progress devours its own foundation. Eventually, the shoreline stands still — not because we choose to stop, but because there is no sand left to build upon.
So I imagine a future in which Singapore’s expansion meets its geological limit. By 2080, this third future has become reality. Long Island is complete, but the rivers of Southeast Asia are exhausted — no sand can be mined, and no nation is willing or able to sell it. The last barge, still laden with the final mixed sediments from Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines and Indonesia, drifts outside the finished shoreline. There is nowhere to unload. Abandoned at the edge of the nation, it becomes the The Last Sand Barge — a floating vessel of reflection that forces progress to look back at its own foundation.
The barge is not rebuilt, but slowly transforms. Its nine spatial sections trace a journey through disappearance — from fisheries lost to dredging and displaced settlements, to the mixed-sand International Foundation and the dark Control Chamber of power.
Each structure reuses what the barge once carried — scaffolds, pipes, nets, and sand. Wind, algae, and water continue reshaping the vessel over time, allowing nature to reclaim what extraction once stripped away. Visitors move through the vessel, from recognition to reflection, witnessing how extraction has shaped — and hollowed — both sea and city. It reveals the ground of prosperity — trade, displacement, and silence — buried within every grain of sand. It does not reject progress, but acknowledges its price.
The project does not reject development; instead, it exposes its costs. Fifth Nature, in this context, is not another form of greening but a form of awareness—an enclosed space that distils what remains unseen in Singapore’s coastal transformation. It invites the city to pause, to recognise its dependence on finite landscapes beyond its borders, and to ask: if endless extraction is impossible, what futures can we imagine—and what worlds are we willing to leave behind?
1.REFLECTION PLATFORM
Visitors step from the land into the floating garden, turning back to reflect on the world we have built and the nature we have replaced.
3.DISPLACED SETTLEMENTS
villages are forced to relocate due to land reclamation and sand extraction, representing the loss of community identity and social memory.
6.CONSTRUCTION FIELD
A blinding space of floodlights and machinery, mirrors the extraction sites themselves — restless, loud, and never-ending.
8.ARTIFICIAL FOREST
Where vegetation is reconstructed with steel scaffolds and green nets, showing the illusion of a “recovered” nature.
2.DISAPPEARING FISHERIES
Dredging destroys coastal ecosystems, silts the waters, and erases the basis of traditional fishing livelihoods.
4.INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION
Six gates represent six exporting countries. Each seems to lead to a different origin, yet beneath them lies the same continuous ground — a mixture of sands from across Southeast Asia. When visitors stand on
5.CONTROL CHAMBER
A dark, soundproof room representing the suppression of individual voices beneath collective progress.
7.HOLLOWED GROUND
Layered excavation reveals emptied riverbeds, exposing how natural foundations are stripped away for growth.
9.OBSERVATION PLATFORM
The final point of the journey. Facing
visitors contemplate whether development should continue to conquer and consume nature.
Assembled from the last sand cargo and the obsolete tools and construction debris left throughout decades of reclamation, this vessel becomes a new archive of what the coastline has lost.
Student Name: Lin Keyu
Tutor: Lehana Guo
The Consumed Path is a project located in the abandoned Mandai Quarry (also known as the Gali Batu quarry – Gali means to dig, and Batu means rocks in Malay). The quarry is a result of the mining process during the mid 19th century. When the mining activity ceased, the site lost its social function and became enclosed, isolated, and forgotten, forming an “enclosed garden.” While vegetation, water, and other natural elements reclaimed the site, this “return” is not a romantic restoration, but an invasive and engulfing parasitism, not unlike the historical mining activity. This project thus begins with the concept of parasitism. The quarry is not a passive object awaiting repair, but an active transformative space that is constantly occupied, eroded and rewritten by multiple agencies.
The design strategy emphasises the “erosion of the terrain”. The rainwater, vegetation, human movement, and experience of change over time are intertwined to create a kaleidoscope of agencies that continuously reshape the quarry through the process of infiltration, erosion, and occupation. The quarry may be understood as a dormant body, while rainwater, groundwater, and plants act as the energies that eat away at it. Water gathers, seeps, and evaporates through the strata, gradually eroding the terrain; climbing plants and moss adhere to and fracture the rock, turning it into a living interface. Humans while no longer the primary agents here, continue to ‘consume’ the quarry through walking and running movement.
In this project, humans return not as builders, but as one agent among many. Their presence introduces new influences and makes other parasitic forces perceptible. Humans are not the centre of design or control, but participants in a shared shaping of the environment. The project does not rely on architectural insertion but foregrounds natural processes and human traces as the drivers of transformation. Paths in the garden are defined by loose materials. As one walks, the ground does not merely support movement, but continuously records, resists, and reshapes it. Footsteps compress the surface, vegetation slowly reclaims it, and rain erodes and interrupts it.
The three agencies – human, vegetation and water - appear simultaneously at each step, such that the path becomes a continuously negotiated trace rather than a fixed form. Walking through the garden is to read an unfinished story of what has been and what is still forming.
Overall, the project envisions a parasitic coexistence of agencies that is neither harmonious nor oppositional, but a condition of ongoing copresence through erosion, attachment, and adaptation. The enclosed garden hence becomes a parasitic landscape in which the boundary between human and nature are constantly negotiated.
The boundaries of the path repeatedly oscillate between dissolution and reappearance. Feeling a parasitic coexistence of agencies that is neither harmonious nor oppositional, but rather a condition of ongoing copresence through erosion, attachment, and adaptation.
Student Name: Liu Yunqi
Tutor: Janice Tung
Located near Bukit Batok, this project explores the transformation of water from pre-colonial swamps to small rivers used for irrigation during the colonial period, and finally to today’s canals and drainage ditches. In prehistoric times, water flowed freely, allowing all life to move without constraint. Throughout Singapore’s development, humans have sought to control water, and this control has varied in different forms over time. However, this control has limited water’s natural flow and flux, contributing to increased flooding within the district. This project proposes a shift in the way water is treated: rather than exerting control, it seeks to allow water to flow to its own devices. The goal of this project is to reverse the historical patterns of control: not through human intervention, but by allowing water to return to its flowing state, enabling it to move, shape, and co-create the landscape over time.
The project is divided into two phases. In the first phase, the project helps water recall its memories and shape itself. Based on historical and hydrological analysis, the design prepares space for water, creating ponds, dry creeks and a basic layer of river channel by identifying where the water most wants to pass through. On the second layer of the river, specially designed diamond-shaped planters guide water and sediment deposition, creating conditions for fluvial geomorphology. Over time, the flow of water and growth of plants co-produce islands in self-organizing forms, allowing the river and plants to act as active agents in the making of the landscape. With the change of water level, the new river can present different shapes during rainy and dry periods.
In the second phase, when the water system stabilizes, bridges between islands and multi-level water plazas enable people to cross the site and observe the rhythms of water: how water enters, lingers, and exits the site. Here, all actorsplants, animals, water and humans - inhabit and influence the environment, participating as witnesses and collaborators in creating new meanings and relationships with the land.
In conclusion, this project seeks to relinquish control over water, allowing it to flow freely, acting according to its own rhythms. Humans no longer make decisions for water, instead, they share space with it, leaving space for its agency. In these hydrological processes, water is a living subject: people, society, and the environment are all in its flow. Over time, the site is a testament of where the city is shaped and reshaped by the traces that water inscribes, revealing an evolving dialogue between humans and water.
Tutor:
Lehana Guo
Seletar Fishing Village, Singapore’s last remaining Coastal Kampung, sits along the Northeastern shoreline and faces a constant negotiation between sand and sea, finding itself at the front line of ecological change.
Sand-Reclaimed transforms this shifting coastline into a study of how sand mediates the relationship between human and nonhuman, acting as both a builder and an eraser. Once a thriving ecosystem where mangroves flourished along the rhythms of the tide, the site now bears the tension between the rising seas and restricted inland growth. Sand that is carried away and deposited by the tide has become a silent force, redrawing its own limits with every passing day.
The landscape of the fishing village is in a constant state of flux and has transformed drastically overtime. However, the village has been a quiet witness to this lively bustle, to and fro around it.
This project positions sand not as an inert material, but as an active agent that builds, buries and reveals life along the coast. Within this garden of flux, the fishing village is an island of memory, enclosed by time, tide and a territory that is continually redefined by the shifting power of sand.
The project reimagines the fishing village as a co-created habitat where the agencies of sand, sea and vegetation are made visible. Rather than resisting the tide the garden yields to its form and boundary shaped by the daily and seasonal patterns of accretion and erosion. Considering human and non-human life as witnesses to the landscape’s own temporal agency, the garden is a lens through which its transformative power is speculated upon.
The existing jetties and decks act as points of reference in a shifting landscape, sometimes submerged, sometimes exposed. Seasonal flooding becomes part of the experience as the garden partially submerges and re-emerges. It is a monument to what the sand remembers, accepting loss and change as integral parts of the ecosystem.
The garden is envisioned as a network of nets, turning absence into presence. Since the fishermen no longer live here, the village has become a third place, and the nets and stilts become standins, weaving the memories of the village into the landscape.
It envisions reclamation not as an act of conquering but as a synchrony with flux, where the land itself is allowed to reclaim its agency.
Year 0 (Present): 2025
Sectional view of the enclosed garden at present
Year 50 (Mid-century): 2075
Sectional view of the enclosed garden after 50 years
Sections mapping the transformation of the enclosure across three time scales— present, mid-century, and far-future—through sediment, tide, and material intervention.
Year 200 (Far-future): 2275
Sectional view of the enclosed garden after 200 years
Projects:
1.Khoo Zhi Luo – Re: Waste
2.Chen Qingsong – Current Current
3.Gao Xinyu – The Three Engines of Everyday Urban Life
4.Ian Hiedie Zuraimi – Ecology Mixology
5.Li YuanHao – Fern Humus
6.Ng Junhao – For Cricket
7.Yan LinHao – Strange Energy: Beyond Greening
8.Zhao Fuhan – Where Faith Meets Water Again
9.Zhou QianYa – Two Futures, One Forest
10.Yue Jingqiu – Strait Garden
This chapter explores landscape as a condition in which complexity is intensified through the accumulation and amplification of overlapping elements and with an aim to transform larger patterns. Fifth nature is understood here as a state of continual co-creation in which human systems and non-human processes are inseparable, folding into each other through cycles of pattern recognition and responsive action to produce spatial effects that extend beyond the immediate site.
Projects such as Current Current, Fern Hummus, and For Crickets foreground this condition by amplifying entangled relationships between water, soil, sound, vegetation, and human occupation. Rather than isolating individual agency, these works stage environments in which recurring patterns—of flow, growth, decay, and movement—provoke adaptive responses. Landscape emerges here not as a static composition, but as an active system of triggers and reactions, shaped through ongoing interaction and mutual transformation.
Similarly, The Three Engines of Everyday Urban Life and WhereFaithMeetsWaterAgain bring into focus the patterned rhythms of marginalised labour and lived experience. The repeated movements of food delivery workers and migrant communities become legible as spatial patterns that call for design actions—forms of care, inclusion, and recognition. By integrating systems of work, ritual, and ecology, these projects position the enclosed garden as a responsive space, where social patterns are not merely observed but engaged, redirected, and supported.
In TwoFutures,OneForest and StrangeEnergy:BeyondGreening , pattern–action extends into the realms of governance, perception, and control. Here, regulatory frameworks, cultural imaginaries, and ecological processes form overlapping patterns that condition how landscapes are seen, managed, and transformed. These projects speculate how such patterns produce specific actions—of control, resistance, or adaptation—revealing fifth nature as a field shaped as much by regulatory and perceptual structures as by material processes.
Taken together, the projects in this chapter articulate the garden of pattern action as a spatial manifestation of fifth nature—one in which accumulation and entanglement are not conditions to be resolved, but to be transformative -Meaning, to transform larger patterns of governance, perception, and control.
Student Name: Khoo Zhi Luo
Tutor: Lehana Guo
RE: WASTE reimagines Chong Pang as a landscape that reveals and celebrates waste rather than conceals it. The project challenges conventional perceptions by framing waste as a material of memory, value, and ecological change. Studies of how waste accumulates across both formal and informal sites — shaped by human and non-human actors — guide a design approach that treats waste as a living substance shaping space and community. This vision forms a “fifth nature”: an urban decay forest defined by cycles of collection, breakdown, and renewal, where waste becomes a co-creator of place.
1. Expose: Residents are invited to deposit plastics directly into designated zones, transforming the garden into a visible archive of waste narratives and revealing how waste infiltrates soil and influences plant adaptation.
2. Evolve: As the landscape develops new microhabitats, seasonal activities — waste clearing, planting, composting — allow the community to participate in its continual transformation.
To conclude, RE: WASTE redefines how people can reshape their perception of waste as a transformative agent. It serves as a reminder that urban nature is not separate from human excess but continually reshaped by it. Through the framework cycles of ‘Expose’ and ‘Evolve’, the fifth nature for Chong Pang’s residential landscape will be an urban living ecology of waste and renewal.
To map out waste being collected and accumulated at designated and non-designated dumping grounds, in relation to how these dumping areas affect the relationship, influences, movement and usage of space for human and non-humans.
To showcase a overall axonometric view of the ‘urban decay forest’. Understanding how different phytoremediation properties of different plant species planted in terms of placement and timeline introduced can affect the garden’s response to the waste being accumulated over time.
Section: Relationships of Human Activities
To illustrate the different human activities that can be engaged within the garden, such as the Waste ‘Foot Reflexology’ and Participatory Waste and Horticulture Management.
To show how one would experience
Student Name: Chen Qingsong
Tutor: Lehana Guo
Current Current amplifies the agency of on-site runoff, transforming the grassland within the former Kranji Army Barracks Reserve Site into an enclosed garden for runoff. The grassland is surrounded by layered traces of historical human activity and the 4 nature narrative of the nation.
As the surrounding dense tropical forest around the site lacks ground cover, it allows runoff to freely pool and flow across the site. The temporary runoff exhibits emergent agency through processes of flow and stagnation, and continually sculpt the site’s present landform and ecology. The footprints of the runoff overlap through each rainfall, revealing the layers of the past while also sculpting the future ground.
The first strategy reconfigures the once easily waterlogged grassland into an enclosed garden, defined by water’s footprint. The garden is conceived as both an apparatus that intensifies flow and stagnation, and a theatre orchestrated by runoff and historical traces, with water as the primary actor. The runoff interweaves the site’s nonhuman elements, including water, soil, historical footprints, vegetation, etc., into a gardenself-organized by water and shaped by the grid derived from historical building footprints. Guided by historical footprints, runoff reshapes the site during its brief presence, revealing nearly-erased traces and allowing visitors to perceive water’s capacity to transform and disclose what once existed. Diverging from four historical attempts to construct a “perpetual nature,” Current Current proposes a new tropical urban landscape paradigm, a paradigm that is temporary, ever-changing, reflect on the history, and arranged by both human and non-human elements.
The second strategy responds to the site’s terrain through micro-landforms that guide and amplify runoff and by using existing ballast blocks to make water’s processes more legible. The ballast blocks function both as stepping stones and as materials intentionally exposed to erosion, breaking down over time into history-bearing fragments that extend the layered past. The micro-landforms also use contour shifts to reveal different periods of history. In dry weather the site appears almost like a reserved lawn, but as rainfall arrives, the enclosed garden gradually emerges. Boundaries and historical traces surface with the runoff before slowly fading again as the water dissipates. Runoff and the footprints form new landscape relations, each reshaping the other over time.
In sum, Current Current redefines the presence and temporality of the reserve site and its landscape identity within urban landscapes by amplifying and visualizing the behavior of runoff. Through the dialogue between runoff and historical footprints in the tropical context, the project positions itself as the Fifth Nature: a dynamic tropical landscape paradigm driven by water, shaped by historical traces, and orchestrated by a More-Than-Humans.
Student Name: Gao Xinyu
Tutor: Janice Tung
Jurong West, an key support zone for the industrial hub of Jurong East, is home to dense communities, schools, and transportation networks. Food delivery workers moving continuously between residential enclaves and commercial nodes, form the invisible backbone, maintaining the daily flows of goods, services and connections.
Despite their crucial role, these workers remain largely invisible within the urban fabric. Jurong West serves as a transient resting grounds and workspace for delivery workers, informal resting areas often lead to spatial conflicts and congestion, revealing a disconnect between urban efficiency and lived experiences.
Through mapping the routes and micro rituals of delivery workers, this project identified a spatial enclosure as the “enclosed garden”. Within this, a testing ground for new spatial typologies and thresholds offers spaces of pause, care, visibility and social mobility within Singapore’s fastpaced urban life. By reinterpreting the routine, habits and needs of delivery workers as active agents of urban form, this projects aims to reframe them as co-authors of the evolving landscape
“The Three Engines of Everyday Urban Life: A Landscape System for Empowering Delivery Workers in Jurong West” organizes the site into three interlinked nodes. The Energy–Mobility Exchange Hub integrates green-energy charging, small-scale commercial programs, and social spaces, funded by energy firms and real-estate partners whose service fees, rental income, and advertising revenues partially support children’s charities. The Health–Recovery Living Campus combines a gym, showers, health-monitoring services, and a leisure lawn with the adjacent sports field to establish a coordinated “light + heavy” fitness system; gym operators and sports brands invest in return for membership and advertising revenue, while delivery workers receive discounted off-peak access.The Agro-Learning Circular Commons accommodates an experimental farm, on-site produce sales, a night market, and a skills-training center for delivery workers, where courses operate in afternoon and evening sessions. Revenue generated from the night market is reinvested into the farm–learning loop, which is further supported by a recycling-derived fertilizer system.
Ultimately, this projects aims to establish a pilot area that is both adaptative and inclusive responding to the routines, needs and aspirations of food delivery riders and the community. Through spatial strategies oscillating between work - rest – regeneration, this project seeks to cultivate a circular economy and social interdependencies, creating a new form of urban labor ecosystem – one that hopes to restore riders’ sense of self-identity, dignity and visibility, while fostering reciprocal care and shared benefit across the surrounding community.
Student Name: Ian Hiedie Zuraimi
Tutor: Wai Hon Tham
Ecology Mixology champions a Fifth Nature where green spaces operate as metabolic, improvisational landscapes driven by the everyday rhythms of a F&B business. The park’s ecological life begins not with horticultural planning but with food—limes, limau purut, butterfly pea, tomato, brinjal, spring onion, papaya, hibiscus roselle, and pandan— folded into fruit platters, laksa, iced tehs, and other local dishes. As customers eat and staff prepare meals, organic waste accumulates across the site: peels, seeds, rhizomes, flowers and buds. Instead of being treated as disposable leftovers, this biomass becomes the primary ecological catalyst animating the park’s living systems.
Chickens, pigeons, bats, and other urban wildlife move through this nutrient field, feeding on refuse while dispersing seeds, bulbs, and buds across the terrain. Their daily movements aerate the soil as they claw, peck, and forage, reducing the need for human-managed maintenance such as forking or scheduled composting. Seeds germinate wherever chance, microclimate, and animal behaviour allow—at path edges, beneath shrubs, in sunlit openings, or in forgotten corners where rich soil gathers.
As these plants flower, they attract butterflies, bees, hoverflies, and other pollinators, weaving a dynamic tapestry of blooms and fertilisation. Flowers turn to fruit; fruit becomes forage. The staff return to the landscape, harvesting edible growth—papaya clusters, lime flushes, mulberry bursts, brinjal from unexpected thickets—to reincorporate into the restaurant’s offerings. The cycle loops, tightening relationships between cuisine, compost, and community.
In this evolving choreography, the park becomes a living manuscript inscribed by humans, animals, weather, and waste. Planting patterns emerge from dispersed agency rather than deliberate design, generating a landscape defined by chance, reciprocity, and ecological drift. Patches of papaya seedlings, accidental lime groves, and corridors of blooming butterfly pea form spontaneously, tracing the movements of birds and the residues of meals shared.
Every few years, the F&B business relocates within the park, initiating new cycles of ecological inscription while old sites continue growing. Over decades, these layered traces accumulate into a textured ecology that resists fixed form, celebrating uncertainty, adaptability, and co-authorship. Ecology Mixology therefore proposes a Fifth Nature where food, animals, soil, and people sustain one another in an ongoing exchange—a landscape made not by control, but by collaboration; decentering humans yet looping back to humans. This approach reframes urban parks as porous, evolving infrastructures that welcome experimentation, honour everyday ecologies, and foreground the humble yet powerful role of waste, appetite, and animal movement in shaping resilient, future-ready public environments for all.
Student Name: Li Yuanhao
Tutor: Wai Hon Tham
The site lies in a reserve site within Tampines in eastern Singapore. My Fifth Nature aims to connect overlooked nature around us with people’s perceptions. I do this by exposing the vertical structure of vegetation and soil. When visitors see these layers, they realize that what lies under the ground is not simple. The soil has a complex structure, and that complexity reflects the instrumental, intrinsic, and relational values of natural elements.
On this site, ferns dominate. The large scale of Nephrolepis biserrate shows its material agency. The ferns combine their own roots, fallen leaves with humus and the sandy soil to shape a special physical environment. The sandy soil comes from the area’s history as a former sand quarry. In the 1960s, many sand quarries operated in Tampines to meet the growth demands of Singapore. Over time, those quarries closed but the soil condition remains. The sandy substrate that remained is loose yet moist, and it suits Nephrolepis. This soil also suppresses other species, so the ferns face less competition.
This patch of ferns is not only interesting for its structure; it also matters in the face of climate change. As the climate shifts, some original vegetation may no longer thrive. But this fern community is very resilient, and it adapts well to the changed soil and moisture conditions. It can act like a pioneer species under new climate stresses. By studying this community, we can gain insights for future ecological scenarios, either in other locations or in a changed climate on this very site.
In Tampines Eco Green, I decide to showcase this story through different viewpoints. I design paths, underground corridor, and bird-view spots. Through this design, I emphasize the relational value between humans and nature. I invite people to walk, rest, and observe. I want them to sense not just physical space, but also processes of growth, decay, and renewal. In present-day Tampines, a few sand quarries still remain. In time, these quarries could undergo a transformation similar to what I envision for Tampines Eco Green. The research and design strategies developed here could immediately apply to them, offering real-world relevance and value
By offering a vertical narrative of soil and plants in an experiential way, I help people reconnect with nature. I do not just “rewild” the land. I also aim to “rewild” human thinking. I want to show that people’s lives have a tight relationship with natural processes. I hope visitors will discover the existing of this overlooked landscape and develop a worldview of interconnection — that all living things and processes are linked.
Student Name: Ng Jun Hao
Tutor: Lehana Guo
The Fifth Nature at Kranji explores how sound reveal movement form an entangled system between human and non-human life. The open lawn appears empty, yet it vibrates with overlapping agencies: migrant workers playing cricket, insects (“cricket”) calling from the grass, and the distant hum of surrounding infrastructure. Each emerges from shared environmental conditions. The compacted soil, humidity, and monsoon cycles form a living field of renewal. The workers’ play flattens the earth, creating temporary boundaries that the grass later heals. Insects recolonize these resting patches, continuing a cycle of disturbance and recovery. Sound becomes the medium connecting these rhythms, revealing movement, growth, and life across soil, topography and vegetation. Through a more-than-human lens, the project listens to these relationships as ecological knowledge and an environment that amplifies what is usually hidden.
The enclosed garden design is shaped by two main strategies. First, the play field is divided into three triangular zones that rotate through use and renewal across the year. Each segment alternates between dry-season play and monsoon-season regeneration, following the life cycles of its agencies: crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas, cow grass, and weather rhythms. Soil composition and planting species are selected to match these fast-rooting cycle grasses recover after compaction while loose, sandy-loam soil supports insect burrowing and moisture retention. Subtle cues guide renewal: design mimic leftover steel poles and sand traces in the center recall the migrant workers’ own game markers, visually framing play areas; meanwhile, sound serves as the ecological signal. The louder insect chorus indicates zones under renewal areas to avoid until the ground has healed while quieter zones invite play, aligning human rhythm with ecological timing.
Second, the landscape uses sound as structure. The topography and planting volume are arranged to filter external urban noise while amplifying inner acoustic layers. Low mounds and dense vegetation deflect incoming sounds and create acoustic pockets where the hidden calls of insects and players resonate. These earthen bumps also form new habitats and shaded edges that attract insects, allowing species migration through open gaps in the enclosure. The result is a field that regulates itself through sound and growth.
“For Cricket” envisions the enclosed garden as a living field shaped by sound and movement a place that listens, heals, and renews itself through use. Renewal happens naturally through their shared rhythms, allowing the ground to change with each cycle of play and rest.
BUMP ZONE (Outer Layer)
Soil and Structure: Raised bump with compacted subsoil creates edge, blocks exterior noise, and shapes interior sound pockets.
Planting:
1) Tall grasses (including lalang) habitat cover for insects
2) Pockets planting supports nesting and resting insects.
3) Moist depressions retain water after rain and intensify insect activity.
Function:
Visual and acoustic screen hides the centre and amplifies interior sound.
C, RECOVERY FIELD (25% Vegetated)
Sparse turf clusters (25%): Mostly exposed sandy-loamy soil indicates early regrowth stage.
Mulched boundary with high insect activity: This edge becomes a major nesting and feeding strip, turning the field into an ecological regeneration zone.
Avoided during early phases: Used only when recovery progresses; insect cues dominate movement here.
PLAY FIELD A, READY PLAY FIELD (100% Vegetated)
Full turf cover (100%): Dense, stable grass that supports the most active and fast-paced play.
Mulched Edges attracting insects: Moist mulch pulls crickets, cicadas, and grasshoppers to the edges for feeding and nesting, keeping the field centre clearer for play.
Fastest recovery field: High turf density + consistent moisture allows this field to regenerate quickly after use.
This panel illustrates three adjacent play fields operating in rotational renewal. Each field uses the same sandy–loamy base but differs in turf density, marking stages from active play to partial regrowth and early recovery. Mulched perimeter bands attract crickets, cicadas, and grasshoppers, creating ecological cues that influence how each field is used over time. At the centre, a deliberately bare sandy zone functions as the primary insect activity core, anchoring the system’s ecological and spatial logic.
SHORT GRASS BELT (Middle Layer)
Ground Condition:
1) Compost mulch mixed into topsoil keeps ground moist and supports grass recovery.
2) Soil looseness and tall grass, attract insect movement into the center area.
Planting:
1) Short, low turf grass, clear movement path for migrant workers.
2) Thin vegetation density improves visibility while still supporting light ecological activity.
Function:
1) Approach zone, guides movement toward the enclosed garden.
2) Transition layer, buffers between tall grass ecology and the play field.
FIELD B (50%
This section illustrates how play, soil compaction, and insect activity interact across the site. The bumps support nesting and feeding, while compacted play zones create firm ground that shifts insects toward the depressions where renewal and breeding occur. Together, these movements form a continuous cycle where human activity shapes the soil surface and insects regenerate the ground beneath it.
•Feeding & •Outward Movement
(Mar–Aug) Egg-laying (Sep–Feb) Outward movement
(Mar–Aug) Low feeding (Sep–Feb) Peak feeding → Upward movement (MAR-AUG) (SEP–FEB)
•Compaction → Softening → Partial Recovery •Insects Peak Egg-laying
(Mar–Aug) Drying → Peak Compacting (Sep–Feb): Softening → Partial recovery
•Early Seeding → Peak Breeding → Regeneration
(Mar–Aug) Seeding → Incubation (Sep–Feb) Peak breeding → Regeneration
•Upward Migration
INSECT NESTING ZONE (BUMP EDGE)
INSECT BREEDING ZONE (RENEWAL LAYER)
INSECT FEEDING ZONE (AT DEPRESSION)
SCALE: 1:50
SCALE: 1:500
This scene is viewed from ground height, at the scale of the insects. It reflects the project’s core idea: that the enclosed garden is understood differently depending on who is perceiving it. At human level, the field appears open and informal. At insect level, the ground is textured, humid, full of micro-habitants and food sources. The same space holds two different experiences both valid, both active, both shaping the ground.
Student Name: Yan Linhao
Tutor: Victoria Jane Marshall
My enclosed garden project, entitled Strange Energy is located beside Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and three embassies (China, Australia and USA). The broader site thus holds a quiet tension — it feels both public and prohibited. This might also be a legacy of its former military use as the colonial-era Tanglin Barracks. When I visited the area, I saw “wild-looking” large trees, presumably planted as part of the Barrack infrastructure, as well as a temporary park with some wooden-stakes, tall fences with monitors, and an open lawn, presumably an outcome of the present use as a reserve site. The site thus exists in this inherent hybridity — the subtle unease of being watched, the ambiguity of staying or passing through the temporary park. Of particular interest to me is a very large tree with winding vines, embodying spontaneous ecological vitality and magnetic appeal. The practice of “greening”, that is of turning a place into a color, and of its one-size-fits-all imaginary, cannot grasp places like this. In response, my enclosed garden highlights the divergent perceptual relationships of “being watched” and “being wild-looking”. My enclosed garden demonstrates how a field of strange energies can become amplified into a novel enclosed garden that maintains security while attracting more visitors. My garden is an energy field that encourages the spread of “wild-looking” vegetation and invites a broader range of human and non-human presences. Within such a field, human and non-human nature agencies continually interact, creating subtle shifts in how the place is perceived and navigated.
To make latent “strange energy” perceptible, my first spatial strategy arranges plants and both sunlight and artificial light on a grid, establishing a sensory framework and guiding spatial logic. It reveals tension through gradients of vegetation density and light intensity in space. For example, near the fences with surveillance monitors, I propose structured planting with measured spacing and cool, dimm lighting to reinforce a feeling of surveillance and control. Toward the core of the garden area, my designed arrangement of lights and plants loosens; clusters of vegetation are allowed to grow irregular, and lights are warmer. The more dynamic illumination evokes spontaneity and uncertainty. Such gradual transitions in density of vegetation, height of vegetation, and brightness of shadow and light during the day and illumination at night allow visitors to sense the flow of energies—from high control to less-control. Graduated plant heights and sequential light strips solidify paths—laying the groundwork for the sightline guidance that follows. The resulting field is both spatial and atmospheric.
My second spatial strategy is an integrated sightline system. It is designed to amplify the tension between elements that are repelling like the fences with surveillance monitors and magnetic elements like the “wild-looking” large tree. These repelled and attracted elements are anchored by three viewpoints. First, from an area that I term the high ground, people can grasp the full gradient of strange energy. Within the center of the garden, the second viewpoint forms a framed composition that brings “wildlooking” vegetation on one side and the boundary fence on the other into a single visual axis. It places spontaneous growth and controlled enclosure in direct counterpoint and intensifying their underlying spatial tension. The third viewpoint is the “wild-looking” tree. Its vines become the visual anchor, gathering light and sightlines toward its core, allowing visitors to perceive how surveillance and spontaneous ecological vitality coexist. Ongoing maintenance by NParks staff shapes vegetation edges and sightlines, while periodic adjustments to the wooden-stake array create shifts in how people move and engage with the enclosed garden.
Visual axes converge toward the garden’s wild-looking core tree, whose vine-wrapped trunk forms a strong visual anchor of untamed growth. Warm light and clustered vegetation gather around this center, while cooler, evenly spaced edge lighting marks controlled zones near surveillance boundaries. This contrast reveals how the site’s strange energy arises between surveillance from MFA and the magnetic pull of the vine-covered core.
The grid organizes plant distribution, light placement, and circulation, forming a gradient sensory field. By contrasting controlled perimeter zones with clustered vegetation toward the center, the diagram shows how energy flows across the garden and sets up the framework for the integrated sightline system.
Student Name: Zhao Fuhan
Tutor:
Wai Hon Tham
This project is located in Tampines, Singapore, an area with a unique spatial structure: migrant worker dormitories, temples, and an artificial river coexist, yet remain isolated and lack communication. The enclosed garden is conceived as a medium to deconstruct the dislocated relationships between humans and nature, faith and migration, and to refine a new logic of symbiosis. By analyzing the displacements caused by multiple factors, I proposed the concept of “Fifth Nature” for this project. Rather than recreating pristine nature, it constructs a negotiated ecology through design, in which social and environmental processes intertwine.
The core of the design thinking lies in how to make the garden a “familiar device” where mobile people can reorganize space, regain control, and establish a sense of belonging. Here, nature is no longer an external spectacle to be admired, but a cultural product shaped and continuously generated by humans and non-humans. The project seeks to reconnect the three dimensions of displacement: water, temple, and workers, exploring their underlying relationships, allowing water, faith, and labor to jointly shape a new spatial order.
Research revealed that the majority of the migrant workers on the site were from Bangladesh, primarily practicing Islam. Therefore, I created a mobile spatial system in my design. Through rotating and sliding walls, workers can proactively adjust the spatial format for prayers or gatherings of varying scales, freeing themselves from the confines of their dormitories and regaining a sense of familiarity and control in a foreign land.
The design is organized in layered spaces oriented toward Mecca, following the spatial order of an Islamic mosque. Movable structures allow users to freely rotate or slide walls, creating spaces that adapt to different forms and scales of prayer. Beyond the ritual area, resting zones offer shaded, quiet places for local workers. Water is reintroduced into the site to invite wind, reflection, and sound, generating a calm and renewing atmosphere. Through these sensory layers, the garden becomes both functional and contemplative, a place where faith and daily life subtly merge within the rhythms of nature.
Ultimately, this enclosed garden is not a natural refuge from the city, but a microcosm of urban relations. It redefines the “fifth nature”—an interface where displaced people and displaced ecologies temporarily coexist; here, faith, labor, and the environment constantly intertwine and mutually generate, collectively reshaping the meaning of “nature” in the contemporary era.
Student Name: Zhou Qianya
Tutor: Janice Tung
At the edge of Clementi, where the Ulu Pandan River meets the traces of the Jurong Railway, lies a forest caught between two nations—and between two temporal logics and imaginations of nature. This project uses a parallelmontage narrative to ask: How would this landscape evolve if its land belonged to different sovereign bodies? Would it become wilderness, or an aesthetic of order? If governed by Singapore, the site would extend the planning logic of the Rail Corridor and be absorbed into the national greening framework. If it remains Malaysian territory—an enclave inside Singapore—it may gradually rewild under lighter oversight, evolving at its own forest pace. Nature is therefore placed within two storylines: shaped as an ornamental object of governance, or acting as a self-directed “soldier” defining its own territory.
Scenario 1: Singapore — Landscape as the Aesthetics of Power
Within Singapore’s green governance—from “Garden City” to “City in Nature”—nature functions as part of national identity. The abandoned Jurong Railway and river-edge relics would be integrated into the Rail Corridor park system. Higher ridges become organized walkways, while fallen logs and understory shrubs are removed. Local species with stable forms are preserved, and non-native species such as Angsana are introduced for diversity and visual clarity. Night lighting, signage, and educational markers together construct a legible landscape, shaping nature into a bright, orderly, and easily maintained environment.
Scenario 2: Malaysia — A Forest Reborn Malaysia’s federal–state structure leaves edge territories lightly managed, allowing the forest to follow its own succession. Guided by a principle of retaining, pioneer species like Macaranga gigantea are sown into existing gaps in March 2030 without clearing original vegetation. By around 2035, a light canopy forms, altering light levels. After the October rains, ferns and Endospermum malaccense gradually occupy the lower layers. Fallen wood and leaves decompose within 10–14 months, accumulating humus year after year. By around 2060, the forest approaches the density and stratification of a mature forest.
This design presents two modes of growth emerging from the same land—parallel rather than opposed. In Singapore, nature becomes regulated, controllable, and display-ready. In Malaysia, with pioneer growth and yearround decomposition, the forest gradually restores its own density, rhythm, and layered form.
Oscillating between discipline and autonomy, the forest takes in the pressures of management while quietly rebuilding itself through light, moisture, and decay.
Student Name: Yue Jingqiu
The Strait Garden is situated within a landscape unique to Singapore: an enclosed garden built on land that did not exist decades ago—a secondary forest atop a former landfill, now part of the planned coastal extension known as Long Island. This master-planned area is built into the Singapore Strait. It was first proposed in 1991 and recently revived as climate adaptation using the technology of poldering. Long Island embodies the City in a Garden vision by integrating blue-green networks through largescale engineering. While the use of polders signals a technical advancement and aligns with Go Green values that promote public behavioral change, this approach remains grounded in a logic of utility and risk management. Here, the Singapore Strait is still framed either as a problem to be solved or a view to be enjoyed; its deeper, sensory presence is systematically neglected—attunement is needed.
In response, The Strait Garden proposes a “fifth nature,” one that moves beyond an anthropocentric “greening” logic. True ecological reclamation involves not only technical solutions but also social perception and acceptance. Without a public connection to the new land and the Singapore Strait on a sensory and emotional level, claims of “sustainability” or “resilience” ring hollow. My enclosed garden addresses this issue by refiguring the future polder and the existing reserve forest as an integrated perceptual system. It is designed to guide visitors to personally experience the Singapore Strait within a secondary forest shaped through plant design, thereby fostering a needed nature culture. The ultimate goal is to foster a dynamic relationship where people, through attunement to novel landscapes, evolve from being passive recipients of policy into active and perceptive participants in a reflective ecosystem.
The Strait Garden is composed of a set of spatial strategies and designed landscape elements that enable people to smell the coast and perceive its textures and sounds. First, I balance earthwork by cutting part of the reserve land to form a polder dike in the Singapore Strait, turning excavation into an expressive landscape act. Second, a branch of the East Coast Green Corridor connects and introduces people from the mainland to the future Long Island polderscape. As people walk and ride bikes through the enclosed garden, they glimpse a hidden “strait” within that invites further exploration. The earthworked polder-garden is divided into two. On the “sea” side, controlled saline ponds and intertidal areas are enriched with mud clams and green algae, which together filter and oxygenate the water while producing subtle marine aromas. This area remains open, providing people with enough space to breathe. On the “land” side, a visitor can walk along the pier surrounded by abundant coastal plants. This area serves as a refuge for all animals that are displaced when the surrounding reserve forest (outside of the enclosed garden) is cleared. This “jungly,” animal-friendly area deep in the polder garden also contains a space that amplifies the sounds and smells of the “sea” side.
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