Rasa, Tabula, Singapura: A Taste of the City’s Future

In this essay for Something Curated, Khoo Peng Beng—curator of Singapore’s National Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale and Professor of Practice at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)—unpacks RASA-TABULA-SINGAPURA, on view until 23 November 2025. Marking Singapore’s 60th year of independence, the installation in Venice reimagines Singapore as a communal dining table, using architecture, food, and urban design to reflect on the nation’s diversity.

What might a city taste like?

It’s not a question architects or planners are usually trained to ask. But as Singapore marks 60 years of independence — and the world confronts challenges from climate to culture, loneliness to artificial intelligence (AI) — this question feels timely. What are we building toward? And what values shape the cities we call home?

RASA-TABULA-SINGAPURA, Singapore’s national pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, offers a multisensory response. Curated and designed by a team from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) — the world’s first Design AI university — the pavilion transforms a national milestone into a moment of reflection.

In a single generation, Singapore journeyed from kampung to cosmopolis. This journey — from necessity to intentionality — has always been guided by design.

Fifteen years ago, the 2010 Venice Biennale pavilion introduced the idea of “1000 Singapores: A Model of The Compact City.” If one Singapore could be planned for 7 million people, then 1,000 Singapores could house the entire world’s population — and we would need a land area equivalent to only 0.5% of the world’s total. It was a bold vision of superdensity: how a liveable city could exist with intensity, compactness, and careful coordination. It showed how a nation with almost no natural resources could engineer a high quality of life through planning, housing, and innovation.

But today, new questions arise. If the first six decades were about survival and growth, what about the next six? What does success look like now? Is it more than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or infrastructure? Can a city be measured by love, belonging, joy, and meaning?

A Table, A City, A Story

The pavilion’s centrepiece is a large dining table — or rather, a fragile tablecloth crumpled in just the right way to create structure. It becomes a suspended slice of Singapore’s urban landscape, laid out like a ceremonial meal. From west coast port to east coast airport, housing estates, iconic projects, parks, and civic spaces sit together on a rippling surface, hovering mid-air above a mirrored base.

On the table are models, maps, AI-generated visualisations, plates as projection screens, and 3D-printed forms that resemble kueh — the colourful Southeast Asian confections that are at once familiar, layered, and hard to categorise. These hybrid artefacts reflect Singapore’s multicultural roots and speculative futures: part dessert, part data, part building — all design.

This is not just a visual installation. It is a lived metaphor for how we design cities — not just to work, but to feel.

Designing with AI — and Emotion

Unlike past exhibitions, this pavilion is itself shaped by computational and AI tools — from concept to execution. The SUTD team used these tools at multiple stages:

Conceptual Framing: To ground the pavilion in real data, we initially surveyed public social media, local message boards, and news posts to build a corpus. Using AI, we compressed this data into a latent space, built clusters, and distilled key trends into discussion points that then guided the selection of buildings and content for the table.

Hybridised Kueh-Architecture Designs: 3D-printed artefacts were created using generative AI (multimodal large language models) to extract and synthesise formal features of Singapore’s favourite kuehs and architectural landmarks. These became speculative micro-architectures — edible metaphors in 3D form.

Defamiliarising Everyday Dining: Developed in-house with AI and crafted physically with upcycled teak by artisans, a set of six ‘neural monobloc black’ chairs defamiliarises the ubiquitous plastic chairs found in every Singapore coffee shop.

Projected Graphics and Lightscapes: We curated a wide collection of current images of Singapore. Image recognition and colour clustering algorithms sorted these into key topics — social, natural, urban, and hybrid — which were then stitched together via code to create immersive lightscapes.

This full-stack integration of AI — from storytelling to sensing — represents SUTD’s vision for Design AI: not as cold computation, but as a medium for empathy, insight, and co-creation.

Superdiversity by Design

Beneath the pavilion’s poetic surface lies a powerful idea: superdiversity. Coined in academic circles, the term refers to societies where differences in ethnicity, language, migration history, faith, and identity overlap in complex ways.

Singapore is a superdiverse city by design. Our multicultural harmony is not accidental, nor merely inherited. It is the outcome of deliberate policies: housing quotas, planning rules, legal frameworks, and symbolic acts — from shared public holidays to multi-language signage.

These structures form “boundaries for thriving” — frameworks that don’t erase difference, but honour it. In Singapore, we don’t choose between unity and diversity. We design for both.

Superdiversity is more than a social idea — it is an urban design challenge. How do we ensure shared spaces don’t homogenise culture, but sustain hybridity? How do we plan cities that allow people to live together with both proximity and difference?

RASA-TABULA-SINGAPURA explores this question, positioning the table — and by extension, the city — as a space of negotiation, celebration, and mutual care.

From Intelligence to Intelligens

The 2025 Biennale’s theme — Intelligens: natural, artificial, collective — echoes Singapore’s evolution. We were once defined by efficiency: the best use of land, water, roads, and time. But today, the measure is shifting.

The new city-making question is not just “how fast?” or “how much?” but “for whom?” and “how well?” This mirrors Singapore’s 50-Year Master Plan, the Green Plan 2030, and Forward SG Initiative — all of which point toward well-being, inclusion, and future-readiness.

This pivot is also the mission of SUTD. Founded to integrate design with technology and AI, the university cultivates inventors and designers — people who can navigate complexity with care. Whether through AI-driven housing models, climate tools, or heritage storytelling platforms, SUTD is training a generation to code compassion into the city.

A Mirror for the Future

The levitating table is also a mirror — literally. In the mirrored floor beneath, visitors see themselves reflected as part of the landscape. The message is clear: cities are not fixed objects. They are ongoing conversations. They must be tended, revised, and co-created — again and again.

Singapore’s compactness, long seen as a constraint, becomes an asset. It creates friction, yes, but also serendipity. It demands efficiency — and invites invention. It is a form of urban intelligence: a cultural algorithm refined by living together.

In the end, our cities — like a meal — are never finished. We taste, adjust, and reimagine them with every generation.

RASA-TABULA-SINGAPURA is not a retrospective, but a sketch of the possible. A table of stories and signals. A moment to pause — and to plan.

As Singapore moves into its next decades, we are called not just to build — but to build with heart. Not just to design systems — but to design meaning.

Just as we once showed how a city could thrive in spite of constraints, perhaps we can now show how it might flourish with feeling.



Feature image: Installation view of the Singapore Pavilion at La Biennale di Architettura di Venezia 2025. Photo: Giorgio Schirato