National Disgrace

This afternoon, while perusing Koolhaas’  S M L XL I stumbled upon a beautiful image of a place called the Golden Mile Complex in Singapore (pictured above.) Unfortunately, I scanned the image but did not save it correctly, so I will go back tomorrow, retrieve it and post it ASAP.

Built in 1973, this building is composed of a 16 story mash-up of programs, including a 1,896 seat cinema, 529 parking spaces, two hundred shops, clubs, a sixteen story office tower and topped with a stepped cascade of sixty eight low income apartments that look out onto the Kallang Basin. As can be predicted about such a high capacity building and environment, the residents and everyday inhabitants of the complex have slowly taken over and adapted the spaces within, altering and manipulating the spaces as its community evolves. In a quote by member of parliament Ivan Png (stolen from Wikipedia) he describes the resident’s effect on the building stating:

Each individual owner acts selfishly, adding extensions, zinc sheets, patched floors, glass, all without any regard for other owners and any regard for national welfare.

In 2006, Png declared the building to be a “national disgrace”. The residents have also done over their balconies to create an extra room, and as you can see below, the tiered facade has taken on a haphazard state that blurs the definition between the individually designed units and the  neighborhood they have become.

This complex seems to have stemmed from the Japanese Metabolist Architecture Movement of the 60′s. Started in Tokyo, this group seemed to produce designs that were fueled by a belief in “demand and circumstance” in which the aesthetics of the orderly town square were rejected and replaced by a type of ad-hoc, organic architecture. It was an architecture built and left to grow organically throughout time with its residents, its bones never changing, but its overall fabric becoming subject to the wills of the public.

The Metabolist Architecture Movement seems to have been a natural step for a culture that found themselves introducing modernism and industrialization to a massive sized population. It was not a question of designing for the individual, but instead of designing an object that could not exist without the masses.

I find it interesting that I related so much to this type of architecture. I visited Singapore a few years back with my parents, and we observed how similar it was to Puerto Rico in its  climate, culture and architecture.  Singapore’s population is close to 5M, while ours is just under 4M, and while we are still a colony/common wealth of the United States, they transitioned from British colony to independent nation in 1963. I am consistently drawn to projects that resemble the size and social interests that these buildings represent and how they manifested themselves into that style in those times. I hope to find a level of expression that is both characteristic of the time we are at and the conditions we find ourselves in and aspire to get to as a small Caribbean population.

Bellow I will include a few more images of the Golden Mile, for me they seem to stand in the fine line between the nature of chaos and the order of design, and I believe that this type of architecture changes based on the level of “resolution” you see it at. From up close, all one can pay attention to is the air conditioners, alterations, changes in materials and obvious presence of its residents, but from affar you realize the grander gesture and thouht of the building, the separation of programmes and environments in section and facade. This building and these images make me wonder who has control in this situation, is the building dictating how the people in and around it interact, or are the inhabitants slowly taking over? Is it both conditions? When did one stop dominating and the other take over? Etc.

Below is the S M L XL image of the Golden Mile Complex…

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