Friday, August 28, 2009
The most difficult 800 words
The most difficult 800 words has to be this stupid report that I am banging out right now on my laptop. I have moved into the room which may sister usually occupies when gaming and the table faces the window, where a very, very drafty wind is blowing in and attempting to freeze me to my seat. While the draught has been very refreshing, it is also mighty annoying in the way it keeps expertly blowing aside my blanket or nipping insidiously at all the places where the blanket doesn't reach or cover. I feel ready to throw in the towel.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
To live in tabula rasa
Yesterday, I attended my first archi seminar (aka what we at Arts call tutorials). We were discussing Koolhaas's vision of Singapore's architecture as being built on a tabula rasa. According to Wiki, (less reliable source that it is), tabular rasa (blank slate) refers to, among other things, "the epistemological thesis that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception".
In discussing architecture specifically, this term "has been used in arguments against what were criticized as insensitive design strategies employed by a monolithic Modern Movement" since the 1950s (Wikipedia). Ahah! One wants to cry out - "This is exactly what happened to Singapore in the fifties!" No one who has gone through the Singapore Education System needs to be reminded of our nation's struggle with problems both of a practical and metaphysical nature. Well, okay, the textbooks mostly chronicle the practical ones but I do think how it's impossible for anyone designing the textbook not to have some ulterior motive pertaining to the latter.
Insensitive - yes - mostly because to start on a blank slate is not as pretty or easy as it sounds (the textbooks and I concur on this point). It means a determined bulldozing of the land's past. As Koolhaas suggests, it is hard put to find any building more than thirty years in Singapore (1011). Shocking, to anyone who has lived in Paris (for example), where the charm of the city is built partly on its carefully preserved architectural past. Everything else is shiny and new in contrast here.
My point on tabula rasa is that it is a brutal process - modern skyscrapers standing cheek to jowl with matchbox like shophouses, and now, contemporary structures in the most flamboyant shapes like Vivocity, the Esplanade, Ion Orchard and the upcoming gambling dens springing up in rejection of the . In these different types of buildings, one can almost map the way Singapore has changed to suit the times. It's not merely that the grey slabs are ugly or are vastly inhuman in scale, they represent the stripping away of a past, literally built on the ghost of the old shophouse, the dirt and squalor. I don't know about you, but when I step into the market in Chinatown, the one that has been recently opened again after all these years, I still subconsciously smell the horror of the damp, wet market when I first visited it as a kid. I also still mince my way between the stalls even though the smell is almost all gone, and the floor is much drier. Ghost of the old building? Check. Tabula rasa is not built on a clean slate - it's a slate that bears the tenacious traits of The Past. In psychoanalysis, it is suggested that which we keep under the carpets boils over all the worse the further it is buried. The same can be said of the anxious way in which living in tabula rasa all my life boils over constantly - progress and develop, but never forget the tenets of our little island home - we are yet always four races at potential loggerheads. We must never fall behind. Don't be complacent. Don't get left behind. We must always strive towards the light! (No rest for the good orthe bad.) We are simply, an eternal work in progress, absorbing and rejecting what's good for this little island without ever being sure where this light is (First world status, maybe?)
But perhaps, that is all changing - we've begun to build monuments to our glorious state -Ion, gambling rules relaxed (if hypocritically), the Durian etc. This is where, in a slice of tabula rasa, I see as the first steps to building permanence rather than change - the Fullerton and Raffles Hotel of the present. What they may mean to you and me is a different thing altogether, something which has not altered while bulldozing. We look back at the shophouses that have survived the demolitions and cranes and heave a sigh of relief - we then go on to insist that they're haunted - by what? A more exciting past, when the threat of death was far more real? When the piss and garbage filled streets which we abhor have been lent the nostalgic tinge of rose tinted distance? I am sinking to the low of rhetoric, but there, I've made my point: I may hate the bulldozing, but I am grateful for it. I may regret that my physical environment is denuded of its history but then, I don't want to live in the past either.
Reference:
Rem Koolhaas, ‘Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis… or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa’, in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, SMLXL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2005), pp.1008-89.
In discussing architecture specifically, this term "has been used in arguments against what were criticized as insensitive design strategies employed by a monolithic Modern Movement" since the 1950s (Wikipedia). Ahah! One wants to cry out - "This is exactly what happened to Singapore in the fifties!" No one who has gone through the Singapore Education System needs to be reminded of our nation's struggle with problems both of a practical and metaphysical nature. Well, okay, the textbooks mostly chronicle the practical ones but I do think how it's impossible for anyone designing the textbook not to have some ulterior motive pertaining to the latter.
Insensitive - yes - mostly because to start on a blank slate is not as pretty or easy as it sounds (the textbooks and I concur on this point). It means a determined bulldozing of the land's past. As Koolhaas suggests, it is hard put to find any building more than thirty years in Singapore (1011). Shocking, to anyone who has lived in Paris (for example), where the charm of the city is built partly on its carefully preserved architectural past. Everything else is shiny and new in contrast here.
My point on tabula rasa is that it is a brutal process - modern skyscrapers standing cheek to jowl with matchbox like shophouses, and now, contemporary structures in the most flamboyant shapes like Vivocity, the Esplanade, Ion Orchard and the upcoming gambling dens springing up in rejection of the . In these different types of buildings, one can almost map the way Singapore has changed to suit the times. It's not merely that the grey slabs are ugly or are vastly inhuman in scale, they represent the stripping away of a past, literally built on the ghost of the old shophouse, the dirt and squalor. I don't know about you, but when I step into the market in Chinatown, the one that has been recently opened again after all these years, I still subconsciously smell the horror of the damp, wet market when I first visited it as a kid. I also still mince my way between the stalls even though the smell is almost all gone, and the floor is much drier. Ghost of the old building? Check. Tabula rasa is not built on a clean slate - it's a slate that bears the tenacious traits of The Past. In psychoanalysis, it is suggested that which we keep under the carpets boils over all the worse the further it is buried. The same can be said of the anxious way in which living in tabula rasa all my life boils over constantly - progress and develop, but never forget the tenets of our little island home - we are yet always four races at potential loggerheads. We must never fall behind. Don't be complacent. Don't get left behind. We must always strive towards the light! (No rest for the good orthe bad.) We are simply, an eternal work in progress, absorbing and rejecting what's good for this little island without ever being sure where this light is (First world status, maybe?)
But perhaps, that is all changing - we've begun to build monuments to our glorious state -Ion, gambling rules relaxed (if hypocritically), the Durian etc. This is where, in a slice of tabula rasa, I see as the first steps to building permanence rather than change - the Fullerton and Raffles Hotel of the present. What they may mean to you and me is a different thing altogether, something which has not altered while bulldozing. We look back at the shophouses that have survived the demolitions and cranes and heave a sigh of relief - we then go on to insist that they're haunted - by what? A more exciting past, when the threat of death was far more real? When the piss and garbage filled streets which we abhor have been lent the nostalgic tinge of rose tinted distance? I am sinking to the low of rhetoric, but there, I've made my point: I may hate the bulldozing, but I am grateful for it. I may regret that my physical environment is denuded of its history but then, I don't want to live in the past either.
Reference:
Rem Koolhaas, ‘Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis… or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa’, in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, SMLXL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2005), pp.1008-89.
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Bordering on lousy
Yesterday, I went to the Borders Sale. Just to show you how far their fiction sale standards have fallen, here is the haul I got from that place: 0.00000000000000000. Compare please, with last year's statistics, which is 13 books, the full description which may be found here. I ended up deflecting over to the Metro sale and I even wandered into Harvey Norman's - that by the way, would give you an idea how depressing I found the Borders one, which I had even rushed over to after tuition and totally skipping my lunch.
And not to make comparisons or anything (I totally am), last year's Borders sale was of the genuine kind, where they not only had the books tossed in a disorganised heap in big cardboard boxes, they did not even bother to put said boxes on a shelf - they were all on the floor.
This year, the books were all more or less neatly stacked, and I did not even see anything going for their purported $3. The majority had 30-40% discounts or started from about $5. Granted, there were a lot of hardcover non-fiction, but can anyone blame me for not showing any interest in The History of the Army and such titles? Plus, even though a hard cover edition of The Prince by Machiavelli going for $12 is still a cheap buy, it seemed pointless to join the queue for one book, especially since I got a Penguin edition of Plato's Republic for $4 the year before.
As Morphus said, the wonder is that the queue is as long as last year's (and as slow moving). Still, I suppose I should have known something was amiss when 10 to 1 shoppers leaving the expo were carrying Metro bags and few black Borders bags could be seen. Ah well. I'll just wait and see next year then though my hopes are not very high. Perhaps Borders has learnt not to overstock.
And not to make comparisons or anything (I totally am), last year's Borders sale was of the genuine kind, where they not only had the books tossed in a disorganised heap in big cardboard boxes, they did not even bother to put said boxes on a shelf - they were all on the floor.
This year, the books were all more or less neatly stacked, and I did not even see anything going for their purported $3. The majority had 30-40% discounts or started from about $5. Granted, there were a lot of hardcover non-fiction, but can anyone blame me for not showing any interest in The History of the Army and such titles? Plus, even though a hard cover edition of The Prince by Machiavelli going for $12 is still a cheap buy, it seemed pointless to join the queue for one book, especially since I got a Penguin edition of Plato's Republic for $4 the year before.
As Morphus said, the wonder is that the queue is as long as last year's (and as slow moving). Still, I suppose I should have known something was amiss when 10 to 1 shoppers leaving the expo were carrying Metro bags and few black Borders bags could be seen. Ah well. I'll just wait and see next year then though my hopes are not very high. Perhaps Borders has learnt not to overstock.
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