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1987
A WORLD CLASS CITY DESERVES A WORLD CLASS ARCHITECTURE
A world class
architecture will not come about by recycling other people's ideas. It
will only come about through the development of a process in which our
intrinsic history, geography and talent are expressed with skill and integrity...
a number of pervasive mandates and attitudes have to be discarded.
The positive aspects of compactness, better communications and greater
possibility for interactive creativity have not been exploited. The tendency
is to cen-tralise and align all ideas. Following from this is the practice
of disparaging others whose ideas imply any criticism of our own. Together,
these mandates prevent the development of a diversity of design approaches
and a broad range of enhanced capabilities. As such, ideas from outside
sanctioned quarters are rare, and independent ideas are largely untapped
and diffused.
Two worlds seem to exist in Singapore. One in the government and the other
in the private sector. Each is almost totally insulated from the other.
Each sector is only just becoming aware of the potentials.
To raise national consciousness through design needs a conceptual breakthrough.
Foreign expertise has not broken any new ground. Foreign designs brought
to Singapore have not surfaced any new design issues or themes intrinsic
to Singapore. The designs are conceptually conventional and conservative.
They have not addressed any Singaporean issues. They were of course not
intended to do so. They serve only as corporate status symbols. We can
afford to look beyond, now that we have satisfied the status need.
Singapore's architec-ture and urban planning concepts have been influenced
primarily by two main forces during the rapid infrastructure building
phase of the last 25 years. The globalisation of the economy; therefore
the stress on foreign expertise and standards.
The sobriety and orderliness of the city is the result of the particular
brand of administrative rationality adopted and the lack of cross-fertilisation
of ideas and the consideration of alternatives. The result is the conventionalisation
of all design ideas.
The need has been to produce uniform results so as not to be accused of
being unfair. In housing, this is especially so. So long as designs and
developments are iden-tified with the single agency (HDB), no real alternatives
are possible. The process establishes its own architectural norms. In
the absence
of debate and dialogue, these norms freeze. During the first stage of
industrialisation, the administrative methods employed were expressed
in terms of the exclusive stress on speed, on economy and on quantity,
the impatience with debate, the penchant for uniformity, regularity and
discipline. These social and political values were also the architectural
values of the 60's and 70's. The two published conceptual designs for
Marina City (by I M PEI and Kenzo Tange) examined no new grounds. They
are merely geometrical and stylistic studies of urban form based on straight
line projections of the growth and role of the CBD. A vision of the nature
and the function of Singapore city in the 21st century was not projected
nor did they address, at the fundamental level, the advanced form of a
city in the tropics.
The proposals there-fore failed to impress or inspire the public on any
broad cultural, technological or eco-nomic issues of any significance.
How to reduce the discomfort and loss of energy involved when moving about
in the tropics? Can Marina City be designed as a dense living and working
City to reduce travel and movement and which is conducive for round-the-
clock activities? Where distances can be covered on foot and where the
environment is shady and well-ventilated? Where vehicular traffic is kept
at the periphery and where the interior spaces between buildings are shaded
with covered open spaces, having cool micro-climates and serving as informal
gathering places. Can new technologies tapping solar energy be brought
into such spaces to cool and to ventilate them? Can the roofs of large
covered outdoor spaces be used to collect rain-water and to provide energy
to run the essential services of the city? Perhaps reduce the humidity?
Can the city use the sun and use the rain as positive and poetic elements
in design rather than merely negatively in avoiding the sun and the rain?
Can the city be considered as one complex eco-system and be designed as
such?
The Tropical City concept serves as a process of mental eman-cipation
from the conceptual biases which have governed the design of cities in
the tropics. All our planning models are from developed nations in the
Northern hemisphere. Since the colonial period, there has been no basic
rethink. This can be seen in the planning of the city. The astonishing
result is that even today, most housing estates are designed with the
living areas of the apartments facing out onto noisy roads instead of
being turned around to front into quiet and cool interior landscaped courtyards
or parks.
The interiors of the housing estates by the public and private sectors
are largely occupied by carparks. In Tropical planning, carparks are better
on the fringes adjacent to the roads and highways. Basic ideas such as
this can only be implemented through overall town planning with appropriately
modified planning and building regulations So long as this is not the
case, individual buildings cannot fully and properly respond to the challenge
of designing for the tropics and air-conditioning is frequently the only
way to avoid the noise, dust and heat generated by roads and hard surface
areas. 50% of energy used in Singapore is for air-conditioning.
Some old cherished ideals which may have reached the point of diminishing
returns might have to be reviewed.
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