Beyond "The Singapore Songlines" (S,M,L,XL) into a Post-Generic City

The Singapore Songlines - from S, M, L, XL by Rem Koolhaas

For architects partaking in Singapore's urban metamorphosis, the cast of architect/theorist Rem Koolhaas' looms ominously. We are only beginning to break the stranglehold of Koolhaas' highly acerbic (even if illuminating) 1995 essay "The Singapore Songlines - Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis" (published in his book- S,M,L,XL). For many, Koolhaas' essay discomfited many because he succeeded in portraying Singapore as what he called "a Barthian slate" (after Roland Barthes) devoid of authenticity, where "even chaos is planned chaos."

To him, Singapore represents the kind of generic city that is the model for China's behemothic urban transformation, elaborated in his subsequent book Mutations. In fact, his other essay "The Generic City" in S,M,L,XL used generous illustrations of scenes from urban Singapore, as if to prove that Singapore's is the generic city par excellence. (Recognise Tange's UOB tower and the Meridien hotel at Orchard Road in the images below?)

Images of Singapore from "The Generic City", S,M,L,XL

Undeniably, Singapore's politics of urban development (and hence, architecture creation) is closely tied to global capitalism. Architect Toyo Ito himself lamented this observation in a recent issue of Japan Architect magazine. The URA Sale of Sites process, whereby the authorities efficiently acquire, prepare (sometimes appending infrastructure) and auction land for development to the highest bidder is a systemic process that assures this continued urban metamorphosis - allowing more and more mixed-use "generic city" type developments to pervade at increasingly larger scales. A very similar model of urban development operates in other East Asian cities like Shanghai, which boasts its own land reserve system for urban development.

Yet, the passage of time always yields unexpected revelations. What used to be thought an immutable truth (or an inescapable fact) usually yields an unexpected outcome. Ten years after he wrote his super-critical "The Singapore Songlines," Koolhaas re-calibrated his position in an interview with a local newspaper, stating, "The issue of authenticity is ambiguous in itself because if you look at Singapore it has taken away a lot of what was there, but everything that is new and has existed for some period of time also has its new authenticity." He adds, "What I thought was (once) a tabula rasa [blank slate], but I discovered within that are now living intricate Asian forms of human interaction and existence." ("Kool Designer: Once Critical of Singapore, top architect sings different tune" 16 Nov 2005, Today [Singapore])

I am not convinced that Koolhaas' totalizing proclamations are the last word on Singapore's (or Asia's) urban paradigm. He ignores the fact that generic city processes like real estate capitalism can still engender original outcomes when the ingredients are right. For a developer-driven residential tower project (Moulmein Rise, by Woha), the architects used a local vernacular architectural device, a “monsoon window” for ventilation during heavy storms. The same window protrudes to give more perceptual space against the literal square footage of each unit, giving developers a selling point. Here, the hybridisation of a local, almost romantic, vernacular element with a ruthless real estate dollar sense yields a very specific outcome (that is anything but the neutral banality he proclaims).

Moulmein Rise and the monsoon window

(Woha Designs)

In his essay "The Generic City," Koolhaas proclaimed, “The Generic City is on its way from horizontality to verticality. The skyscraper looks as if it will be the final, definitive typology... The towers no longer stand together; they are spaced so that they don’t interact. Density in isolation is the ideal.” Yet it is anything but. The two examples illustrated below (Pinnacle@Duxton, Singapore by ArcStudio and The Met, Bangkok by Woha) demonstrate that the combination of developmental density pressures, climate, and demand for accessible (sky high) public space can sponsor new urban typologies that transcend the lone skyscraper type. Again, another Koolhaas-ian problamation is proven wrong.

Pinnacle@Duxton (ArcStudio)

The Met, Bangkok (Woha Designs)

What seems to be a tabula rasa (blank slate) isn't really a blank slate. The real challenge is to identify the real processes and factors underlying our urban context that allow us to determine an architecture that is specific to Singapore's unique context. RL