Singapore Archifest 2024
The performance of measurement
Singapore Archifest is an annual architecture festival commissioned by the Singapore Institute of Architects. For its 18th edition, the festival returned with the theme “The Performance of Measurement: When is Enough, Enough?”. This curatorial direction built upon the ongoing lines of inquiry that began at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, where Singapore’s pavilion posed questions about visualising and measuring intangibles like love, connection, and freedom.
Our initial task appeared straightforward: create a graphic response to the theme. However, we struggled with the theme’s ironic concept. The Singaporean impulse to quantify everything, even emotions, was both a point of contention and departure. Buildings and the built environment are designed according to measurable and quantifiable standards, but a community’s interaction with their environment is intangible and not assessed within these same markers. We simply cannot measure the unmeasurable.
Design as critique and performance
To address these complexities, we first proposed a bold name shift, inverting the title and its focus. This simple semantic change reframed the festival’s theme, re-emphasising architecture’s raison d’etre through evoking the intangible. This linguistic shift also served as both a response and a meta-critique of the original exhibition at the Venice Biennale. It allowed us to embrace the unmeasurable and explore the concept of measurement as a performative act instead of rigid quantification process.
Measuring the unmeasurable
Utilising P5.JS, we fed photos and questions posed at the Singapore Pavilion into the code, resulting in a series of interactive, letter-based visuals that became the anchor of the festival's branding. The reimagined visual identity leaned towards abstraction to convey these elusive and intangible qualities. Our use of a monospace font within a gridded layout reflected the theme of measurement, while also highlighting the ironic performative act of quantifying what truly cannot and should not be measured.