HASEEF RAFIEI

The expansion of modern capitalism has caused urban villages in Malaysia to face extinction. Kampung Baru remains as one of the few surviving villages in the heart of Kuala Lumpur.  ‘Upgrading’ the village to meet the western image of an ‘ideal city’ would be detrimental to its social landscape. This project aims to promote the persistence of localism through the adoption of vernacular values. The Kampung Hybridisation seeks to combine and merge traditional Malay architecture with contemporary design that is sensitive to its local environment. It envisions the creation of a ‘contemporary kampung’ through the adoption of traditional values with new methods of fabrication.

Urban-Rural Dialectic

POD VENDING MACHINE

House Dispensing Skyscraper

Tokyo has long been the leading city for robotics and manufacturing. The city’s fascination towards science and engineering has changed how society interact with machines. Its culture and social patterns have long revolved around its obsession with automation and its high regard for automated systems. The proliferation of vending machines in Tokyo is impossible to ignore. As a result, these machines have minimised the cost of human labour, eliminating the need for sales clerks. The Pod Vending Machine explores the possibility of converting the real estate industry into an automated vending system.  

KAMPUNG HYBRIDISATION

THE HUT FACTORY

The Hut Factory is based on a dystopian future where energy becomes a crisis, thus resulting in an increasing demand for manual labour and man power in industrial sectors. In this era, the population survives on the manufacture of huts where its main users are the formal and informal communities.  The factory explores the dynamic between the formal and informal through acts of appropriation and reappropriation. The huts represent ‘freespace’; spaces without any predetermined function which encourages creativity and spontaneity in appropriation of space.

The Formal/Informal Dialectic

THE NEURAL MAZE

A project that explores the relationship between the human brain activity and the physical world. The neural maze is a product of creating forms that engage the human mind. The ‘maze’ is historically used my humans to study spatial awareness and intelligence. It has the ability to keep a person mentally engaged as they constantly attempt to re-orientate themselves to find their spatial bearings. The extensive fibre optic installation consists of thousands of neural networks which react to emotional response by reading a person’s brain activity.

Physical/Virtual Dialectic