Category: History

Baharuddin Vocational Institute

Baharuddinbadge-(small)

In 1971, the Baharuddin Vocational Institute (BVI) was officially opened after moving to its new permanent campus in Queenstown.

“In this way, our Republic will some day be able to depend entirely on our own designers and craftsmen in advertising, handicraft souvenir, fashion, woodworking and printing trades,” said Home Affairs Minister Dr Wong Lin Ken who officially opened the school.

When it began operations in 1968, BVI was the only place in Singapore that provided training in manual and applied arts. The school had a printing school, woodwork department, fashion department, handicrafts department, and a graphic design program — then known as commercial art — which would become its biggest and most popular in years to come. The only other art school then was the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts which concentrated on fine art and only came up with a graphic design course in 1975.

For the next two decades, BVI was the main institution that helped give birth to Singapore’s graphic design scene. Eventually,the entire applied arts department moved to help establish the graphic design program in Temasek Polytechnic.

After a chance encounter with a former BVI lecturer, I began a journey to document the history of this school that played a huge role in Singapore’s graphic design scene then. If you happen to have taught there, studied there, or know anything about it, drop me a line at justin [at] justrambling.sg.

Danger and Dragons

The playgrounds a generation of Singaporeans played and grew up in were slain in the name of safety.

Dragon Playground

“Adults of tomorrow will recall dragons of Bedok” [1]— declared a 1987 headline in The Straits Times newspaper. Three and a half decades later, this prediction seems prophetic given how fondly a generation of Singaporeans now remember the dragon-shaped playgrounds they grew up playing in. Like its inspiration, the dragon, this playground design has become the symbol of a myth, of a now almost non-existent space and way of play for a generation of Singaporeans.

The dragon playground was first unveiled to the public in 1979, one of five ‘adventurelands’[2] that became a part of Singapore’s public housing esates. Other designs included a pair of doves, a metal cage, another with man-made slopes and one made for climbing. These new playgrounds, each costing around S$20,000 to construct, were the Housing & Development Board’s (HDB) plan to “move away from the preponderance of static animal sculptures” found in its existing playgrounds to “miniature adventurelands for the young and active” instead[3].

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