Stroke of Genius
TDC & Associates masterfully blends art and design to create impeccable and impactful interiors
“Art brings life into a room. It helps to enhance the mood of the space and is a good conversation starter,” declares LH Chan, principal designer of TDC & Associates. This is precisely why Chan and his team strive to incorporate an elegant mix of art and furnishings in each of their projects, creating interiors that are beautiful, functional and wonderfully made.
The proportion and size of an artwork, followed by the colours on it and the mood it creates, are among the key qualities to look out for when choosing art for your home. In one project, the firm selected a light-hued artwork to “elevate the bright and airy feel” of the living room. “The light-coloured piece of art against a dark-veneer wall panel helps to enhance the seats around it. The dark-veneer wall provides a perfect backdrop,” Chan explains.
In the master bedroom, a painting was utilised to enhance “the clean and crisp feeling of the room”, augmenting the zen-like atmosphere of this space. In another room, the dynamic brushstrokes on a piece of art capture the eye while simultaneously promoting a sense of softness and repose.
To create a similarly elegant look, Chan recommends first determining where the focal point should be in the room. “Ensure that the colour theme of the art will help to elevate the room and not compete for attention with the room setting,” he says. If you’re arranging a few pieces together, do a mock-up of the composition before securing the works to the wall. Adds Chan: “Arrange and lay everything out on the floor or a table to get a sense of how it looks before putting it up on the wall.”
The meticulous manner in which Chan plans and carries out his projects has won TDC & Associates much praise from clients. “No request is too small to look into, and the attention to detail is important,” says Chan. “Every room is different because it was designed for a particular person with certain functions in mind, where the user’s habits, quirks, likes and lifestyle are fully reflected.”
Blender, Unreal Engine, Unity and Twinmotion—to create realisticlooking virtual environments.”
The difference today is that with the rise of blockchain technology and everything it made possible, from NFTS to cryptocurrency, there is more money and attention being lavished on the metaverse than ever before. And the technology surrounding the metaverse is becoming ever more sophisticated.
Designers have been astonished by the output of artificial intelligence tool Midjourney, which can quickly create remarkable images based on just a few keywords, raising the possibility that virtual spaces can be entirely self-generated. Meanwhile, companies like the Metaverse
Travel Agency are working on new tools like VR helmets— astronaut-like contraptions they call “metahelmets”—to create a more fully immersive digital experience.
“I feel like these virtual worlds have been coming at us in waves, and every wave gets us closer to something that could be a usable solution for the way we live,” says Razvan Ghilic-micu, chief editor of The Singapore Architect magazine and a senior associate with global design firm Hassell. Today, while much of the current conversation around the metaverse is “focused on the marketing and monetising of things,” he says, “architects could bring a social, cultural and environmental lens to it.”
Ghilic-micu is skeptical about the possibilities of purely digital worlds—“the current version of the metaverse just looks like a [crappy] version of a Wii game,” he says with a laugh—but he is enthusiastic about the ways it might enhance the physical world. “I see a lot more potential in augmented reality as the first step into virtual reality. The role architects could play is to
bring that excitement of virtual new possibilities that enhances the real world. Could you test architectural strategies or placemaking strategies in an ordinary mundane building to uplift the quality of the experience?”
Calvin Chua is doing just that. The founder of Singapore design studio Spatial Anatomy is currently working on a project called Beauty (Meta) World, which is part of a broader investigation into the future of Singapore’s shopping malls. Chua explains the goal is to find real-world ways to rejuvenate ailing malls, while also seeing if their spirit and culture can be recreated in virtual environments.
In this case, the focus is on
Beauty World Centre, a mall that opened in 1984 on the site of a much older open-air market. Through a user-owned virtual universe called Decentraland, the project takes input from local stakeholders and transforms it into lively reflections of Beauty World’s past lives “as a vice-laden amusement park for the rich opened by Chinese businessmen and the Japanese during World War II, as a popular but chaotic open-air market in the 1940s, and as a fresh resettlement mall that drew in regulars from the western and northern region of Singapore,” says Chua.
“The metaverse opens up exciting theoretical possibilities of recreating and reliving the different histories of a place over time that can be pieced together with input from the community,” he adds. It’s a way to harness the collective imagination into something that feels real, even if it isn’t strictly speaking tangible.
That sense of shared purpose is an important aspect: no virtual world can exist without inhabitants. “Belonging to something, a collective or a community, that’s what really makes a space,” says Eric Wong, a British architect interested in speculative architecture and virtual worlds. “That’s probably why
NFTS are so big, because you have an opportunity to connect to others.”
And in another sense, community is how architects