1 - Singapore Songlines Revisited: The World Class Complex and the Multiple Deaths of Context

Summary

Abstract

This essay revisits Rem Koolhaas's classic meditation on Singapore's natural and built environment in the post-independence era. Building on Koolhaas's provocative depiction of Singapore as an architectural and environmental tabula rasa, it delves deeper into the twentiethcentury modernist conditions which produced the post-independence city state's decontextualized urban landscape. Singapore's city-making state policies have resulted from more than an official ideology of pragmatism; rather, they contain within them an official poetics with which independent creatives in the city must contend and negotiate. An analysis of these poetics, embodied in Singapore's official image of itself, reveals a pervasive preoccupation with ‘the global’ and a wilful desire to liberate Singapore from the constraints of history through creative urban destruction.

Keywords: globalization, global cities, urban renewal, heritage, post-colonialism

I turned eight in the harbour of Singapore. We did not go ashore, but I remember the smell – sweetness and rot, both overwhelming. Last year I went again. The smell was gone. In fact, Singapore was gone, scraped, rebuilt. There was a completely new town there. (Koolhaas 1995: 1011)

So begins Rem Koolhaas's classic meditation on Singapore as a tabula rasa, an architectural blank slate wiped clean and inscribed with new buildings, and then wiped clean again. It is a depiction of the city that resonates with me. In 1982, at the age of nine, I spent a delirious week with my family in that Singapore of ‘sweetness and rot’. My siblings and I ate croissants for the first time at the luxurious Oberoi Imperial Hotel on Jalan Rumbia near River Valley Road. We watched our parents haggle in the markets of Chinatown, where I first encountered cha kuay teow and found the bitter taste of the cockles more unsettling than the rat that ran past our table and out onto the street. We wandered afterwards wide-eyed through old Bugis Street. The entire trip was a reverie, a slice of pure and other exotica. For the next decade and more I yearned to go back.