Category: Cities

April 6, 2014

Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation

The air-conditioner is the greatest invention of last century. That’s according to Mr Lee Kuan Yew, the founding prime minister of Singapore, a bustling city right in the heart of the tropics.

In a 2001 documentary chronicling Singapore’s rapid rise from Third to First World in just over three decades, Lee not only revealed his choice, but also how he kept the temperature in his office at 22 °C (71.6 °F) and his bedroom at 19 °C (66.2 °F) when Singapore’s equatorial climate averages around 30 °C (86 °F).

Air-condition technology certainly allowed Singapore to rapidly modernize to standards of Western cities by importing its architecture wholesale. Steel skyscrapers and glass buildings could thrive anywhere because this technology allowed them to ignore climatic conditions.

Such modern buildings quickly replaced tropical architecture, however, as seen in the image above. Air-condition units are attached to the back of shophouses which originally were designed with features to keep the interiors cool without the energy-guzzling air-condition. The rise of architecture that ignores local climates and the loss of tropical ways have gave rise to unsustainable lifestyles in Singapore. Today, its people adopt Western fashion like cardigans and suits while eating food from all round the world.

It takes a lot of energy to maintain this city’s artificial climate, and it has become ridiculous. In 2008, when asked about climate change Lee said that he now needed warm clothing more often in Singapore than when he traveled to Europe because the air-conditioned offices were freezing!

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Written for Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s Cultural Theory class at D-Crit in response to “Beyond Sustainability: Architecture in the Renewable City” by Peter Droege

April 2, 2014

An Inconvenient Truth of Architecture

Does the responsibility of an architect stop at designing and not its construction?

The is the controversy sparked off by architect Zaha Hadid’s defense that it wasn’t her “duty” to look into the deaths of immigrant workers during construction work in Qatar as part of the World Cup 2022. One of the most prominent projects being built for the event is Hadid’s al-Wakrah stadium.

Like the workers who died, the London-based Hadid is an immigrant who made use of globalized networks to find work for the Qatari government. The mobility of labour today has made the building of cities into multinational projects which are often designed and constructed by foreigners and even cater to them rather than citizens. That architects like Hadid are rewarded handsomely for their concepts and designs while the people who make it into reality are often exploited and in the background points to how cities have become spectacles and brands as suggested by Shiloh Krupar and Stefan Al in their essay “Notes on the Society of the Spectacle Brand.”

The focus on architecture as an image—first as renderings and finally tourist photos—obscures architects and the public to the realities of constructing a city today. It takes an entire transient community of migrant workers to give our cities concrete permanence. Is this something architects should consider when coming up with their designs? The narrow focus of architecture as a backdrop for our lives turns the process of building into a walled-up construction site—an inconvenience waiting to be gotten rid off once it is built.

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Written for Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s Cultural Theory class at D-Crit in response to “Notes on the Society of the Spectacle Brand” by Shiloh Krupar and Stefan Al

March 30, 2014

CREATIVE©ITIES

“Creativity” is a buzzword in urban development today. Many governments are enacting master plans and policies to build a future city powered by industries offering creative products and services, and populated by open-minded and imaginative citizens. This idea of a “creative city” is built upon a triumvirate of ideas — creative city, creative economy and creative class — and it first emerged in the US during the global economic restructuring over a decade ago. It has since spread across the globe and become the new paradigm of what cities should be today.

CREATIVE©ITIES is a project I worked on last year which mapped out 10 cities in the Asia-Pacific that are examples of the “metacity”. The maps were created by asking local designers and artists to recommend people, places and products and projects that represented their “creative city”. Despite the different cultures and languages across cities like Seoul, Bangkok, Manila, Singapore, there existed a common creative infrastructure including bookstores, cafes as well as art and design centers. Within them were content that crossed national and cultural borders, such as products, publications and art from the region. The “creative city” then is an international space of cultural production and collaboration, but it can also be a generic urban order easily imposed upon anywhere around the world. It matches a similar itinerary I’ve often taken in my overseas trips: despite visiting different cities, I’m always traveling the same map.

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Written for Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s Cultural Theory class at D-Crit in response to“Introduction: Metropolis, Megalopolis and Metacity” by Brian McGrath and Grahame Shane