as a key entrepôt. It has always been a melting pot and it is even more so today with such a large percentage of its population made up of expatriates and permanent residents. This demographic diversity is increasingly reflected in greater urban diversity and lifestyles.
There is also the ongoing issue of space or, rather, the lack of it. The government has responded to this with the vision of Singapore as a garden state where the public realm is effectively also the private realm, thus compensating for the lack of private space. This merging of the public and the private is one thing that gives Singapore its distinctiveness.
Nonetheless, there will always be a need to separate the private from the public domains. The traditional Asian emphasis on family and the collective is increasingly required to accommodate a new individuality, a demand for more private space. The ongoing issue is how to be together and yet separate, played out both in the domestic context and in the wider urban context. Domestically, it is reflected in the planning of the home and in the various strategies for dividing and linking space—gardens, courtyards and promenades. In the wider community, it is a case of developing a sustainable urbanism where Singapore, as an intensely urban society, can nonetheless service the non-material needs of its citizens.
The homes in this book have been chosen to illustrate the various ways in which residential architecture is responding to all these issues. A particularly interesting example is the way in which high-density and high-rise living is increasingly seen as an opportunity rather than a drawback. In high-rise apartment buildings, this is signalled by emphasizing and enhancing the panoramic views and by vertical connection with nature—green walls and green terraces—to generate a sense of being connected with nature even when living many storeys up in the air. Inside, there are initiatives (currently being driven by the HDB) to rethink the planning of apartments to more effectively accommodate the multi-generational family.
This also reflects a new sensitivity to the needs of clients, an acknowledgement of the need to make multi-residential living sustainable in the social, familial and personal sense. While the HDB is encouraging new apartment configurations to accommodate the extended family in public housing, at the other end of the property spectrum developers are building open-plan apartments—’semi-white plans’—to allow occupiers to customize their personal space. As with the idea of vertical landscapes, the aim is to replicate the feeling of living in a landed house with all the individuality that implies and a shift away from the standardization of traditional apartment design.
Waterson points out that ‘Inhabited spaces are never neutral; they are all cultural constructions of one kind or another.’6 In other words, they embody meaning. But an ongoing issue is the tension between architects and their clients as to who decides the ‘meaning’. There is always a tendency for architects to ‘over-design’ in order to control the ‘meanings’ embodied in the home. The problem with this is that the meanings are the architects’ meanings, not those of the people who will be living in the home. This is not a sustainable way to go about things. Happily, the houses in this book exemplify a trend towards a sustainable collaboration between architect and client.
It may seem an obvious thing to do, to design a house that is right for the occupants, but actually houses are very often designed to reflect only what the architect thinks is important. However, there is now a marked trend in Singapore to highly customize residential design. It is, as architect Alan Tay says (see the Sembawang Long Houses, page 70, and the Tree House, page 78), a matter of asking ‘how the client would use the house’ and this can involve a lot more than the basic programme, with its number of bedrooms, etc. Occupiers have an annoying habit of filling and decorating a house with their favourite things, which can often result in a contradiction between the way the house has been designed and the way it is used. An obvious way to avoid this mismatch is to work closely with the client from the beginning.
This is a powder room in the basement of The Coral House (page 86) that no one wants to leave because of its view of the sunken swimming pool).
Clients now often insist on being part of a collaborative process. This book has many examples of clients being actively involved. With the remarkable shophouse conversion by Mark Wee in Neil Road (page 26), the client had a clear vision of a sustainable marriage of heritage and the contemporary and made it clear, saying ‘I didn’t want a house, I wanted a home.’ In Chang Yong Ter’s award-winning Namly Drive House (40), the client wanted ‘two homes in one house’. The client at Guz Wilkinson’s The Coral House (page 86) comments, ‘I was born in Singapore. This is the tropics. And I don’t like being cooped up in an air-conditioned room. When we were looking for an architect, we were very mindful that we wanted someone who would blend with our taste and style, not someone because he has a name.’ At The Cranes in Joo Chiat (page 200), the client, whose day job is in shipping and whose boutique developments are almost a hobby, worked closely with the architect to devise a multi-residential model that catered for a new demographic of professionals, but nourished by the rich, local urban heritage.
Indeed, there are architectural practices, such as eco:id, who only work on residential projects that are truly collaborative and where there is a natural empathy between architect and client.
This is not just a matter of clients briefing their chosen architects. This is a whole new paradigm for the client–architect relationship, which involves an ongoing conversation between the two that is intense and highly personal. Sustainability—environmental, personal and cultural—is a key driver for all parties and it is an approach which is drawing attention from all over the world.
Sustaining a Changing Singapore
Sustainability is not an option for Singapore, it is an imperative. In environmental terms, this means conserving water, looking for ways of moderating dependence on air-conditioning, attempting to restrict the use of private motor vehicles and making the best use of the available land. This, in turn, has implications for the social sustainability of the country. Land shortage and the cost of land—as one architect, Chu Lik Ren, said to me, ‘Space is a universal constraint’—imply high-density, high-rise and smarter ways of using space. If the use of private motor vehicles is to be discouraged by ownership restrictions and financial imposts, then an affordable, convenient and efficient public transport system has to be provided. Moreover, such a system has to be attractive and comfortable if it is to compensate for the lack of a private car. In the same way, to maintain social harmony the emotional well-being of the community needs to be ensured by providing communal amenities to compensate for the constraints of apartment living.
Economically, the country needs to be infinitely adaptive, constantly sensitive to shifts in the global economy and alert to new opportunities. Hence, the government has placed great emphasis on education, aiming for a highly skilled, flexible and innovative workforce, significantly aiming to make Singapore the design hub of Asia and a centre of creativity.
The key to sustaining an adaptive economy is diversity and inclusiveness, and with more than one-third of the workforce of non-Singaporean origin, not to mention its natural ethnic mix, Singapore is nothing if not diverse. The challenge will be to address certain contradictions, notably the perceived need for a stable consensus (which tends not to entertain deviant ideas) as against the need for a plurality of competing ideas and values if the country is to remain genuinely adaptive and innovative. This points to what some people believe is a fourth
