housing affordability, the cost of living overall is becoming a major concern in Singapore. It is now the eighth most expensive city in the world and the third most expensive in Asia. Again, this can be seen as partly an imported problem. As one architect remarked to me while researching this book, ‘Singapore is the new Monaco—a place to park money.’ It is certainly a tax haven with a low tax rate on personal income among a number of factors— such as other tax measures, Singapore’s location, the fact that it is almost entirely corruption-free, the availability of a skilled workforce and advanced infrastructure—attracting large amounts of foreign money. It is estimated that one in every six Singaporean households have at least $1 million in disposable income. Despite growing disparities in income, real economic growth continues.
Formwerkz typically brings nature into the home, often with mature trees providing indoor greenery, such as in the Tree House (page 78).
Because it is so exposed to shifts in the global economy, Singapore has also experienced demographic changes related to economic change and the emergence of new professional groups. Its highly diversified economy is a result of deliberate government policy to ensure that Singapore remains sustainable. It is now, for example, the fourth most important financial centre in the world, the fourth largest foreign exchange trading centre in the world and the world’s largest logistics hub. With new professional groups, an ever increasing level of education and the emphasis on maximum connectivity with the rest of the world, Singapore’s lifestyle is becoming increasingly diverse. This diversity, along with the economic issues discussed above, is having a fascinating impact on the residential architecture of Singapore.
Almost paradoxically given the seeming ‘internationalization’ of Singapore, it has an emerging identity that many once felt it would never achieve. After a period of frantic and indiscriminate demolition and reconstruction, Singapore rediscovered its built heritage and, with it, a cultural heritage. Consequently, precincts such as Tiong Bahru, Joo Chiat, Chinatown, even the raffish Geylang, which managed to maintain their cultural continuity, have become sites for the kind of cultural memory that is essential to a nation’s identity. As Singapore approaches its fiftieth birthday, there is a growing sense of the island state’s uniqueness. Even the much satirized ‘Singlish’ is a marker of this. Singapore English consists of more than quaint inflections like ‘la’. It has its own emergent lexicon and phonology, making it a distinct form of English. Mixed in with the other indigenous languages, supported by the government’s four official languages policy, this makes Singapore unique linguistically.
The Travertine Dream House (page 142) has a rooftop garden, which cools the master bedroom below it.
From Tropicality to Sustainability
A language does not stay the same. It is constantly evolving. Words come to mean different things over time without necessarily losing their history, and words can mean different things in different parts of the world because different places have different histories. English, for example, is not a single language but a whole variety of languages which may look the same on the surface but which vary considerably lexically and phonologically.
I have already mentioned how Singapore English is a distinct variety that is gradually becoming even more distinct. I also suggested that this is a pointer to Singapore’s emerging identity. Far from being an ‘instant city’ or just a giant shopping mall, Singapore has a unique character that goes back much further than 1965.
Pursuing the linguistic model for the moment, Iet us imagine the contemporary Southeast Asian home as an intersection of past and present, a combination of Malinowski’s immediate and wider context.
In her pioneering study of traditional housing in Southeast Asia, The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia (1990; 2009), Roxana Waterson comments that ‘Architecture involves not just the provision of shelter from the elements, but the creation of a social and symbolic space—a space which both mirrors and moulds the worldview of its creators and inhabitants.’4
Here we have the intersection of two functions that make the home sustainable. On the one hand, the home is a shelter and a refuge from the world, a place where we eat, sleep and raise our families, where we sustain ourselves as physical entities. On the other hand, the home is a repository of all our values and beliefs, accumulated over generations, and so sustains us emotionally and spiritually.
Waterson’s book not only describes the physical forms of traditional housing in tropical Southeast Asia but also demonstrates the important role it has played socially and symbolically. Two points are worth highlighting. First, unlike Western houses where walls were important both as enclosures and as supports for the roof, the vast majority of traditional tropical houses consisted largely of a platform supported by piles and a dominant roof, with only token walls made from perishable natural materials like palm fronds.
Secondly, the house, typically occupied by a number of related families, combined habitation and ritual. Indeed, ritual often predominated, meaning that there was less of a need for separate places or buildings for worship or public functions.
Is it casting too long a bow to suggest that these original characteristics of the Southeast Asian home linger on in the homes of today as they increasingly aspire to respond to their place in a tropical climate and as part of a tradition of tropical living?
Take, for example, the strong connection between the inside and the outside, with terraces extending out from the interior spaces. Especially notable in this respect is the growing enthusiasm for open bathrooms, which is partly a sensual indulgence involving the pleasure of bathing in outdoor tropical luxury but partly a pragmatic anti-mould strategy for airing the wet areas of the house. There are numerous examples in this book, but no better example of deliberately revisiting vernacular tradition than Randy Chan Keng Chong’s ‘windowless’ house, the Jalan Mat Jambol House (page page 128), which is almost completely open and effectively raised off the ground as though on piles.
Today, however, the ‘sustainable Singapore house’ has moved on from the 1990s explorations in ‘contemporary vernacular’5 and the quest to reconcile modernist principles with cultural history and a tropical climate. While these preoccupations remain, they have taken on more sophistication. Today, it is more accurate to speak of place-making, that is to say, a mix of geographic, cultural and temporal place. Moreover, sustainability is seen as a broader and more complex imperative involving not just passive strategies for cooling (cross-ventilation, breezeways, shading, use of greenery and water, etc.) but other things, such as recycling (of materials, and of entire buildings to avoid demolition and rebuilding), minimizing waste and incorporating flexibility for future reconfiguration.
The award-winning Namly Drive House (40) has a water garden in the living room, which draws and cools air through the entire house.
Sustainability: A Broader Agenda
Singapore is not unique in fretting about whether it has an identity or not. But, like other countries that also fret, it is probably just a case of not having noticed up until now that it has had an identity all along. I began by reviewing the circumstances of Singapore’s birth and by noting the importance of cultural diversity and inclusiveness—surely
