‘PIRATED’ City --- Augmenting Reality through Fiction (work in progress, 3 more mths to go!)

Hey, thanks Hann, for helping to elaborate my thesis at the REAPS #1 (so this is the official name? sounds good!).

Yeh, I am excited and at the same time quite daunted by the scope and goals of this thesis I am attempting. Many ideas, many agendas, many plans.

What I have below is a more detailed description of what my thesis is about and hopefully then, if you can, to help send any stuff you think will be helpful to me. Appreciate it lots.

* I will be putting up an online ‘work in progress’ website + blog of my thesis (together with some other thesis of similar genre) within the next 1-2 weeks, so do look out for it), look forward to your feedback.

Thesis Statement:
Pirated City - Augmenting reality through fiction. To consider the potential of augmented reality as a transformative force that interactively informs, architecture, thus rendering the design process no longer exclusively a conscious and intentional act.

Thesis Intention:
To explore how previously ostracized influences and strategies can 're-infect' the city through virtual parallel universes activated by scenario planning mechanisms and deep understanding of the political, economical, social and site issues and simulating them real-time.
These alternative universes may then serve as a retroactive polemic for individuals to think critically and perhaps redefine the 'city'.

Thesis Project:
Pirated City propose to project the future of the city (Singapore) with reference and simulation from a certain past, gathering failed/rejected strategies and to implement these 'Pirated forces' to create ‘Pirated Singapores’ to explore new possibilities, unexplored paths and avoided strategies. Goal is to generate 2-3 scenarios.

Much Needed information:
1) 2d & 3d models and digital files
2) important news and planning articles involving the site Marina Bay or Singapore in general
3) information on rejected/failed strategies. Even strategies that have been announced but not yet fulfilled. (eg. world cup 2010)
4) photos, videos, clips, archives
5) analysis of the Marina Bay development
6) any other related information

Thanks for reading through all these. Hope you find it interesting and meaningful.

A tale of two shophouse back-alleys

Chinatown back-alley

Little India back alley

Here are snapshots of two shophouse back alleys I took during one of my vacations back. The former is soldierly clean, brightly painted, yet cold and lifelessly sterile. The latter is slightly disordered, somewhat grubby, yet teeming with soul and urban life. (Dare I say, the latter is more value-added since it involves economic transactions, rental payment, performance of service at affordable prices. And add the intangible value of urban interaction/activity.)

What are the lessons on preservation that we can learn from such a comparison? Is it enough to "sensitively restore" a building to its "former glory" in a clean and pristine state? Are we missing out on something more essential and soulful in our preservation efforts, in our need to talk real-estate re-rental/redevelopment dollars and sense? Could we and should we just leave some areas alone? (as they say, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it.")

What are your thoughts? (Let's start a discussion thread in the comments section.)

Urban Tokyo Series - pt.2: Showa Modern

This week, our Tokyo correspondent Darryl Wee gives us his take on Showa Modern, the genre of architecture that emerged in a culturally insecure Japan during the Taisho-Showa era and eventually blossomed into the Japanese modernism that we know of today.

Although never formally colonized, Japan has always been fertile nesting territory for Western cultural imports. The vogue for youkan (western houses) dates from Meiji, but it was only really during early Showa (1925 onward) that modernist architecture as such began to sink roots. Ever since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel was completed in 1923, Tokyo has cherished, if not actively fetishized, the industrial gleam of steel and glass, prizing their “negative” values like natural light and void space.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Tokyo Imperial Hotel, 1922

Maybe that affinity was mirrored in its own native building traditions: the one storey hiraya, a wooden house constructed from timber joinery and sliding screens; the row house (nagaya) stretching deep into narrow back alleys (rojiura) despite an extremely narrow frontage (supposedly a legacy from feudal times when merchants, for whom this dwelling was principally constructed, were taxed on their property according to the width of this frontage along the main thoroughfare); the tea room, or sukiya, that opens out onto a “verandah” overhanging the garden or doma (unfloored part of the house), the site of domestic urban-pastoral happiness, it seems - frothy matcha in tea bowls with Japanese sweets, sunning oneself while playing go, entertaining the house cat, etc.

Foreign architects working in Tokyo found warm reception for their open plan, well-lit interiors. Conversely, Japanese repatriate architects returned to plant Parisian arcades and brick buildings all over the city. Wright’s assistant on the Imperial Hotel, the Czech-born Antonin Raymond, enjoys something of a mythic status as a pioneer of rational, angular modernism. In suburban Suginami ward, Raymond’s Tokyo Women’s Christian University nestles next to Zenpukuji park. The church façade is riddled with geometric ventiblocks that resemble a Moorish arabesque, or one of Wright’s Mayan-inspired suburban stone villas in Hollywood or Pasadena.

Early attempts at reproducing a Bauhaus aesthetic
in Japan (Kikkawa Residence by Horiguchi Sutemi, 1930)

The record of Japanese product during the same period, however, was patchy. Mainstream Japanese modern before the war was essentially Bauhaus inspired-and-imitated. Apartment blocks were initially meant only for foreigners and Japanese repatriates. It introduced other curious and forward-looking youngsters, mobo and moga (modern boys and girls; essentially the Japanese generational equivalent of London’s Bright Young Things, or Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age dandies) to dosoku seikatsu – literally, life with shoes on. From wood, cinderblocks and rice paper, lounging on cushions and tatami, suddenly Tokyo’s moboga were capering around a living room in brogues and heels, perching on top of Bauhaus pipe chairs and sipping earl grey from English china.

The love of “modern” interiors was uncritical and unchallenged, and at first the Japanese didn’t so much import Western architectural expertise as borrow the glamor of its associations. The defining curves and stylized lines of New York Art Deco were props on permanent loan for the living spaces of Asia’s first burgeoning middle class urban consumer society.

European mod cons seemed as if they were flown in direct and retrofitted. From Paris, the shopping arcades or passages suddenly materialized in central Tokyo. The first indoor arcade appeared in the Maru office building in 1923, in the Marunouchi/Hibiya district, historically faithful down to the mosaic floors, Art Nouveau arches and wrought iron rails and balustrades. This would mark the start of an enduring taste for Reform Club smoking-jacket chic: heavy lampshades, thick wooden panelling and so on. Even today, this sort of gentleman's club atmosphere lingers in the more sullen corners and musty basements of Marunouchi and Ginza, still cherished by retro hounds with a taste for boardroom gravitas.

Japanese Pavilion at Paris World Exposition
by Sakakura Junzo, 1937

It would take some time for modernism as such to be fully digested by the New Japanese architecture, though. Maekawa Kunio, together with Sakakura Junzo and Yoshimura Junzo, completed the somewhat textbook-Miesian International Culture House (kokusai bunka kaikan, not to be confused with the late 50s concrete concert and event hall in Ueno park called just bunka kaikan) in Roppongi, which even way back in 1923 already had the stirrings of a foreigner-friendly cosmopolitanism. Late in his career, Maekawa would find the balance that would earn him his reputation as a leading light of the New Japanese Modern, successfully marrying his Bauhaus leanings with traditional “authentic” Japanese traditions.

Maekawa Kunio's Tokyo Metropolitan
Festival Hall, Ueno, Tokyo, 1961

His personal residence (1942), now dismantled and reincarnated in the open-air Edo-Tokyo architectural museum in Koganei city, is essentially a hiraya with more generous proportions and better natural light. It retains the free flow of space from the interior living room outward to the yard of the traditional Japanese residence, with an elegant concession to high ceilings and near-transparent sliding screen doors. The result is one of those rare instances where fusion rids each component of its limitations. The Japanese house managed to shed its usual gloom, and the modern glass box acquired a newfound warmth of materials. I’ll let the picture speak for itself

the Maekawa residence: its warmth and glow

Urban Tokyo Series - pt.1: Doujunkai Apaato and your New Hills Lifestyle!

Really Architecture is proud to present a new 8-part series on urban Tokyo. This series of columns will be penned by our guest writer/correspondent - Darryl Wee, urbanite hipster and former guest-Parisian/Bostonian currently teaching English in Tokyo. We hope that this series of entries may inspire our readers to take a fascination with the soul behind our urban environments.

In a city known for feverish new development and a generally shinier patina than most, gracefully decaying buildings are something of a Tokyo marvel. The average lifespan of public housing, shuugou juutaku or danchi projects, is 30 years. Especially during the feverish era of postwar rebuilding, entire tracts of faceless "tofu" apartment complexes materialized overnight; in an effort to rehouse maximum numbers of people at minimal cost, they were often in slapdash materials, marred by haphazard workmanship. Walls and floors were thin, uninsulated, prone to leakages and fractures.

Subsequently, and usually within that narrow 30-year horizon, upwardly mobile residents got fed up of dealing with the repairs, and simply upped and moved elsewhere, or else tore down and rebuilt in something more "modern," like concrete, tile and aluminium. Because they were provisional structures in the first place, preservation and heritage were never on the cards at all. Those housing blocks that were not part of this mass rehousing scheme, built before the war and spared the blitzing of Tokyo, however, were of a much higher quality.

(This was during a time before the rather twee self-branding campaigns began - now danchi are danchi, apartments are (non-public) apartments, "heights" denote a little more luxury, and "mansions" are a guarantee of comprehensive "western" mod cons like dishwashers and *gasp* combination toilet-bathrooms).

In other large metropoles, mid-century architecture, especially of the Corbusian "Unities of Habitation" variety, has become a motherlode of perfumed ruins, prized as "authentic" historical blank canvases for architects and photographers to install their studios in...Tokyo's the same (and very probably more smitten. In any cool cafe worth its half its pretentions, the magazine rack is sure to have the Casa Brutus "BIG 3 extra issue" featuring all the forgotten and obscure works by Corb, Wright and Mies - including an unbelievably curated architour of Chandigarh).

Perhaps this pre-war/post-war rift in quality control has fueled an even greater obsession with the charmingly creaky and paint-peeling walk-up tenements, sometimes with hardly anything else to recommend them except their venerable age. As recently as the Bubble 80s, though, Tokyoites were too busy speculating in French country chateaus and Manhattan penthouses to pay much attention to their own native deadstock of public housing, known collectively as the Doujunkai apartments.



Originally numbering 16 projects in Tokyo and Yokohama built in the late 1920s and early 30s, the sturdy, practical construction in reinforced concrete (fireproof and earthquake-resistant), ample ventilation and natural light made them ideal for dense inner city living. The majority were dismantled in the 80s, and presently only two remain, in the eastern "downtown" (shitamachi) districts of Uenoshita and Minowa.

More recently, there have been some sensitive facade treatments and adaptive reuse, however. Daikanyama, a satellite residential district of Shibuya, is something of an ongoing (half-century, and counting...) study in public housing on a human scale. Maki Fumihiko's Hillside Terrace, a sort of proto-Metabolist housing project, used clever partitioning and layering in an attempt to revive the idea of a "commons" in a public housing project. It has hosted unfinished alterations and progressive annexes since the 60s.

The Daikanyama Doujunkai was "upgraded" in 2000 to become the more condominium-ish Daikanyama Address. All this is somewhat besides the point, if you consider that Daikanyama, together with adjacent Nakameguro and Ebisu, is now part of one of the most gentrified sections of the city, cheek-by-jowl with discreet bars, sidewalk and canal-bank cafes, boutiques and all the rest of it. If the Doujunkai has "survived" in Daikanyama, perhaps it's only as some kind of token communal landmark that can then be safely reworked, helping to bolster land prices and spur on the nostalgia industry...

The other recent metamorphosis is of course Ando's Omotesando Hills, a studiously unconventional shopping mall that recalls the graceful curves of the New York Guggenheim; sure, it's about shopping and rabid consumerism, but at least Ando tries to disguise those ugly motives with his trademark artisanal concrete, sloping walkways and sensitive skylighting. The former Aoyama Doujunkai survives as the "gallery wing" of the complex (home to a number of art galleries) that shows off the open plan stairwells and simple frontal balconies to best effect.



Behind all this apparently sensitive redevelopment, however, is the sinister master vision of one Mori Minoru, who has in the past decade or so syndicated his network of "Hills": a sort of 21st century urban template of Bigness (I wonder what Koolhaas would have to say about this) for a scattershot Tokyo, a city he sees as languishing in the face of competition from Shanghai, Bangkok and Singapore.

His diagnosis isn't incorrect, but the prospect of his network of Hills, each one a vertically-integrated playground of curated leisure for moneyed internationals, strikes me as a Ballardian nightmare of super-rich gated communes. Already he has five major Hills in place; the first, Atago Green Hills, was completed in 2001, and Omotesando Hills opened to sharply-dressed mobs only last year. He stumbled a little over Roppongi Hills, because of the number of people he had to buy out and resettle, but the trend seems unlikely to abate.

Tokyo "Midtown", another live-work-play megaplex, is scheduled to sprout in the same neighborhood in a couple years. Like some kind of global superstructure plastered onto the lowrise Tokyo landscape, Mori's Hills would be appalling even in Singapore or Shanghai, but they are especially depressing in Tokyo, a city I trusted would be mature enough to fend off the grandiose urban ideals of some meddlesome technocrat.

For more of Darryl's writings, click here.

On Masterplanning

I found a short paper that I wrote a little over two years ago (Oct'05) for my "Architecture, Planning and Preservation-New York" class. Much of it still seems to make sense, though on hindsight, I realise that the issue is much more profound than this essay could cover. And my personal stand on this question (where sg is concerned) has also shifted somewhat from this essay. And so here goes:

Do you think it is possible and/or desireable to have a masterplan or masterplanner in New York today?

I begin this essay with a basic tenet: that all urban planners have the best intentions to make the city a better place to live in. Likewise, a master plan begins with such intentions to realise its vision of a utopian city by homogenising the city into a coherent whole. Herein lies its irony: that the well-intentioned realisation of this utopia replaces a rich multi-layered urban fabric with banality. Although planning has been synonymous with community destruction, this essay will argue for city intervention and how it can enhance neighbourhoods, not destroy them.

Some of the greatest cities of today were the result of master plans. Without Central Park and the grid, New York would not be what it is today. Without the boulevards of Haussmann, Paris would not be the iconic city of culture we know of today. One only needs to set foot on an unplanned city such as Kuala Lumpur (with the exception of its CBD) to understand the difficulty of living, walking, and finding one’s bearings in an unplanned environment. The haphazard, unplanned growth of a city can be as detrimental to the development of community and civic culture as planning is.

Manhattan & Central Park

Planning takes into account future growth trends, and problems. It is the means through which planners to take preventive, pre-emptive, and remedial action through intervention to avert future crises. Had not the Singapore government developed an outer ring of satellite towns and linked them to the CBD by mass transit in anticipation of potential growth, acute conditions of overcrowding and traffic congestion would have taken its toll in the immediate vicinity of the city centre.

The Singapore Experience - Linking an outer-ring of satellite
towns with mass transit

What makes master planning contentious is the confrontation between this need to deal with potential problems (e.g. highway construction) and the drawbacks of taking such pre-emptive measures (e.g. community and civic destruction). The former deals with the near-future and hence cannot be immediately perceived. The latter deals with the loss of the present and is thus met with a sense of fear and trepidation. On a more basic level, one often questions the validity of such forecasts justifying city intervention.

This confrontation between planner and community, between the need to pre-empt future growth and its negative ramifications gives rise to the legitimate discourse of master planning as being antithetical to a community’s organic growth. After all, plans are deliberate and often arbitrary. In particular, there is the contention that most planners do not respect the pre-existing fabric and the needs of the local community in their decisions.

Yet, planning per se does not tear apart communities. When applied sensitively to the needs of the community and the collective unconscious of the city, the tools of city planning can enhance the fabric of the city. While we criticise Moses’ public projects with venom, we do not reserve the same judgement for Edmund Bacon’s revitalisation of Philadelphia’s Society Hill. Whereas the former intervened with no due respect to what occurred on the ground level, the latter was sensitive to the existing fabric. Planning per se does not tear communities apart.

The excesses of Robert Moses took place primarily because of the amount of power he had amassed in the absence of checks and balances. Likewise, most planners proceed without due respect to the affected local community because of the power vested in them and the assumption that they, as professionals, know better. In that sense, the problem of city planning and community destruction, is not so much the problem of planning per se as it is about the location of power and how decision making processes are influenced.

Robert Moses- responsible for the destruction/development
of much of New York

Who has the power to make the important decisions? Is the decision-making power evenly distributed to include the interests of the community stakeholder? If the planner claims to act in the interest of city dwellers in trying to make the city a better place to live, the planner is ultimately answerable to those whose lives are affected by his decisions. This means that planning decisions should ultimately be determined by a democratic process.

The urban fabric of New York is composed of multiple layers of history combined with the numerous community ecosystems simultaneously interacting with one another. New York will not exist without its communities and without its history. Hence, any intervention by city planners in the existing fabric cannot be a utopia removed from the existing conditions of the fabric. In formulating any master plan for New York City, the vision cannot belong to the planners alone, but has to be collectively determined by the city dwellers.


For the insights I learnt and managed to articulate on this paper, I am very much indebted to Professors Anne Buttenweiser and Carol Willis, who opened my eyes to the many issues surrounding this great city.

A Tale of Two Cities - Part 1

Singapore is a city on the brink of adulthood. Like many cities undergoing this stage of maturation, Singapore has an insecurity-complex fuelled by the need to prove that it “has arrived” in the league of big cities. In view of this observation, I thought it appropriate to draw an analogy from a different moment in the history of a different city, one that Singapore likes to compare itself to: New York.

Compared to most European cities, New York is much younger. (hardly two centuries older than modern Singapore) Much of New York’s development was driven by maritime trade and industry, the primary source of its wealth. As can be imagined, much of New York’s initial growth was haphazard until the 1811 grid plan. It wasn’t until the early to mid-1800s that a class of wealthy Americans emerged, thanks to trade money. New York had no aristocratic wealth to speak of.

Members of this new leisure class were able to afford their grand tours of Europe. They went to the historic and cultural centres in Europe and saw in these cities what their own did not have: art and culture, grand museums, palaces, public parks, libraries, concert halls, and modern underground railroads, etc. It is this insecurity-complex, this need to be as great as Paris or London or Rome, that led to the creation of institutions and buildings like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, The New York Public Library, Grand Central Station, etc.

Most of you probably find this tale familiar. After 40 years of economic prosperity, many of us have travelled and seen some part of the world to feel that we must have our Guggenheim Bilbao (Marina Bay IR), our waterfront performing arts centre (Esplanade), our museum in an imperial classical building (the old Supreme Court / new National Art Gallery), our London Eye (Singapore Flyer), our Central Park (“Central Linear Park” in the new Marina downtown) and our hi-rise Manhattan lifestyle (the new Marina downtown).

These developments have as much potential to make Singapore a richer and more exciting place, as they have the potential to sap up and displace all that is authentically Singaporean. When we desire to be world-class, we desire to enter a “class” whose standards are pre-determined by others, not by us. This implies that the others who set the standards of “world-class” are better than us. It also implies that we do not sufficiently trust our authentic selves to manifest externally.

As opposed to being world-class, I much rather we be in a class of our own. Instead of aspiring to be the “New York or London” of Asia, would we have the courage to be the “Singapore of the world?" What would that entail? That is when we can finally use our imagination, and stop playing catch-up.

(Part 2 will focus on Architecture. Specifically, I will attempt to compare the proliferation of neo-Modern design aesthetics in Singapore today [as a symbol of good taste] with the proliferation of neo-classical beaux-arts architecture in New York from 1800s through the early 1900s)

“ Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations that feed reality, the energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation --- a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension … … this city, which is no longer anything but an immense scenario and a perpetual pan shot, needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms " [Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard]

was thinking.... how about Singapore? what is the reality and hyperreal? what do people consider their home... their place?

Of Being a Nomad

"Such incessant and dramatic change to one's surroundings must have some effect on the Singaporean psyche. You could say it turns Singaporeans into a nation of nomads. Except that it is not the movement of the people that make it such, but the shifting of the land. Even if they stay put, the country moves around them, and Singaporeans find themselves eventually in a new place, clinging only to ghosts."- Lost at Home: A Nation's State of Geographical Confusion, Air-Conditioned Nation.

With the constant chugging and whirling of machinery from dawn to dusk (and oftentimes till midnight), the landscape ( in the broadest sense, including all manner of hardscape and built works) at Farrer Road has changed dramatically over the past year or so. Construction hoarding taken down overnight suddenly reveal reworked roads, redirected roads, relocated overhead bridges and new pedestrian paths. As the MRT construction progresses, each and every stage reveal new alterations ; the landscape stirred by an invisible stick once every month or so. However, the noise is as constant as a fly's buzz around one's head. To add to the cacophony, a steam roller rolled by the window sometime last month, in an attempt to flatten the rock garden behind the apartment and to replace it with a children's playground.

We think of moving. The thing is, everything else is moving around us.