This thesis explores the rise of ‘passion work’ — self-directed, often craft-based practices pursued for personal meaning and fulfilment. As more individuals turn hobbies into side hustles or full-time vocations, passion work has emerged as a quiet resistance to the homogeneity of corporate labour. It resists the conventional office, instead unfolding in improvised, adaptive, and intimate spaces embedded within everyday urban life.
Beginning with a personal investigation into denim upcycling, this project asks: how do we make room for pleasure in how we work? Through research into informal architecture, adaptive reuse, and the resurgence of the handmade, this thesis speculates on a working
city shaped not by productivity, but by care, joy, and autonomy.
Focusing on Shenton Way — Singapore’s financial district, defined by its rigid 9-to-5 rhythm and its standardized construction systems — the proposal imagines a quiet transformation: the insertion of small, modular sheds for various crafts and forms of work. These structures, scattered and elevated, respond to the site’s contradiction by offering alternative rhythms and relationships to work. Rather than attempt to solve problems of scale or infrastructure, this project speculates on the soft, humanised systems that emerge when people are given “rooms of their own” to pursue the craft they find meaningful — spaces that are adaptable, unique, and in resistance to the corporate
monotony of the contemporary city.
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Tutor's Notes // Rooms of Our Own presents a quiet radical rethinking of labour and urban space through the lens of ‘passion work’, a new mode of productive labour prevalent amongst Generation Z. “Passion work” customarily monetizes one’s hobby or leisure pursuit,
often done in snatches of time, across borrowed space and in the home. Drawing from Mei Yee’s own practice of denim upcycling, the thesis reveals an intimate understanding of both craft, spaces and times of practice, offering a critical counterpoint to Shenton Way’s rigid corporate order. The proposal’s key innovation lies in the insertion of modular, elevated sheds—light, adaptive interventions that carve out space for care, autonomy, and pleasure amidst a hyper-regulated district. These human-scaled structures resist prevalent narratives of worker productivity. They cultivate softer, more diverse rhythms of work, and social engagement. Attuned to context and cultural nuance, the thesis reframes the unused slack spaces of the city (precluded by strict urban design regulation) as a renewed site for self-directed making, with a view towards producing new architectures of labour rooted in joy and resistance.
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