What’s in a Name?

When a Singapore designer applied for grants from the government’s art council some years ago, he was referred to the national design agency instead because of his profession. But when he did just so, the same proposals were regarded as too artistic to be considered design.

This encounter, and the fact that art and design are governed by separate departments in Singapore (and in most parts of the world), confirm an existing difference between the two. What is art and what is design is something we seem to intuitively know until we try to explain the distinction between them.

Design has its roots in art, having been referred to in the past as the applied arts. Particularly telling was how graphic design — a term coined only in the 1920s — used to be called “advertising art” or “commercial art” and was a means by which many fine artists in Singapore made a living. This backdrop of the fraught relationship between the two explains the tinged perception that design is the ‘selling out’ of art to serve the needs of commerce. While professional designers have since rationalised what they do as problem-solving by offering a function to businesses and society which artists and their personal introspections do not, art has retained a halo of higher calling by seemingly remaining ‘pure’ and freed of any external influence.

This might have been true in the age of industrialisation, when design rose as a profession with the boom in mass production and consumption, but the once seemingly precise divide between art and design has blurred in recent times. Not content with just serving solutions to clients, designers are striking out on their own with speculative designs (or art?) that pose questions, or self-initiated projects (such as this film festival) that demonstrate alternative possibilities of practising design. The centralising of design production in the computer has also democratised its practice and enabled the injection of “personality” into a profession that once strove for objective answers. Designers nowadays have become celebrities whose work, ranging from posters to furniture and even buildings, are increasingly being collected (and produced in limited editions) just like art pieces too.

Conversely, art has been brought down from its pedestal. Movements like Dadaism that celebrate anti-art, and Pop Art’s appropriation of popular culture have attacked the traditional understanding of art by re-introducing everyday imagery and objects that we often encounter as products of design first. Today, it’s also not unheard of for famous artists to collaborate with corporate brands to mass produce design products (or art?) or to have their works sold at auctions for millions of dollars — who’s making commercial art now?

As the boundaries between the two get muddled up, the task of classifying something as art or design becomes increasingly difficult. Why we call something art or design is becoming less contingent on definitive attributes, such as what form it takes or how it is practiced, but instead what we value in each. I find myself asking why isn’t beautiful art a function for our well-being? And why can’t a design that solves an everyday problem be a work of art too?

Art and design are first and foremost acts of human expression. They contain the intentions of their creators, the material of cultures, the spirit of the times, and still leave space for our personal interpretations. Call them works of art or brilliant by design — there is probably some truth in both. Through art and design we try to make sense of the world we live in, and hopefully, use them to create a better one too.

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Written for A Design Film Festival Singapore 2014 festival guide.

Hype + Property = “Starchitecture”

Reflections at Keppel Bay (2013) by Daniel Libeskind, The Interlace (2014) by OMA, artist’s impressions of Jean Nouvel's Nouvel 18 (2014) and Le Nouvel Ardmore (2014), rendering of Toyo Ito’s The Crest (2018) condominiums, and rendering of Zaha Hadid’s D’Leedon (2015).
Reflections at Keppel Bay (2013) by Daniel Libeskind, The Interlace (2014) by OMA, artist’s impressions of Jean Nouvel’s Nouvel 18 (2014) and Le Nouvel Ardmore (2014), rendering of Toyo Ito’s The Crest (2018) condominiums, and rendering of Zaha Hadid’s D’Leedon (2015). | STAKN, IWAN BAAN, NOUVEL-18.ORG, AND THE CREST

Architecture or property are different names for what most of us call a building.

But the emergence of starchitects has blurred the line between the two. Nowadays, there are buildings, and there are buildings designed by famous architects.

The city of Singapore has recently become the home of several condominium towers designed by starchitects such as Rem Koolhaas (The Interlace), Zaha Hadid (D’Leedon) and Jean Nouvel (Le Nouvel Ardmore). Local developers seem to believe that such architects renowned for their avant-garde designs can raise the values of their properties with a touch of designer class.

But what happens when such avant-garde architects meet the property market? Imagine Koolhaas or Hadid selling their architecture to the man on the street. You can’t — that’s the job of real estate agents. And the translation of these architects’ often abstract concepts into market language reveal the gaps between architecture and property.

Sky Habitat (2015) | SAFDIE ARCHITECTS
Sky Habitat (2015) | SAFDIE ARCHITECTS

Consider Moshie Safdie’s Sky Habitat, which became famous as the most expensive suburban condominium in Singapore when it was first launched in 2012.

This is how the project is introduced on a dreary grey backdrop with no photos on Safdie Architects website:

“Over the last four decades, Safdie Architects has created from the experimental project Habitat ’67 in Montreal a series of projects incorporating fractal-geometry surface patterns, a dramatic stepping of the structure that results in a network of gardens open to the sky, and streets that interconnect and bridge community gardens in the air.”

The developer’s website for potential buyers, however, begins like this:

Sky Habitat Property

This is just one of several blurbs including “Garden Living from Above” or “Dive into Our Sky Pool” that markets the “sky life” created by Safdie’s design. Selling such a view seems a strategic move considering the apartments are marketed to middle-class Singaporeans who are clueless about Safdie (“also known as ‘Who?’ to 99% of Singaporeans,” said one commentator). They would be familiar with his Marina Bay Sands design, however, a building which introduced the concept of a pool in the sky in a big way to Singaporeans.

Absent from the “sky life” hype, however, are how Safdie’s design attempts to foster a sense of the public amongst its residents with “generous community gardens and outdoor spaces on the ground”, according to the architect’s website. The developer’s descriptions of the design never expand beyond “you” and “your family”, highlighting how architecture is massaged into private property.

This struggle between architecture and property also surfaced in a recent Icon interview with Safide when he revealed that a woman wrote to him for help in getting a loan to buy a Sky Habitat apartment.

“When you take land and construction prices and the costs developers add on, it’s a struggle between affordability and the ideal. Moreover, the development was so desirable when it was built that it immediately became gentrified,” he said.

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Written for Elizabeth Spiers and Chappell Elison’s Online Publishing class at D-Crit.

From Garden City to Gardening City

What started five decades ago as a government-led project to build Singapore into a clean and green city, has today become a dialogue between the state and its citizens.

STRAITS TIMES
STRAITS TIMES

A Straits Times photo of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew launching Singapore’s first-ver tree planting campaign in 1963 best depicts how the idea of building Singapore into a Garden City first took root. As Mr Lee bent over to dig a hole with a changkol to plant a Mempat tree in Farrer Circus, Singaporeans stood around and watched — none of them offering a helping hand.

Fast forward to 2012, and one finds a different landscape of Singapore’s Garden City. In August, a group of residents in Limau estate petitioned the government to conserve a stretch of greenery near their homes instead of selling the land for development. This was not an isolated case. In that year alone, residents in Dairy Farm, Pasir Ris and Clementi also clamoured for green plots near their estates to be preserved, using what has since become a tried-and-tested method of engaging the government: banding together to write petitions and meeting their Members of Parliaments to convey their thoughts and concerns.

➜ Read the rest at BiblioAsia (April – June 2013) V9 Issue 1