For Context - a photo essay

The shophouse screams “image-type” and “facadism”, and I would argue, also signals a post-modern approach before the Postmodern. One of the most delightful things about this typology is observing just how far you can push it out of its mould, or how many varying elements and styles you can cram into its articulation, before it “breaks”. Programmatically, they also exhibit as much eclecticism, used variably as restaurants and cafes, a sundry shop, a gold pawnshop, a seedy karaoke bar, or a spin studio. All these, and their associated symbols, collide in a cacophonous assemblage, somewhat held together by the typological constraints of that single, flat facade, and a recessed five-footway.

The following images are by no way a comprehensive survey of shophouses in Singapore, but are simply picked from my own photos of three neighborhoods in Singapore: Joo Chiat, Little India, and Kampung Glam.

It is not unusual to find the date of completion on the buildings, but it has also been recorded that these are sometimes plastered over and the buildings relabeled!

some shophouses were designed to blend in …

others to stand out ..

quite literally!

whilst not technically shophouses, these buildings show a kind of in-between, of shophouse and apartment

not technically a “shophouse”, but somewhere between that and an apartment block!

now more apartment block then shophouse …

and at night …

facades gain a whole other layer

Someone found some humor amidst the past year:

“Circuit Breaker” was the name given to our Covid quarantine efforts in Singapore

before I go … my favorite coffee/cocktail bar in town

%arabica on Arab Street

fancy Japanese coffee

And something often ignored … where do all those AC units go??

- more on this in a later post!