Nippon Paint Singapore announced the winners of the Singapore edition of the 2018/19 Asia Young Designer Awards (AYDA) in January at the National Gallery of Singapore. 

AYDA was launched in 2008 by Nippon Paint as an event platform to inspire architecture and interior design students to nurture their skills through competition and networking with industry players. Today, AYDA is held in 13 countries across Asia. 

The award calls for most innovative design proposals for two categories: Architecture and Interior Design. Three shortlisted finalists from each category were invited to present their concepts to a panel of judges comprising industry experts. Entries were judged based on their innovation in addressing ongoing issues, including sustainability, future needs and social impacts, as well as its aesthetic quality. 

All three finalists of the Interior Design category were students of LASALLE College of the Arts. The Bronze Awards went to Nang Cho Mar Myint for her restaurant concept Duo Dining. 

Duo Dining is a completely curvilinear restaurant concept envisioned as a “community junction especially for people who feel lonely to have their meal alone.” The curving interior and furniture are a strategy to bring people together. Duo Dining also features drone servers, interactive tables and smart materials that will absorb the light during day times and light up at the night time. 

The Silver award in the Interior category went to Anggoro Hari Wicaksono for his concept Time Saver” The Future of Transjakarta.

The project reimagines the interior of Transjakarta buses, Jakarta’s public bus service, as a moving restaurant in a bid to make public transport a more attractive mode of transportation in the city with the worst traffic in the world.  

The Gold Award in the interior category was awarded to Jason Ong Xiang An for his library concept Alexandria 2050. 

Alexandria 2050 envisions an archive library in the post-apocalyptic year of 2050. The library is housed in a vault for physical archivce as well as a new generation of ‘time capsules’ and an amphitheatre.

This new-gen of time capsule each contains a command that is used to extract information from the cloud, which is then broadcasted in the amphitheatre using projectors equipped with AR. 

The inspiration for Alexandria 2050 came from, among others,  the Alexandria Library and the Svalbard seed vault in Norway. 

The judges felt that Alexandria 2050 stood out among the other finalists as it addressed architectural solutions without losing focus on the quality of the space and envisioning a need in a post-apocalyptic world. 

The Bronze Award in the Architecture category went to NUS student Max Lee for the concept of Herstel Wellnes and Rehabilitation Centre. 

The masterplan concept proposes to transform the heart of Holland Village into a hub for wellness and healthy living. The centrepiece of the development is the one-stop hub for healthy living Herstel, a wellness and rehab centre comprising healthcare facilities, hotel and wellness-focused retail.

The Silver Award the architecture category went to SUTD student Peng Haonan for his Solid/Void concept. 

Solid/Void imagines the removal of the boundary between solid space and void space and merges them into each other. “So that the interior spaces are more likely be used and people are more likely to get out of their own solid block,” Peng states.

NUS student See Ying Jia took home the Gold Award in the Architecture category with her project Tube Fare, which reimgines the future of the street vendors in Hanoi, Vietnam. 

Tube Fare reimagines a tube house – a Vietnamese residential typology measuring 3 x 40 metres long – located at the heart of Hanoi.

The tube house in the proposal is the residence of an architect and his family while the front portion rented out to a clothing store. Tube Fare imagines the rented out part of the tube house as the site of a communal kitchen and a market. 

“The challenge is then to negotiate how a market and residential can co-exist in this tight space while still allowing for natural ventilation and daylight as well as preventing the smells and noise from the market to interfere with the resident’s lives,” states See. 

The judges praised Tube Fare for addressing a real social and contextual issue and for its extensive research on types of street vendors in Hanoi, the scale of the typical Vietnamese living space and introducing passive cooling to make the place more comfortable.

The judges felt that See’s design, if implemented, could potentially leave a mark on the streetscape of Hanoi. 

Gold Award winners See and Ong will represent Singapore in the Asia Young Designer Awards Summit 2018/19 in March, where all top winners from 13 countries across Asia will compete for the grand title of ‘Asia Young Designer of the Year’ and the grand prize of a six-week course at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in Boston, Massachusetts.