Lecture Response 1

THE ONLY WAY IS UP [SHELTERED: DOCUMENTS FOR HOME]Panel discussion.                                                                                 6 Nov 2015 NLB LVL 1Firstly, an excerpt (mixing in some views of mine).-          Prof Jane M. Jacobs, Head of Urban Studies and Director of the Division of Social Sciences at YNC. Expertise: urban studies, postcolonial studies and qualitative urban methods.
Book! Buildings must die: a perverse view of architecture (MIT Press, 2014)-          Debbie Loo. Studying doctoral at NUS. Project, Passages Home.
-          The Saturday Projects (Felicia Lin, Jolene Lee, Wong Zihao). Familiar landscapes with unstable, unfinished or unwritten expositions.-          Moderator: Dr Lilian Chee. UCL doctorate; A.P. at Arch. NUS. She conceptualized the architectural essay film 03-FLATS (2014) which formed the initial impetus for Sheltered.The only way, it seems, is up, sometimes... The verticality of HDB, while being a success story, has also generated a whole complex of unanticipated movements.Prof Jane:She talks about home as something banal. While the HDB has achieved all these fantastic accolades, and Singapore has achieved what nobody has done with public housing, but there’s still another definition of home beyond that. Home links to identity. A person’s identity, our nation’s identity. Home is about the intangibles as well. It can be mobile and fluid, a concept rather than a concrete physicality.She quotes Liu Thai Ker. (Side track: He’s the director of RSP Architects Planners and Engineers! His father is Liu Kang, a local pioneer painter. He was head of HDB and URA. Chairman of National Arts Council. STPI Chair. Etc etc etc.) – HDB, as big as residents can afford.
Can the HDB be more than pragmatism? Or is it already?An example of a magazine – Our Home. In Oct 1983: with a HDB as the background; in the foreground, a NDP kind of party with people dressed in red and white, holding up the HDB flag (red on white). If we look at it in terms of rhetoric, we see a message of the heartland starting to emerge. HDB built these; HDB employs the common man, proud to serve and live in these flats; HDB as an icon and backdrop to Singaporean life. We can see it not only as propaganda, but also as an instrument of national building (on the flip side).But at the same time, are there correlations between high-rise living and suicides? She cites a paper, a thesis written in the 1980s. Applying sociology to architecture; high-density living and its negative aspects. As a new way of life, new typology of buildings they led to new forms of social conflict, such as washing clothes and with dirty water from a mop dripping down. The paper shows that a high ‘worry index’ is linked to living on higher floors. Is there a correlation?**********************Firstly, her talk about the stresses of high-rise living brings to mind some booklet I took from NLB before the panel discussion. About how Chinese coolies smoked opium, partly as a means to forget about their cramped conditions… So now that Singapore doesn’t have all these vices, how do people relax?Also, is high-density living really a new typology? When we know that HDBs were built to replace the slums, shanty towns, coolie houses, as a social good. Perhaps it may be more accurate to frame the social conflicts as what happened when people are inconsiderate and forget that others live above and below. How has the situation changed now? The study tried to imply that people are more stressed on the higher floors. But it seems that nowadays we like living on higher floors to catch the breeze. New HDBs – think BTOs like Skyterrace@Dawson – are up to 40 stories high. How has our ‘happiness index’ changed with time?I feel that there are more questions than answers to be had for Jane’s short talk. But I guess that her main point is that home is more than just four brick walls. It’s also a concept. Home – Singapore on a macro scale. Propaganda-like images help to influence that for sure. But more often than not, we live in Singapore. Born and bred here. I think it’s no surprise that people get attached. It’s more than just HDB living, but also about the lives we lead around it that wrap around the architecture, give it greater meaning. No matter how big or small the flats eventually turn out to be, there has to be a degree of sentimentality, especially if (since) a good enough job has been done of making a way of life.Perhaps, as our definition of ‘home’ changes, the architecture has to adapt to the needs of the people. How does the architect find that expression in the façade of a building for instance? Especially as in Singapore, the buildings seem to get torn down every so often. Perhaps the look of our public housing will have changed with the times in a generation.Debbie Loo:She started off with a poem like thing which I cannot remember.What she did recently is to go to pearls centre, located at 100 Eu Tong Sen Street, upon the invitation of her friend who lived there, and it became an obsession to her to document the lives of people unseen. She showed pictures of the intangibles of a home, and of people making homes where there wasn’t supposed to be one: umbrellas hooked and hidden behind doors, a fridge in a smoke stop lobby, signs of habitation, graffiti on the walls in Chinese that ask for the return of Imperialism and the emperor – an explicit denial of capitalism.It is clear that the residents have taken over the building and that whatever intent the architect originally had for it is now subsumed over the years by the various tenants of the building. We have to bring in Yangtze Cinema, which started off showing wuxia films, but changed to softcore porn (R rated flicks) upon its re-opening in 1995. Along with that came a reputation for seediness and sleaze.Debbie’s photographs remind me of my Intangible City assignment where we were supposed to go about Singapore and take 12 photographs and write a poem. There it already was, a building full of character and characters with words in it that existed to be taken, and she captured it perfectly through her lens, showing the exact same subjects I wanted to show – the ageing of architecture, the lines and blackened dirt marks telling volumes of the stories untold that we could all see, if only we looked a little harder. Debbie talks of Paul Auster, who makes scribbles of a detective who traces someone through a building and eventually comes up with fantastical routes that seem to trace out letters that perhaps are the echoes of the building itself. Debbie does rubbing on the floors and parts of Pearls Centre and leaves some of her marks behind, as her own contribution to the place. What has been left there – torn-off posters, scribbles of I-love-yous, all speak of the history of the place just as her marks do. And she says, someone will come along and interpret them and add his or her own mark too, and so it continues, until the building is torn down and demolished (which it was in August).*******************************************This was honestly the talk that made the most impression on me, because it resonated with me. In reading up more on Pearls Centre, I discovered just how sleazy it was. On Coconuts Singapore, Robin Hicks talks about old men who go to the cinema to masturbate and satisfy their desire for intimacy. But more than that, it reflects an undercurrent for “Singapore’s biggest social ill – loneliness” and the Yangtze cinema is a market for a specific audience on coping with this. I really began to see the dark underbelly of Singapore. This draws parallels with stories I’ve heard of aunties and uncles going to floating casinos over the weekends to gamble, and with the current work we’ve been doing – looking at the busy metropolitan lives of the people in the city and what consequences they may have – Debbie’s work came across as apt.Many questions were raised (in my head) that may not have answers to them: what happens when the architect is gone? When the architecture is no longer needed, slated for destruction and for a new building to takes its place – in paraphrasing Hicks’ words, to make way for yet another shopping mall even more soulless than an airport? When people start forgetting and the building doesn’t really exist anymore because it is being treated as though it isn’t there anyways, and both it and its residents wait for death like old people in a geriatric home. It’s just so sad. And I wondered, who will remember? Who will come by to pick all these memories up? Who will document and make sure we remember? So what, even if that happens? What will change, or is anything meant to change? And what can the architect do about it, if he can even do anything about it?I asked Debbie the question of whether she thinks that buildings can be designed to prevent this from happening – that hopefully we can design ourselves out of this problem of old, forgotten buildings and people. With the preamble during the open-floor discussion – that architects are increasingly involved also in the end-stage of a building’s life, in conservation and documentation and even redevelopment – are architects only to document and move on? Does a building just die? Or can it live on indefinitely while preserving its heritage?While she did not answer my queries directly, I sort of found my own answers through the discourse that followed. I came to the conclusion that buildings do, eventually, die. Prof. Jacobs’s view that “buildings must die” led to revelations on decay and consumption – that architecture can be treated as a process, not as a product. The architect’s job seems to be over once the building is completed, and tenants take over and give the space added meaning instead. Perhaps one more question should be: how can the architect be further involved in the life of a building? Debbie treats buildings as having a life as well; they age as society ages. But dying is a natural process. Perhaps it may be too idealistic to want to save each place in words, photographs, videos. Sometimes, all we can do is to preserve memories of important, iconic buildings past their prime; document; and these serve as reminders of a bygone era. And the new building erected in its place will hopefully try to remember what stood in its place before and reflect that in some way.But likewise in a metropolis, there is ever-growing consumption and buildings may just get conserved and repurposed. As ‘new’ buildings, they, too, have to then reflect their heritage in some form; pay homage, and tell the world not to forget what it was in its previous incarnation.Maybe when architects design, we have to try our very best to understand every aspect of the plot of land. All the better if the building hasn’t been demolished. We need to understand its history: what was growing on it before; what significance did previous buildings have; what does the client need and how do we take the past into account and design, for the present, a place that grows into the future, grows old along with its residents and tenants.It strikes me that in much of what I’ve learnt about history so far, it always seems to involve the Hegelian dialectic in some way or another. Let me amend his words to a slightly different meaning of current and counter-current: for every movement, there is always an anti-movement; and then something else appears to synthesise the two; and then another counter-movement appears, and so on and so forth. For the ‘Dark Ages’ and Gothic, there was the Renaissance; for that, there was the Baroque; for the Baroque, there was the Rococo; for that, modernism and its multifarious smaller movements that comprise it; for the busyness of every life in Singapore, we Singaporeans have developed a deep nostalgia for pretty much anything from our childhood or that survives to be more than forty-odd years old. What will be the next synthesis that we come up with?The Saturday Projects:By three architectural assistants more or less fresh out of architecture school (I assume). Jolene is in Harvard on further studies.They talked about the architect not as the main maker, but rather, the tenants are those that take over. They are the second part of the story that has been left out (so far), the human, social aspect of architecture.They also examine and ask questions on what happens when the HDB flat, in all its ubiquity and hence anonymity, becomes a place of violence. Anonymity becomes a camouflage, makes the familiar unfamiliar – something they explored with their exhibition that uses everyday objects whitewashed to become recognisable, but yet not the same.They ended by encouraging the audience to go for the NUS museum exhibition Sheltered.***************They imply that when we study architecture, we need to consider, again, architecture not as a product of the architect, but also as a process that doesn’t really end until the building is gone – and even then it may live on in things erected in its place, or in memory, or as a hollow shell, much like our Chinatown of today, and especially as it was in the 1980s.Undoubtedly, though, their views have filtered into my response to Debbie’s talk.A question by Dr Lilian Chee, At what point does architecture become irrelevant? :This is my own interpretation of the discussion that happened.Somewhere, someone talked about the lifespan of buildings getting reduced from hundreds of years to tens of years, primarily because of the material used (I feel), because concrete is so ubiquitous. It seems as though buildings that have been erected are knocked down, too soon, in Singapore especially. Perhaps architects can make each building so unique, so special and emotion-provoking, that they don’t deserve to be knocked down after a few decades? This links to the idea of impermanence raised by one of the panellists. Architecture itself will never become irrelevant. But pieces of architecture most definitely will. It’s part of the whole system: build, destroy, raise a new piece of architecture, and repeat. It’s bound to happen in land-scarce Singapore. But in the process, are we losing something? Are we losing our identity? And if there were a resource crunch of the future, then perhaps it would be prudent to cater less to a consumerist culture and instead design for more permanent structures instead.Comments from a sixtysomething-year-old man who asked interesting questions, giving tidbits of information such as the moving of the previous occupants of Pearls Centre to People’s Park Centre and Complex:Along with Hicks or some other online article I read that said that the tenants simply move to another part of Chinatown, where they feel at home in a certain environment: If we extrapolate, when will this moving about stop? Will there always be places like Little Thailand in Golden Mile Complex, or Yangtze Cinema? Or will they eventually fade away when the government reaches out and crushes it? What will happen then? This brings to mind Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, talking about the hidden aspects of cities. My belief, though, is that every city will always have its hidden dark side, and that when one part of it is exterminated, it simply grows back somewhere else, finds a way to survive on the fringes.
*In conclusion, I’ve attended fourteen talks so far since the start of school, beginning with the ArchiEducator’s Forum. I believe that these discussions and lectures are part of a vital discourse on architecture. As architects continue to design, we must continue thinking about these essential questions, find our own answer to them, and adapt our ideas as times change, and influence the rest of the construction and civilian world when we really have a strong message to bring across.