One wonders how different things would be, had the Singaporean government decided not to put the fate of the country’s old Supreme Court and City Hall into the hands of an international competition. The objective was of course Singapore’s first National Art Gallery, to house pioneer and contemporary art. The competition was eventually won by France’s studioMilou which proposed an attenuated steel and glass roof structure that united both buildings into a cohesive complex for art.
In New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 50th anniversary birthday festivities include a monumental effort by artists and architects to envision how the central void of Frank Lloyd Wright’s museum atrium could be radically transformed. With imagination and sometimes with the help of reality-bending technology, they proposed more than 200 visions for the void, without ever having to set foot on the notoriously commitment-begging territory of competitions. Proposals for Contemplating the Void included one by Julian De Smedt Architects in particular, evoked a genuine desire for their realization, with an orange, curtainlike net that would spiral up through the space and that visitors could climb.
Urging people to see things in a different light, the show was a playful yet effective medium for exploration where competitions for the serious would rarely dare to boldly go. However disparate the circumstances of both museums – the Guggenheim’s 50th years signalling its old-dame status; Singapore’s National Art Gallery as a barely fetal set of plans – such artistic and maybe even quixotic activity might allow more minds to express what the new center for art in Singapore could become.
