The (Context) House
The (Context) House is a well-loved trope in architecture, conveniently legitimized with tokens of archeological, anthropological or historical significance.
At its best, the most perceptive of authors wield it as an instrument to better understand the shared humanity of our architecture. At its worst? It exists as a pseudo-anthropological shorthand, an undisciplined cross-disciplinary gaze at the other.
Its most common variant, however, may be found on bookshelves and coffee tables, likely bearing the logo of a publisher named for a love of the Classical.
This series on Singaporean Shophouses was to begin differently than it will. For one, the past year has plunged me back into my hometown of Singapore after roughly seven years on the East Coast. But now, my Zoomed-out brain is on an academic hiatus, affording me a moment to just take in all the work that an over-zealous virtual school schedule has produced; including this very research project.
And of course, there is also the small matter of just not knowing where to start! One of my greatest writing blocks in this has been figuring out how best to portray a subject like this; all whilst rediscovering it for myself.
Last summer, I photographed hundreds of individual shophouses, conducted archival research, compiled a sizable bibliography, emailed academics, interviewed an artist, and even 3D-scanned shophouses in my neighborhood ... All in the hope of reaching critical points in this research where I could somehow make it legible to you, the reader. And, viola! You would, perhaps, hopefully, somewhat understand just a bit more of the Singaporean Shophouse.
But just how much of this simulated in-situ would be sufficient? Does this contextual understanding really matter? In a city seemingly obsessed with presenting a larger-than-life image of itself to the world ... “fuck context”, amiright? I mean, what can be said (or heard) over the roar of the world’s tallest indoor waterfall?
Jewel Changi Airport, Singapore, by Safdie Architects. The Rain Vortex is the world’s tallest indoor waterfall. Source: The Rain Vortex by Matteo Morando, use by Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0
Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis … or Thirty years of Tabula Rasa as published in S, M, X, XL.
Speaking of the Dutch architect, perhaps a more palatable introduction to the Singaporean Shophouse might begin where many syllabi-friendly introductions do: with Rem Koolhaas and S, M, X, XL; for in the same year that he published his seminal essay La Ciudad Generica (The Generic City), Koolhaas pens Singapore Songlines: Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis … or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa.
In this essay, Koolhaas unpacks just over 30 years of urban development in Singapore, deftly characterizing the political and social aspirations that motivated the rapid urban transformation of the post-colonial island nation. He does so with admirable skill, pulling together multiple convergent narratives, involving a cast of characters ranging from Lee Kuan Yew and Fumihiko Maki, to the UN, and Singaporean Ekistics spin-off SPUR. Weaved into this, of course, is Koolhaas’ trademark acerbic commentary, generally aimed at the fair amount of irony, rhetoric and relentless effort involved in this Singaporean process.
In broad strokes, Koolhaas describes newly independent Singapore as a tabula rasa, where a Confucian/Asian flavour of modernity was allowed to develop in triumph over “denatured” nature and an “insignificant” context.
Legitimized by an unpublished UN report (at the time of writing), this fervor extends to multiple New Towns built on newly flattened, “virgin land”. New Towns that are simultaneously “pragmatic”, yet “thoughtless”, bland “slab[s]”, and yet “mysterious” in their success.
This blank slate is said to be a precondition for a kind of “Barthian State”, where the imagery and symbols of modernity have been assembled to create this “Potemkin Metropolis”. Visibly modern, yet not quite as modernism anticipated, accompanied by a faked nature of beaches and parks and greenery where once stood swamps and hills and mangroves.
Koolhaas relents in the closing paragraphs, concluding with a particularly perceptive remark: that Singapore would become the asymmetric center for the future of China. In retrospect, much of those observations have played out in the past two decades since the essay was published, and, indeed, Singaporean firms have been heavily involved in the development of a number of Chinese cities.
Where is the Singaporean Shophouse in all of this you might ask? It certainly is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.
After all, the urban development that Koolhaas describes could not happen with the shophouse, and actually depended on its demolition. It exists as pre-tabula rasa, that “insignificant” context, a shelter of “squatters”, with whatever surviving examples surely having been “[missed] by the bulldozer”.
To be more precise, they are never referred to as Singaporean shophouses, but rather Chinese shophouses. Yes, the shophouse has an arguably Chinese origin, but we are also talking about a typology that, at the moment of writing, had been actively built in Singapore and Southeast Asia for over a century. Are they really still “Chinese”? And if so, in what sense? I hope to delve into this in a later post, but for now, let us just indulge in a bit of semantics.
Describing them as “Chinese shophouses” accomplishes quite a few things. For one, it compresses the definitions of Singporean to Chinese to Asian, using a broad ethnic definition to allow Singapore to become a metonymic object not just for China, but for Asia. (At this moment, it feels apt to point out to the reader that, at the time of Koolhaas’ writing, the population of “Asia” is just shy of 3.5 billion people, more than that of all the other continents combined)
This categorization also curtails all the possibilities of what this typology could be in the context of Singapore, and instead relegates it to what is quintessentially “Chinese”, what is traditional, and what is not of a modern, new Singapore. In his description of the queer red light district of Bugis, the juxtaposition of “ ‘traditional streets’, framed by entirely new Chinese shophouses” is telling.
It is as if shophouses are not allowed to sit on a continuum from traditional to modern, that a “new” shophouse is somewhat illegitimate. Koolhaas stops just short of explicitly completing the chosen analogy, likening these attempts at modernization to “transvestites” and “female female impersonators” (Koolhaas’ emphasis)
For all the insight Koolhaas offers on the evolution of modernity in the non-West, his writing bears all the marks of a unwavering Western gaze. Conveniently missing, too, is any mention of the colonial hangover experienced by Malaya, and then Singapore and Malaysia. The essay sidesteps any consideration of the impact of colonialization, or how a formerly colonized “75% Chinese, 15% Malay, and 9% Indian” population would be substantially different from China or the rest of Asia.
I could write a whole essay just unpacking these statements, and even perhaps I would be chided by an architectural theory professor on how I am just not reading the tone, or sarcasm, or satire in Koolhaas’ work. I hope you sense my exasperation in the choice of these quotes, for I have neither the patience nor the word count to do either of the above here.
[in what must have been conceived as a witty chapter opening]
“From one single, teeming Chinatown, Singapore has become a city with a Chinatown. It seems completed.”
[on the West’s response to Asian modernity]
“ … dead parents deploring the mess our children have made of their inheritance …”
[on the relative success of New Towns in Singapore]
“The mystery of how … the strategy of modern housing that failed in much more plausible conditions could suddenly ‘work’ is left suspended between the assumption of greater authoritarian and the inscrutable nature of the Asian mentality.”
It would be wholly unfair to attribute these circumstances just to the Dutch architect’s Western gaze. Just as it takes two hands to clap, so too have Asians leveraged some kind of innate understanding of “Asia”. As Koolhaas observes, Lee Kuan Yew embraced the idea of a Confucian-inspired, supposedly quintessentially “Asian” democracy to legitimize his actions in Singapore. This extends too, to architecture and aesthetics.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Koolhaas chooses to anchor his overview of the architectural scene in Singapore by referencing the 1993 Pritzker Awardee Fumihiko Maki. Two of the buildings described in close detail indeed do have a concrete link to the Japanese architect, being designed by his former students at Harvard. Accompanying this reference, is the assertion that the Metabolism so championed by Maki and his compatriots, has finally bore fruit in Singapore, and has come to define a uniquely Asian urbanism.
The Future of Asian Cities by SPUR.
This projection of the Singaporean urban as representative of an “Asian” urban is also adopted by the Singaporean group SPUR, an Ekistics-centered urban activism group that Koolhaas portrays as a CIAM abroad. Their portrayal of the “Asian City of Tomorrow”, however, is astutely digested (and made palatable), by Koolhaas. Indeed the “Asian” here is a “sentimental diversion”, that nothing traditionally Asian will appear in this city, and that the mute, stoic blocks of HDB (Housing Development Board of SIngapore) flats would be the new “sign of the Asian”
Undoubtedly, Maki and SPUR are both playing the same game of categorization that Koolhaas engages in. However, one cannot help but feel that, at the end of the day, it all feeds into a narrative of Western authorship, one that allows Koolhaas to play a game of intellectual connect-the-dots:
Singapore architects - savagely synthesizing influences of Le Corbusier, the Smithsons / Team X, self-consciously Asian speculations derived from Maki, a new Asian self-awareness and confidence - crystallized, defined, and built ambitious examples of vast modern soles teeming with the most traditional forms of Asian street life ….”
If the reader is feeling somewhat confused at this point, wondering if this is indeed a suitable introduction to the Singaporean Shophouse; it is precisely that kind of bewilderment that non-Western students experience as they approach their hometowns and cultures in the context of architectural academia. Koolhaas positions Singaporean architecture variably at two polar ends, either as a traditional or somehow more “authentic” entity, or a new, but Potemkin reality, a pastiche of an idea from more palatable origins. The Context House serves this purpose well as it grants the author a means to instantiate vague cultural assumptions (or even allows the reader to conjure those up themselves) without really looking too much into how the categorization is performed to begin with. By compounding cultural context with typology into such a flat description, it enables architects and architecture writers to assume authority on the subject matter and knowledge of a given context.
Bibliography'
Koolhaas, Rem, Jennifer Sigler, Bruce Mau, and Hans Werlemann. Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large. New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1998.
“File:JewelSingaporeVortex1.Jpg.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, January 25, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_Changi_Airport#/media/File:JewelSingaporeVortex1.jpg.
