Märkt: architecture
Why am I such a nerd?
I’ve actually thought about a thing now for a couple of weeks, this little thing that has kept coming back to me. Yesterday, and today, at two completely different places, not related to each other at all – two different thoughts hit me.
Yesterday I was with a group of people and we were about to leave for an evening event and someone asks ”do you know the way there Johan, how to walk?” and I don’t understand the question at first, because the question implies if I know the way from one side of the city to the other, on foot. Well yeah, I say because I do know it (and race through the 45 minutes walk in my head like a tape on fast forward) but we should go to the MRT because we won’t do that walk with our group, I answer. It is not an unreal walk I know, but that is not the point. The point is, why do I know this and no one else seem too? Why does it surprise me every time?
Today I was racing through China town on my way from a great single dinner (I say this with some joy and comfort) and on my way to one of the worst places this city has to offer. The eternal whole of shadows, discomfort and shivers – Vivo City shopping mall. Oh my I have lost words for this place. And people go here? BY CHOICE. And like a Saturday nice fun family trip with your children. It’s a million people, cramped in an oversized mall with a sound level like an airplane taking off. OK, rant over. I went there for a movie, but while I’m walking from the ticket hall of the MRT and enter the mall a thought just shoots through my mind. Do I believe I can ever change anything big in scale? Why do people choose a specific place to live, to stay, try to interact and change that environment (I may add the luxury of actually ”choosing”. It’s not like a box of chocolate)? Why would I, in the field I’ve chosen, stop and hold up at a place and try to change it for the better? Isn’t that the point of why I’m doing all this, to make things better for people?
The questions come back to the little nagging one I’ve had now for a few weeks; Why am I such a nerd?
Cause I’m gonna be honest. I don’t understand how you can move to a place, be there for some time, and not try to find out what it has to offer. Explore, experience – but maybe something more important- find a place that you connect with. A place if that is a street, a house, a bar, a tree, a bench, a person even. I think it is in someway human nature to try to find something that is related to you as a person. It is difficult, it really, really is. Sometimes you don’t even know what that thing is or why you like it. But go out and find it.
But is this my subjective view? Of course it is. But I would argue it is not very far off. I would actually say it is pretty mainstream. But still I’ve had so many conversations about my favorite places here, that so many have barely heard off. And it is right there, in front of you. It is a bus ride away, a train, a walk sometimes.
And you know what.
Places are architecture, they are food, they are drinks, they are the rain that flows down the streets or they are the sun that you hide from under a roof of the shop that sells lizards on a stick next to notebooks in expressive colors that will be future diaries. Places are the bricks and the stones that holds the buildings together, or the pavements in between them that makes narrow alleys or broad market squares, they are the live music played in a language you can’t understand by the teenager who later sits by a tree eating olive rice, bought from a stall where the owner feeds tens of people every day and smile like it was the first ever serving. Sometimes places are photographs, a fixed memory seen through a lens, sometimes they are memories of feelings or touches and not so much activities, they are spaces filled with ghosts of the people we once were there with. Places are feelings, items, conflicts, structures, air, mud, politics, money, nature, hugs, clouds, smiles, coffee, religion and sometimes cats are there.
Crazy places have their crazy spaces
Did a sight visit yesterday which was an interesting one. It is in my course ”Understanding design and construction” which is a good one I think so far. A lot of new perspectives and a close relation to the built environment where we look at real developments and their various approaches in design and how it effected outcomes in primary physical and economical aspects. So for our project we have chosen South Beach Development which is situated on very valuable land, also at the same site as older buildings which is integrated in the project.
Reading about the project is a mix of poetic design hoolahoo language from the architect point of view, to ecstatic descriptions about the green and sustainable approach with different cool high technology implemented. Looking at the development from up close it doesn’t seem that obvious or straight forward how everything works out in reality.. I won’t go into further not-interesting-details. And I really should take this time to write about it in the actual report, rather than on the blog.
Stepping out of the door is like opening up hundreds of new ones
It feels like this weekend was very long, satisfying, expensive, sweaty (chocking), inspiring and just plain great. Ones again I saw many different sides of this city, it’s people and myself. Not any dancing though, have been a while but I’ll catch up on that eventually.
So on Friday we went to this outdoor movie screening at one-north park, about 25 minutes walk from were I live. There is a group that has internet polls on the upcoming movie, and then they choose different locations every time and there was free snacks and some drinks. We sipped wine and watched a half decent movie, and I had some Indian food so it was all good. Then we went to Mad Men Attic, which is a rooftop bar in the older blocks of the central business district. So we drank some beers (finally), listened to a band playing some nice music watching out on the skyline from below. A lot of locals, well dressed, young people and the mood was pretty party. I like these places that are not very obvious to everyone from the outside (which they maybe want, having in mind it lies in a quite touristy area with bars and restaurants), and you don’t really stumble upon it in these small back alleys.
on Saturday we ended up going around Bugis for quite a good couple of hours. Bugis is the area with a Mosque and a lot of Middle East inspired food, shops, and all that. I really like it. Think I described it before but during the day it has this chick hip feel to it with small boutiques, shops and cafes and during night it all turns around and the streets are filled with different bars and live music and DJs. We stumbled upon a place which sold hand made perfume, smelling scents, candles and such things. Practically everything organic and natural, and SO cheap! Perfume bottles were around 40-50SG (25-30 euros) and for that quality.. wow. And apparently they buy in a lot of old bottles to reuse, so it has a nice little nostalgic touch to it. www.sifr.sg is their website.
Then we went to this open flee market which was on a small rooftop with lots of people, vintage second hand things, cheap beers and muffins, live band was playing and I bought myself a hand made design bag. Supporting the locale art scene you know.
We then went on to a little outdoor party with the Singaporean LGTBQ community, which was situated somewhere I can’t remember but there was this nice little bar there serving drinks and they had food on the grill, various people playing music, some stands with handcrafts and hand made designed things lined up. Just a nice little finish to a busy day.
Today we went to eat at Raffles Hawker center, one of the more famous and bigger ones. Situated at a little square right in the central business district, surrounded by all the skyscrapers and high rise. Just like most older areas in central Singapore. We then went to Capitol theater for the Design Film festival to watch ”From Paris with love”. Watch the trailer if you’re interested, it was a good subject about handcrafts leaving this earth, and all the traditional studios and ateliers of Paris getting taken over by big companies in the fashion business.
This week is gonna be packed with stuff I think. A lot of school stuff, a lot of hours writing and actually getting stuff done because it’s a short week with public holiday on Friday and the week after is before recess week. So gotta get to work! Have a great one, hope you enjoy my pictures from this weekend.
AND OH. The place which looks like it is situated in a Batman movie, or a dystopian sci-fi movie from the 80s, well yea it’s real. But it was so cool, and it throws you back in time a bit when you go inside. Every detail is there to fit the style, and so many things going on. I would love to go up but don’t seem to be possible, I was allowed to take some photos though. It just stands out in the most extreme ways around here.
The most urban time of our history
So I’ve just started to dig into the urban form and live of this planet, reading about cities, their pits and there tops, nerding down in small urban initiatives from planting by the sidewalks of Paris streets, the discussion about ”smart cities” in South Korea and it’s arguably intrude on the free will and movement of people, on the astounding development of Medellin since the 90s or about the far of city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in Russia which is surrounded by two volcanoes, but no roads. These are just a handful of discussions and topics, and it never gets boring, and it quite never ends. The scale differs, the situation, the place, the background, the history, the surroundings, the people, the culture, the means and the ends. I LOVE IT.
Did you know that there has never been a time when we were so urban as now? More than half of our 7,3 billion people live in cities and it will keep on rising. Apparently South America has already reached 70%. Controlling and understanding urbanization will be one of the biggest challenges during our lifetime and in the next 100 years. For the next 15 years, we have to plan for as many people as the size of Sao Paulo, every single year. In Nigeria they have estimated that in the case of extreme population growth they will reach a billion people by 2100 (more accurate or reasonable is around 500m).
I read a very interesting text a couple of days ago. Never before has such large masses of people, of diverse backgrounds and traits been ”put together” into such close contact with each other as in America. It goes for a lot of places, but maybe most seen. The cities we have today have such sharp contrast, is is shown by it’s people, by its products, by its buildings and policies. We have greater tolerance then never before (even though we often argue about the opposite) but less communication and close relations than in our past.
The big problem for a lot of cities is that it cant reproduce itself, which is interesting. In the past the death rates were so high because of the living standards that cities could die out and if was difficult to keep up with birth rates. Today we have the opposite, people never seem to die and give birth later in their lives, and also to fewer so we sometimes don’t even reproduce ourselves in the matter of 1 to 1 count.
Today we are more consumers of life, than producing them. The systems and structures in our cities are pressured into the extremes. We see that in the environment, the socio-economical gap between poor and rich, the densities rising. It effects land use, values of property and materials, the nature, social, ecological life and how we relate to them all.
There you have one side of urbanism you can’t get enough of.
[pictures of Central Business District, Raffles Place, Singapore]
Tiong Bahru, a story of survival and new light
Okay this is a long one, but a good one.
As another blogger wrote: ”She’s old school. She’s charming. She’s so hipster it hurts. She’s Tiong Bahru.”.
This is common underline to explaining what Tiong Bahru is. So why is that? It is actually one of the oldest social housing projects in Singapore, from the 1930s. So in Singaporean terms, it’s older than the country itself. After some fast googling, Tiong Bahru actually means ”new cementry” and was before filled with cemeteries which is today long gone. If you really wanna dig into neardy stuff, the architecture style that emerged during the 30s and is apparent here is called Streamline Modern, or Art Modern.
It’s arguably the number one hipster area – that is – a lot of cool cafes, some with a little Italian/French style to it, good eco-fair-trade coffee, waffles, bakeries, design and art galleries, small bookshops (only found one here though?), and even smaller shops with old LPs hanging in the window, and there is supposed to be cool young people hanging around. And of course the area is old, usually it’s a bit rough around the edges, which is supposed to be cool and add to the hip feeling.
There are two interesting side stories to this area. The first one, is that apparently the cafe Forty Hands (where we took a coffee upon our first visit here) which opened in 2010 started the whole thing of making this area into what it is today. The founder was pleased in finding a gem of a place. More tagged along and did so under the same locale developer. Now the Forty Hands owner, talks about how it’s a shame that so many cafes and shops are established in the area causing it to be gentrified. Well, what a surprise.
The other thing is that as late as this year, the URA (Urban Redevelopment Authority in Singapore, deals with all the things surrounding planning and development) started kicking out ground floor businesses in the area. Locale residents has complained about increased noise levels, pollution and congestion in the area and some of the shops didn’t have the proper license to turn there ground floor flats into business space with open doors to the passing by public. It’s only been four years, as I understand, and I have no idea how it was before really but it seems the changes has been pretty extensive in some ways.
The area sounds to be totally buzzing with people, cars, noise, action and life. Well I would say that is a lively place, but my first impression is that is a world apart from the Singapore I’ve seen. Or the other hip places we’ve been to so far. It is so calm and subtle, the whole scale is just so much smaller. You walk trough Tiong Bahru in 15 minutes, tops. I thought at first we had come to the wrong place because of the lack of people on the streets.
But the contrasts are never far away in this city. The food market and hawker center is packed with people, from the streets outside you just hear a silent buzz, knowing that something is going on. Here it looks like any locale hawker, diverse of people and food.
The architecture of this area is interesting in another way than just being old and unusual, but because of the floors above ground are ”hanging out”, you can’t really see what is going on at ground floor. Like the cafes are a little bit hidden. And it actually looks like some places are place homes, made into something else which I didn’t at the time know was the case.
And oh the cars on the streets, I think they say something about how thick some of the wallets are around here.
In all of these older neighborhoods, you’re always reminded about how most modern life looks like in Singapore. In almost every picture, you see an HDB high-rise climbing it’s way into the background. Areas like Tiong Bahru are like the grounds and roots of the thick rain forests, some life and species will just die out if these places are run over.
Min resa börjar med att resa till den – Amsterdam
My journey starts with travelling to it. Next up is Amsterdam. Not that far away, but still a world apart from that I’m leaving. Amsterdam is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited, and I do have a lot of favorites on that list. But oh Amsterdam. There is just so much to how the city works, the architecture and the history of how it is built. The street life is buzzing all the time, but always with a calmness even in the most busy areas. There is always something going on, with every street somehow familiar to the other one but at the same time unique in it’s own way. There is never a house that is exactly the same, there is never a shop that is the same. It is just such a variety where every little street and neighborhood is packed with it’s own identity and small things that make just that place it’s own, it’s something I’ve never experienced before in this kind of way. And I still really can’t put my finger on the atmosphere, or what I think about it. It’s just plane and easy a terrific place.
My great, great friend and host Anna. Living the Amsterdam life.
De ceuvel. Great urban design/planning project in northern Amsterdam (http://deceuvel.nl/)
NDZM, old harbor/shipyard now with a crane hotel, bars, design & art galleries and studios, plus more cool things.
singingsingapore 