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.