Tang Guan Bee, the pioneer architect and a fervent supporter of experimentation, delivered a lecture at the National University of Singapore in January: it was nothing short of a thinly veiled critique of the current state of architecture in Singapore.
He makes many good points- his diatribe against the prevailing pedagogy of the master-pupil studio is refreshingly ahead of our time; and his accurate reading on the prevalence of copycat local architecture that substitutes substance for style (read: louvers) is right on the money. Yet one cannot help but feel a bitter aftertaste at the end of his lecture- as poignant as his remarks are, there is a glaring blind spot in his understanding of the current discourse on identity in local architecture that only hurts his sincere call for more creativity.
Architecture for the early post-independence generation has become a badly abused vehicle for political cynicism. Nostalgia for time past, coupled with a dangerous dose of feeling restrained and cut off from their rightful heritage (may it be Malayan or Chinese) has created an entire class of pioneers that push agendas onto a new generation of architects who may not share their concerns- becoming the very thing they accused the politicians of being.
To put it flatly, there is a severe disconnect between the pioneer and the current generation of architects that stem from the earlier’s inability to grasp the profound meanings and differences that globalization has brought to the latter.
Tang Guan Bee advises students to “forget the West for a while�- seemingly wise words from an architect for which Anglo-Saxon influence is an adopted heritage. He revels in his latest foray with ethnicity- advocating a return to the roots and the Sinicization of our arts, strongly rejecting the artificial borders of country and the imagination of a Southeast Asian region.
However, for a generation for which English is more than just a language, this cannot be further from the truth. Divorced from the perception of Western influence as a form of imperialism, increasingly connected to the world and especially to the West- discussing true heritage for them is a minefield enough without trying to fabricate a nostalgic connection to faraway places and times past.
In the Corbusian Housing Development Board flats, Chinese Tu Lous and Javanese homes are as alien to the young as are their Nordic equivalents- arguably even more so if one has had IKEA furniture all his life. To discount this as irrelevant is to deny a very legitimate proto-tradition that is evolving in Singapore due to globalization. Time is as alienating as distance when it comes to identity- not addressing the issue of ethos will seriously handicap our ability to understand the Singaporean search for culture and identity in art and architecture.
In fact one can almost argue that our inability to build something distinctively Singaporean in ever changing Singapore is less a matter of negotiating the confluence of many immiscible primary cultures than the ever more turbulently violent continuum of time.
Any attempt to coerce this definition before its time would only reinforce the very thing these pioneers do not what to do. Until we understand that authenticity to self is key, not difference for the sake of being different, we will continue to point fingers and badger each other for being too this or too that, criticizing what is relevant influence and what is not - never realizing that we have already reached a time past where such iron-clad boundaries no longer have meaning. Only when we transcend these stylistic understandings will a truly Singaporean architecture fester and thrive.
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Everything that is wrong about architecture in Singapore
Tang Guan Bee, the pioneer architect and a fervent supporter of experimentation, delivered a lecture at the National University of Singapore in January: it was nothing short of a thinly veiled critique of the current state of architecture in Singapore.
He makes many good points- his diatribe against the prevailing pedagogy of the master-pupil studio is [...]
I think it’s a very piercing comment. This ‘transcedance’ is not just what will affect Singapore’s architecture per-se; but what will elicit a shift in the outcome of almost everything that Singapore, to this date, has tried so hard to achieve. We have to believe that we are capable of better, if not the same, as people beyond our shores. ‘Overseas’ no longer means ‘better’, but just ‘different’. Look what happened when the Chinese Stock Market fell. The rest of the world’s markets caught a bad cold. Before that, people believed that only the New York Stock Exchange could achieve that, but no longer. The “Asian Century” is upon us, and all we have to do, is believe it.
40 years on from the Singapore Conference Hall and its associated contemporaries, architects in Singapore are still hung up about appropriating modernism and ‘creating a tropical identity’. The current crop of local architects still create modernistic neo-plastic boxes that are generations divorced from their intellectual origins. No doubt some of these examples are of exquisite space planning or material craftsmanship, but there seems to be a dearth of cognitive criticism within the current landscape of architecture in Singapore.
What building is there that is not a permutation of the Miesian neo-plastic planes of the Barcelona pavilion, slapped on with a ‘tropicalisation’ of wooden/aluminium brise soleil? Even the best examples of our boutique condos that keeps popping up all over district 9 and 10 are simply Barcelona Pavilions repackaged into a slim-form factor and tessellated on top of each other.
If one is to buy into Deluzean philosophy, the onslaught of capitalism and its associated chaos into China’s homogeneous society has triggered a reaction that pushes it to excel after centuries of ’stagnantation’, if there is such a word. Outrageous buildings, estranged from its context, forms an allegory to this tide of globalisation. It is interesting to see local Chinese architects struggling to stem this tide with their monumental but exquisitely sensitive buildings juxaposed against state-sponsored buildings designed by European architects drawing influences from the French philosophy of Deleuze and Foucault. Disturbingly one can observe the same happening in Singapore as KeppelLand puts out its latest batch of starchitect condos.
In this context one might find cause for, as Kexiang so succinctly puts it, Tang Guan Bee’s “advocating a return to the roots and the Sinicization of our arts”, for a culture is being eroded by a state-sponsored onslaught of foreign ideologies. Yet, as Kexiang and JJ so rightly points out, it is not an issue of an erosion of identity, rather a lack of staunch confidence in local authenticity. Yet I question, what is local authenticity?
If authenticity means the aboveforementioned pretentious Miesian planes and boxes I’d rather have my ridiculous UFOs or floating oblongs that gives the finger to local context. At least these monsters will hopefully prod local architects out of their intellectual paralysis and navel-gazing complacency to approach their designs with more critical thought. We are past agnonizing over critical-regionalism or neo-tropicality, yet time and time again architects keep on rehashing these tired ideals for want of something new.
More importantly, current pedagogical practices of churning out competent copycats untrained in critical cogitation needs to be updated. We don’t need architects that can fill HR requirements of local architectural bigwigs; we need thinking individuals that, as a collective, seeks to establish a direction amidst this floundering. And I hope FFW can form part of this collective that can rise above this intellectual apathy.
I feel all this talk about identity just leads to nowhere. forget about this discourse about identity! i believe the west has gone beyond that! Move on people! time to embrace this earth, hug it a little, sayang it and make it a prerogative in your architecture!