By the Order of Love | Voices
Khoo Peng Beng, one of the festival directors of Archifest 2022, reflects on the delightfully surprising theme of the festival and how to foster peace, community, hope, trust, friendship and hospitality through architecture.
By Khoo Peng Beng -
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Voices is a column on Home & Decor penned by personalities within Singapore’s design and arts community on their recent projects. The column offers a behind-the-scenes look at operations and insights on how these initiatives could benefit local homeowners and the design community. The opinions expressed in this section are not affiliated with the publication’s editorial board.
Imagine us all steering a big ship into an unknown horizon. Imagine that every decision we make is aggregated to either take us into darkness, strive or peace. How would we steer this ship together into peace?
Planning an architectural festival in four months felt a lot like that. There were so many moving parts, so many relationships to weave together. Belinda and I, as festival directors, could not weave this tapestry alone.
We needed fellow sailors to jump in and sail this ship together. However, these sailors would need the faith, and to trust in our vision, as it was not something that they could touch or feel.
As Belinda and I pondered over this festival and the invitation we wanted to extend to all, we felt the need to create the right atmosphere for conversations and experiences where everyone is drawn to think about the deepest motivations in our hearts.
As a city, Singapore has topped many categories - best housing solutions, best airport, best designs in a number of other categories. As we strive to be the best, the most renowned, the happiest and the richest, we may sometimes leave behind what is core to our souls – relationships that matter.
Singapore has created the most stunning city of glass, marble and steel, but our young are increasingly reporting greater confusion, loneliness, hopelessness, fear, shame and anxiety.
On this basis, we believe that beyond the beauty of material arrangement and order, the design of spaces in our city should foster peace, community, hope, trust, friendship and hospitality.
While the Covid-19 pandemic literally killed many people, the culture of fear and anxiety that results in spiritual death is perhaps an even more terrifying pandemic.
How, then, can we design a city that is conducive to healing and restoration? This became the inspiration for the theme of Archifest 2022: The Order of Love.
Love bears different meanings for different people. The Sanskrit language alone has 96 words for love. Within our community, many associate love with care, kindness, sacrifice and so on.
The definition of love by philosopher Thomas Aquinas, that love is to will the well-being of the other, resonates best with Belinda and me.
Our well-being depends on the well-being of our planet, our physical self and our metaphysical self over a period of time. The understanding of our interdependence and inter-relatedness with the planet and with one another led us to form the three categories of inquiries.
To create physical forms out of these intangible qualities, we invited seven teams of designers to create seven pavilions exhibited at the City Gallery at the URA Centre.
The Connection, Freedom, Play, Unity in Diversity, Common Good, Justice and Restoration pavillions are all unique and attempt to make tangible the qualities that we feel are critical to love.
Archifest 2022’s Freedom Pavilion at the URA Centre.
We invited seven panels of speakers to help bring our conversations deeper into various topics such as an economy of well-being, a city of well-being, care of our Common Home, and conversations with our pioneers to pass on seeds of wisdom.
We created a trans-contextual conference with the best features of live and zoom conference rolled into one sensorial experience.
As we worked towards expressing the Archifest 2022 vision, all the lines of connections started forming an intricate symphony that resounded the order of love itself.
We learnt that the more we willed the well-being of the other, the more we received in return. Love cannot be stored or compounded for interest. Paradoxically, the more love we give, the more we receive.
As with the organising of Archifest 2022, co-creating the future of humanity can be represented by the collective steering of a ship into an unknown horizon with only our vision as a guide.
Architects Belinda Huang and Khoo Peng Beng, founders of ARC Studio Architecture + Urbanism, who were lauded for developing socially meaningful, community-focused projects.
We are at an inflexion point where our super-exponential population growth is affecting the biosphere that keeps us all alive. Environmental restoration and social equity are the two greatest challenges of our time.
We are all called to be the bearer of light for the ship we are all collectively steering into the unknown future.
To navigate towards the safest and most peaceful future is to make absolute love, which transcends time and space, as our beacon. To love absolutely is to care infinitely for the highest well-being of the other.
By anchoring ourselves on that eternal and unchanging love, and willing the well-being of the other while we collectively design our city, we will find a sure way towards a safer, more peaceful and beautiful future.