Carlos Banon
Verticalised Grounds (Cover Artist)
Singapore | @carlosbannon
In a landscape where structure and soil become one, Carlos Banon imagines architecture as excavation rather than imposition. Based in Singapore, the architect, educator, and researcher fuses algorithmic precision with geological intuition. Verticalised Grounds stands as both title and ethos; a meditation on how buildings can grow from geology instead of conquering it. Banon’s architecture is not something placed upon the world; it is something unearthed from within it.
A co-founder of AIRLAB at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, Banon explores advanced computation and digital fabrication to reveal sustainable forms rather than fabricate novelty. His methodology feels archaeological: scan, listen, carve, reveal. Through AI and parametric logic he allows the site to dictate the solution, producing forms that appear inevitable; monuments born of patience.
“I don’t build on the earth; I reveal what’s already waiting beneath it.”
Carlos Banon (Cover Artist) | Singapore | @carlosbannon
Stone, Shadow, and Memory: Building from Within
In “Strate Living,” dwellings are sculpted directly into the cliff face, ledges and chambers formed from excavated stone recast into structure. By day, the mass reads as geology; by night, the cuts glow like veins of molten ore. The project merges shelter and strata, crafting a treaty between human presence and geological time.
“The Legacy Library” extends the dialogue. Shelves ripple along the grain of the cavern walls, each volume nested within sediment’s rhythm. Light seeps through fissures, revealing that knowledge itself is layered, not stacked. The library breathes like a living organism—heat, shadow, and silence intertwining into atmosphere. Learning, here, is excavation.
In “Where Stone Remembers,” Banon envisions a monumental hollow carved from rock, transformed into a cathedral of reflection. Workers appear miniature at its base, absorbed by the vast amber glow radiating from within. The structure emanates reverence without ornament, proving that absence can illuminate more than adornment.
Carlos Banon (Cover Artist) | Singapore | @carlosbannon
Carlos Banon – The Ethics of Embedded Design
Banon’s design philosophy merges computational rigor with tactile humility. Each algorithm is a chisel; each iteration an act of listening. For him, technology amplifies empathy rather than ego. By allowing digital tools to simulate erosion, pressure, and sunlight, he discovers patterns the hand alone might overlook. The result is architecture in conversation with its context; responsive, reciprocal, restrained.
Verticalised Grounds ultimately positions architecture as dialogue, not dominance. It argues that the future of sustainable design lies not in conquering terrain but in collaborating with it. Banon’s projects suggest that true innovation begins where human intention pauses; at the moment we let the ground speak first.
To stand before his imagined cliffs and glowing caverns is to feel both awe and calm: awe at their scale, calm in their inevitability. They remind us that progress and preservation are not opposites but partners in continuity. Through geometry, patience, and respect, Banon gives form to a new covenant between matter and mind.
His architecture does not shout; it listens. It listens to wind through stone, to water carving valleys, to light finding its way through fractures. Verticalised Grounds is his testimony that architecture, at its highest state, is not construction; it is remembrance.
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