Benjamin Lee
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I’m a designer currently based in Singapore, with experience in crafting design solutions for clients across the mediums of digital, print, and art direction. My passion lies in developing unique solutions that delight and inform the end user through design.
Archifest 2023
A festival identity in interim
Scope
Visual Identity, Web, Environmental Design
Year
2023
Completed at
Practice Theory
“Interim: Acts of Adaptation” is the overarching theme of the 17th edition of Singapore Archifest. It is an invitation to rethink our built environment as continually being in a state of
transition. Presenting itself as a lab, this edition of Archifest investigates the potential of adaptive architecture as the mode
of action in response to pressing environmental, cultural, and technological change.
Evident in planning and policy language, Singapore is no stranger to the “interim” with its range of discrete stopgap interventions. While this thinking has powered the nation through a hyper-efficient production of our cityscape, we can no longer afford to be uneasy about the temporal necessity of continual change, as our city matures and navigates an increasingly volatile world.
Time and change
The visual identity echoes the festival’s call to revisit architecture’s relationship with time and change – architecture is more robust when it can adapt. Therefore the identity should serve as a medium to facilitate its evolution. This fundamental idea led us to anchor the graphical approach in a constant frame to house changing contents – scans, imagery, and text – that evolve across the festival duration.
The festival logo follows suit by being ever changing through motion and variation. There is no singular finalised logo but rather a collection of logos that further the idea of time and evolution. The logos were also hand-crafted with tapes and markers which are tools of annotation which is an interim act in and of itself.
Annotations through the city
Similarly, the festival functions like a giant hand that annotates the city, through an overlay of light and temporary elements. The identity manifests through the city through these annotations. This resulted in environmental and spatial design that embodies the spirit of interim through mediums such as tape, cones, flags and even scaffolding. In the same vein, a marketing campaign was also crafted with photographer Fabian Ong to capture images of festival posters at interim sites across the island which conveys the festival as a dynamic movement rather than a fixed and final outcome.
From every touch point, digital to physical, the identity utilises material, texture and found media to manifest a sense of transience and interim. Asking ourselves, how can architecture and humanity adapt and evolve for the future.