Our National University of Singapore masters course in resort design wound up on November 20 with a rapid-fire mixed-mode crit session. Reviewing remotely were Darlene Smyth (who wrote the book, literally, on Bedmar and Shi), Susan Tan, Senior Design Director for IHG and David Gowty of Hassell, Brisbane. Matt Shang, founder of interior designers MSDO, joined in person. After fourteen weeks of focused research and design effort, eleven students presented their innovative work in four short hours.

Launched late in 2020, Haven is an imprint of the Edge, Singapore’s leading business and investment weekly. Haven’s inaugural issue features interviews with some of the most prominent names in the interior design and architecture industry, including our Director, Fiona Nixon.

We’ve had fun over the past few weekends playing with Microsoft’s 2020 release of Flight Simulator. With a new world map utilising Bing Maps’ satellite imagery and AI to re-create the terrain of the entire planet and populate it with building models, vegetation and water, we wondered whether the game would be useful as an analysis tool. And indeed it is, allowing us to pay flying visits to sites currently blocked by physical travel restrictions.

Gaming Engines are allowing life-like (or less-so) worlds to be simulated in real-time. Where does this technology leave architects? With an expanded field of operation or a narrowed scope of actual buildings catering to tactile, aromatic and acoustic experience?

Fiona Nixon and Kristian van Schaik both graduated from RMIT University and spent nearly two decades working in Asia for leading architectural firms before merging their practices to create STUDIO NvS.

We recently happened upon the ever-growing online image collection at the M+ Pavilion of West Kowloon's under-development cultural precinct. What an incredible archive of the last 80 years of Asian architectural modernism.

We’ve reached the halfway point in our semester at the National University of Singapore, and this week the students presented their work in progress to a distinguished panel of critics.

STUDIO NvS Director Fiona Nixon continues her engagement with the NUS School of Architecture in 2020, this year running a master’s studio in luxury resort design titled ‘Grace, Peace and Place’.

Pedestrian bridges knotted from riverbank roots, fish-farm landscapes that filter urban wastewater and houses woven from dried reeds that can be relocated within a day. These examples and many inspiring others are uncovered in our recently-arrived copy of a new Taschen publication.

Singapore hotels are open for staycation business.

What do the Tourism Board's new guidelines tell us about future hospitality design?

STUDIO NvS have recently been exploring projects in the mountainous west of China, but Kristian isn’t the only van Schaik fascinated by the region’s history and culture. Brother Sam is a world authority on the history of Tibet.

The Venice Architecture Biennale 2020 is unsurprisingly postponed. Fiona Nixon was Architecture Australia Magazine’s official correspondent for the festival in 2016 and reviewed the installation at the then new Australian Pavilion…

Deep green galleries contrast creamy classical busts. But is it a whitewash?