The Knowlton School is pleased to announce that Fernanda Loyola Cardoso has been awarded the inaugural Director’s Travel Prize for her proposal “Singapore: Architectural and Urban Contradictions in Addressing the Critical Zone.” The project makes use of Bruno Latour’s “critical zones” to investigate the environmental implications of the same “high-tech architectural and urban developments” meant to address climate change. 

Loyola Cardoso will travel to Singapore during summer 2024 to research that city’s Gardens by the Bay, a building project purported to provide sustainable green infrastructure.

Singapore, a global leader in innovative and sustainable architecture, portrays their green infrastructure in the Gardens by the Bay region as strategies that actively tackle their Critical Zone. Despite these notions, the architectural and urban phenomena present in Gardens by the Bay have infused practices of greenwashing, portraying an unrealistic image of sustainability (Schneider-Mayerson, 2017). The intended research aims to capture the unsustainable architectural and urban contradictions practiced in Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay to further understand the environmental outputs at stake in the Anthropocene.

As part of her research trip, Loyola Cardoso will visit the Gardens by the Bay and other sites to create orthographic and analytical drawings and learn about Singaporean conservation and infrastructural systems, conduct archival research at the National Library, Library@Chinatown, the National Gallery of Singapore, and the ArtScience Museum, and meet with local scholars and architects.

Loyola Cardoso is a student in the Bachelor of Science in Architecture program and is pursuing an Undergraduate Minor in City and Regional Planning. 

The Director’s Travel Prize expands experiential education and research through international or domestic travel and offers established bachelor’s or master’s students the opportunity to complete their educational career with a capstone experience.