Stepping into the Past
Celebrating the bicentennial of its founding this year, Singapore has retained enough historical architecture to satisfy any heritage buff, as a walk through the city’s downtown core will attest.
IT IS NOT TOO MUCH of a hyperbole to say that Singapore’s skyline morphs at an astonishing speed. Especially as, quite unexpectedly, the island-state holds the world’s largest collection of architecture by Pritzker Prize laureates and starchitects. Blink and almost overnight, a new building by Thomas Heatherwick, Ole Scheeren, Norman Foster, Moshe Safdie, or Daniel Libeskind has sprung up alongside masterpieces by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Kohn Pedersen Fox, Zaha Hadid, Kenzo Tange, Kevin Roche, Paul Rudolph, I.M. Pei, and Richard Meier.
But beneath all that 21st-century gloss and tent-pole names, an older, perhaps grander, Singapore still pulses. That built heritage is what makes Singapore such a pleasure for flâneurs, especially in the early morning and late afternoons when the tropical sun is more forgiving.
For some, an ideal walking tour involves a leisurely meander through the neighborhoods of Little India, Kampong Glam, and Chinatown for their cacophony of sounds, music, and chatter; for their collection of temples and markets; and for their urban footprint of narrow alleys lined with period architecture that are remarkably intact some 200 years after Stamford Raffles, the founder of modern Singapore, first demarcated these quarters for the diasporas of Indians, Malays, and Chinese.
But for die-hard architectural treasure hunters, it’s the half-a-square-kilometer swath around Raffles Place that best captures a remarkable snapshot of Singapore’s sepia-toned past.
Stand in the middle of Cavanagh Bridge at the mouth of the Singapore River. From this graceful cast-iron suspension bridge built in 1870, the island’s history coalesces into an extraordinary skyline. Though sleek, gleaming skyscrapers with their soaring glass and steel frames dominate the horizon, the greater pleasures are to be found in the older, lower-slung silhouettes that dot the banks of the river.
Here in the long shadows cast by towers built by I.M. Pei and Kenzo Tange, is a charming stretch of multihued 19thcentury shophouses. Hugging the sinuous riverine curve, Boat Quay was once a raucous strip of shops, warehouses, offices, and homes for the coolies and businessmen who made their fortunes off the trading barges that pulled up here. These days, the carefully conserved buildings house lively, if touristy, pubs, cafés, and restaurants.
And just across the river on its east bank, the imposing civil offices of the old
colonial British administration have been meticulously restored and repurposed into the Asian Civilisations Museum, soigné eateries, and drama centers, alongside the mid-19th-century Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall.
Of particular note is the Arts House. Today a boutique multidisciplinary arts center that hosts everything from writing workshops and poetry slams to foreign film screenings, the graceful Palladian pile has, since its 1826 commission to the great colonial Irish architect G.D. Coleman, been a courthouse, Council Chambers, Supreme Court, and Parliament House.
Walk another block north to take in the neoclassical glory of the early 20th-century Supreme Court and City Hall buildings, which were made over in 2015 by the Paris-based Studio Milou into the National Gallery Singapore. At around 64,000 square meters, the bones of the original interior spaces—the old courtrooms, light-filled marbled public corridors, and timber paneled judges’ chambers—have been preserved as a sequence of generously proportioned gallery spaces that house the world’s largest collection of Southeast Asian contemporary art.
Stand in front the National Gallery and look out over the green expanse of the Padang. At weekends, the field, which is bookended by two of Singapore’s oldest private clubs (the Singapore Cricket Club and Singapore Recreation Club, founded in 1852 and 1883, respectively) echoes to the whistles and cries of a rugby match, and the baritone whack of cricket balls.
But there is a less bucolic palimpsest. In 1942, during the Japanese occupation of Singapore, Singaporean and British civilians were rounded up on this lawned patch before being taken to the POW camp in Changi in the east. Three years later, Lord Louis Mountbatten stood on the grand steps of City Hall and accepted the official Japanese surrender from General Seishiro Itagaki. And in 1959, the newly elected prime minister Lee Kuan Yew chose those same steps— this time, facing a Padang filled with celebrating locals—to declare Singapore’s independence from Great Britain.
Just beyond the Padang is Marina Bay. Only a few decades ago, the waterfront was a hive of boats and sampans. Today, its eastern flank has been enclosed by a new CBD, the futuristic twin biodomes of Gardens by the Bay, and architect Moshe Safdie’s towering triptych: the Marina Bay Sands casino and resort.
From the Padang, walk northwest toward St. Andrew’s Road. Two centuries ago, this was a stretch of pastoral land framed by dirt tracks and orchards. In 1835, the ever-prolific Coleman built St. Andrew’s Cathedral in an English gothic style with a softly glowing white facade made of shell lime, egg white, sugar, and water from soaked coconut husks.
Though St. Andrews Road is now a busy thoroughfare, the cathedral— with its elegant interior of fine filigree plasterwork, soaring arches, perfectly proportioned porches and doorways, and pews made of rattan and teak—remains one of Singapore’s best-kept secrets for a
quiet, contemplative retreat.
A few blocks to the east is the Armenian Church. Officially called the Armenian Apostolic Church of St. Gregory the Illuminator, this bijou pile was the first Christian place of worship to be built in Singapore and is generally regarded as Coleman’s masterpiece for its contained elegance. A small church, it seats barely 50, the number reflecting the size of the Armenian community when it was built in 1836. Clad in white stone, it is laid out in the shape of a cross and features triangular pediments and porticos held up with slender Doric columns. Ever the thoughtful gentleman, Coleman designed the porticos in a way that allowed horse carriages to be drawn right up to the church so that ladies could step out directly without dirtying their dresses.
A little distance away stands Chijmes, a vast dining complex on the restored grounds of the former Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, a school and convent for orphaned children. In 1854, four nuns from the Congregation of the Sisters of the Infant Jesus arrived in Singapore to start a noble, charitable enterprise that continued till 1983 when the school relocated to new premises.
Today, amid the lively haul of bars and restaurants, the toll of the bells from the neo-gothic chapel is a charming echo of the past, not least in the gorgeous stained-glass windows (created by the celebrated Belgian artist Jules Dobblelaere in 1903 of 30,000 pieces), the delicately carved columns of tropical fruits and animals, and the row of laughing Buddhas engraved in the clerestoried windows beneath the former dormitories in the West Manor—the latter a tribute by the convent to the early Chinese merchants who supported the orphanage and construction of various buildings on the grounds.
In many ways, buildings like Chijmes and the National Gallery Singapore represent an ongoing effort by Singapore’s
urban planners to preserve a balance between past and present and future. Part of the impetus, says architect Dinesh
Naidu, co-author of Our Modern Past: A Visual Survey of Singapore Architecture
1920s-1970s, is fed by commercial interests. “Retro is very in now. I also think people now regard older buildings as a reminder of a more romantic past. Modern architecture has now progressed enough for us to see the value of the earlier buildings.”
And in downtown Singapore, with its trove of historical landmarks, the value of that heritage is clear to see for visitors and residents alike.