Thea Teo
Hello! My name is Thea. I believe in working with the community to create unique spaces to bring about wonderful experiences. I strive to create dialogues between people to understand their wants and needs. Other than pursuing interior design, I am also interested in architecture, vintage fits and photography.
Home Comfort Part 1: Discomfort
This final year project is about the different types of home comfort one can experience.
To begin, comfort has various meanings that evolved throughout the years. Home, on the other hand, represents different meanings to different people. Home can be for the individual or with people, some may treat it as a territory or a place of retreat. Some institutions are also regarded as homes because people live permanently in them. Now, when we put home and comfort together, it means something more deep than what we think. People usually do not think of home comfort as something important because we live in it everyday. Only once we are affected by our current living conditions, we start to wonder about the comfort we want to achieve everyday in our homes.
Part 1: DISCOMFORT
Investigating discomfort in a home through the living conditions of physical abuse
At the end of every day, the common thought is that most people go home to rest, but we might not know what someone else has to go home to everyday. In Singapore, the rate of domestic abuse has increased by 22% during the circuit breaker period (due to COVID-19). According to the Singapore’s Ministry of Social and Family Development, Singaporeans need to be more knowledgeable about domestic abuse in the country, and that there is a need to talk more about how the issue can be countered or dealt with. Hence, I wanted to explore and investigate whether designing for comfort can be effective for the home with the extreme living condition of physical abuse.
Research was done in the films Marriage Story and Parasite. In Marriage Story, it depicts how living together can change so differently when individuals start to feel uncomfortable around each other. In Parasite, it shows how characters are separated by social class, with the usage of lines. These lines come in various forms, they are represented by objects, furniture, walls, floors and materials, all of which make up domesticity.
For this project, the line is not just a line or a wall, but an invincible line that separates the physical and emotional space between the abuser and the victims. The house is to have a main line that separates the abuser’s side and the victims’ side. The abuser’s side includes a work room and a rage room while the victims’ side includes escape routes and comfort room. Other ideas include living in transparency because walls are meant to give privacy, but in the case of physical abuse, walls trap victims and it becomes a prison for them. The usage of lines are heavily used to separate all these spaces.
Ultimately, at the end of this part of the project, the challenge to design a house for the abused is very limited due to the sensitivity of the topic. This project was very precedent driven leading to an uncertain outcome. Abuse should not be seen as a game and victims suffer from abuse in various ways and
different degrees of trauma or phobia may be inflicted on them.
Home Comfort Part 2: Family Comfort
This final year project is about the different types of home comfort one can experience.
This follows after Part 1: Discomfort.
Part 2: Family Comfort
Investigating in-between spaces and privacy.
Continuing from the house for the abuser and victim, the house will be taken over by a new creative family. A series of dialogues were conducted with a real-life family, to understand what home comfort mean to each individual, and to know about each person’s preferences on what they would like to have in “their space”. Based on their personal collages, individual spaces were conceptualised based on
their wants and needs. “Stay together but not together” was their overall idea of living together while seeking spaces to be alone. This brought to the main aim of investigating the in-between spaces between the individuals and family while giving them the comfort and privacy they desired.
Detailed designs were needed to investigate the spaces in-between the individual spaces. They helped to bridge the access points and circulation within the house. The detailed designs were inspired by several precedents, with references to the family’s original house and part 1 of the project. There were applications of ramps, brickwalls and decorative blocks. With many explorations on these detailed designs, came about preferred and suitable outcomes.
Light and Shadow Exploration
Decorative blocks in exterior view
Application of Decorative Blocks in interior spaces
Home Comfort Part 3: Personal Comfort
This final year project is about the different types of home comfort one can experience.
This follows after Part 2: Family Comfort.
Part 3: Personal Comfort
New domesticity.
From the dialogue sessions in part 2, the older siblings of the family mentioned that they would like to move out of their current house to live alone independently. However, due to financial issues and family closeness, they decided that it is best to stay with their parents until they get married and move out with a partner.
Bringing in the idea of young adults living alone, affordability, domesticity and fulfilling basic needs and secondary wants, a new domesticity was explored to achieve personal comfort.
In Singapore, the government does not allow one below the age of 35 to own or rent a flat alone. However, in other countries like the UK, schemes like the Single Room Rent (SRR) are available for young adults who desire to have their own place. How can this kind of scheme be applied in Singapore to allow young adults to live alone but still under the law?
From the precedent Urban Village Project by effekt, there was the idea of a single unit meant for one person to live in and whether a single unit of amenity could join and share between 2 people. Looking into working with apartment interiors in Singapore, this was a precedent that was done as a personal project to have personal comfort. Gary Chang converted his 3-room apartment into 24 different configurations to maximise the apartment’s entire area. He made use of movable walls and furniture while achieving comfort in his daily life. Does comfort have to come in 4 walls/a space itself? Or can it be achieved in just walls like Gary Chang?
With the main user group to be students and site to be the old Ngee Ann Polytechnic Loft, linked to the school via a bridge, the method of Gary Chang’s plan dissection was used to work and change one unit.
Shared Kitchen and Laundry Space
