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1993
TOWARDS AN ECOLOGICALLY-RESPONSIBLE URBAN ARCHITECTURE
It is strange
that in the past thirty years, architecture has moved further and further
away from planning concerns in the developed world and their Third World
cousins follow suit. Architecture journals and schools everywhere concentrated
on "difference" and style. They seem to withdraw from engagement
with real environmental issues. This seems strange when architecture and
city planning have always been totally interconnected. As architects today
shun the connection, they are reduced to styling and theorising.
To imagine architecture as autonomous from the city is thus an academic
dream. Unfor-tunately, this pursuit has become so much part of the image
culture today. Indeed, the self-imposed engagement with reality is even
taken to be a form of "resistance".
The tragedy is that it is a resistance against sym-bolic enemies when
the real ones go unnoticed. The basic design chal-lenge is to conceptualise
a sustainable form of planning cities and designing buildings and to develop
the requisite technology which does more with less. Sustain-ability as
a principle means that the fulfilment of human needs at any moment in
history is achieved in a manner which does not jeopardise the fulfilment
of future needs.
The Kampong Bugis DGP was an attempt, in 1989, by a team of Singapore
architects, planners and sociologist, using the Tropical City Concept,
to reconcep-tualise the relationship between architecture and city planning
at the metropolitan scale in a sustainable ecological manner. It was an
attempt to forge the critical link between ecology, city planning and
architecture. The study was fortunate to be able to be contrasted with
the Singapore Concept Plan review which was then concurrently underway.
The contrast revealed serious flaws in the nature of current planning
concepts and procedures. The issues outlined by the Tropical City Concept
developed in Singapore has broader implications beyond that of Singapore.
What then are the basic concepts of the Tropical City? The most fundamental
idea is that the further transformation of an existing city should pursue
a reurbanisation strategy rather than expand its curtilege any further.
At suitable
locations, i.e. near to amenities and transportation nodes, the density
of developments should be increased to the maximum that the local environment
can bear.
The Tropical City Concept is therefore a design strategy which attempts
to answer the questions of dense urban living in a geographical context
but in a manner which acknowledges the sun and the rain as positive elements
in design rather than as factors to be shunned.
One of the
challenges of the 21st century is the humanisation of city culture.
The design of the city cannot any longer be conceptually divided into
closed categories such as "architecture" and "planning".
Space in the city has to be conceived of as an integrated resource albeit
under different responsibilities. Architects must be bolder and planners
must be more knowledgeable.
A better design culture is called for.
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