Air Cons & Heirlooms

A Flaneur is an urban explorer — a connoisseur of the street. In our rotating column, guests share their musings, observations and critiques of the urban environment in cities around the world. In this issue, Singapore transplant Sarah Mineko Ichioka considers the tension between heritage and progress in The

Lion City

Only mad dogs and expat wives go out on a midday run.

Here she comes now, our latest arrival, slogging down the river path, red patches blooming on her exposed shoulders, brave face streaming with sweat. The average temperature hovers around 28°C year-round, and climate change continues to dial up the heat. Welcome to Singapore, sister. I — five years assimilated — hurry on, beneath my UV parasol, en route from air-conditioned office to air-conditioned MRT to air-conditioned lunch destination.

In this equatorial metropolis, a transplant from more temperate climes quickly learns that shade means safety; to leave it one risks sweat, burn, glare. At street crossings, smart pedestrians hang back in the shadow of surrounding buildings until the traffic light turns, then dash across. One also comes to appreciate the structures that create shade and a breeze through form and orientation, following Singapore’s multicultural lineages. Traditional Malay kampong houses with their stilts and deep eaves, a dwindling typology. Chinese shophouses with their louvred shutters and central courtyards preserved in small clusters around the city. Colonial-era five-foot ways that still provide continuous shelter along older street frontages.

Government agencies consider the climate in many of their own designs, from the breezy void decks and open corridors of the Housing Development Board estates that some 80 per cent of Singaporeans call home, to the new sheltered linkway being installed at my local MRT station. Not forgetting natural cooling infrastructure in the form of the two millionodd trees planted along the city’s roads, on its state lands and in its well-tended parks, and more than 100 hectares of high-rise greenery now growing on building facades, balconies and rooftops. Despite the high profile of many new naturally ventilated public buildings in the Tropical Modernist tradition, at present these remain promising exceptions to the airconditioned rule of new construction. The lure of continuous thermal comfort is powerful; one reason shopping malls remain popular. Some Singaporean colleagues tell me that they wouldn’t mind working underground. And in fact, extensive plans for subterranean developments are underway.

This is because — as nearly everyone on this 700-square-kilometre island will tell you — land is scarce. The nation has reached the legal limits of horizontal expansion through coastal infill, which undergirds some 20% of current land area, including the Marina Bay skyline — now ubiquitous as visual shorthand for its city — and is commemorated by the nowlandlocked Beach and East Coast roads.

Newcomers should relinquish any oldfashioned desires for stasis. Everything — from land to people — must remain fluid, because the accommodation of constant flux is key to competitiveness, to future-proofing. As a friend recently put it, ‘ We are always erasing ourselves.’ Although, when it comes to Singapore’s buildings, some appear to be more indelible than others.

In 2019 Singapore will celebrate its bicentennial, commemorating its foundation as a British colony. At this 200-year mark, a significant number of buildings commissioned and designed by imperial actors remain, preserved and repurposed for new uses. The National Museum occupies the former Raffles Library; the present-day Fullerton Hotel and Asian Civilisations Museum once housed government offices; the new National Gallery dramatically fuses the old City Hall and Supreme Court buildings. These all demonstrate the value of creatively reworking heritage buildings.

At the same time, multiple treasures of postindependence modernism, fewer than 50 years old and designed by Singapore’s pioneer generation of architects, face the threat of sale and demolition. These include Pearl Bank Apartments (Archynamics, 1976), People’s Park Complex (DP Architects, 1973) and Golden Mile Complex (also DP, 1973). The market can assign a dollar figure to the land beneath these buildings, but not (yet) to their architectural and cultural importance. A campaign is underway to raise and document public support for the preservation and imaginative reuse of these unique and internationally significant structures.

At time of writing, these buildings’ fates remain unclear. This relative newcomer admires the creativity and persistence of the local civil society groups and individuals engaged in the effort to reframe these post-independence icons as cherished heirlooms, rather than fungible real estate, even when it would be much more comfortable, more convenient, for them to simply hurry on towards the future along the path of least resistance.