Vision of the island of Singapore. William Cho, Getty Images
Our island clean and green broke all calculations. The next milestone in our development, we will build a country in which our people and those who will then have the best possible home, exercising a sound and prudent management of our resources, optimizing the balance between man and nature. With smart innovation and strategic partnerships, we will prevail on our limitations, to build a Singapore that will endure for generations to come.
The Singapore Green Plan 2012
We guide excavators to the right places.
<--- recently commented to a colleague and friend the need to master English in order to keep the burning issues in the international discussion about architecture and urbanism. Currently, English is the lingua franca occurring in richer discussions, for these-and many-themes. The Anglo-Saxon cultural landscape is a fertile ground for continued exchange of ideas and proposals and, unfortunately, not often transcends quickly to other languages. Why it is so important to master the language fluently and so are those related disadvantage using only their native language.
reflection comes this tale of the translation of the lengthy article by Rem Koolhaas, Sendas dream of Singapore, Portrait of a Potemkin metropolis , conducted by Jorge Sainz, a correct edition of the Catalan Editorial Gustavo Gili and recently appeared in Castilian, fifteen years after its original publication in this thick volume titled mythical S, M, L, XL , the architect and Bruce Mau.
over a hundred years ago, Adolf Loos published Die stadt potemkinsche which would reflect critically on the transformation stage of the Ring Viennese a text that I have mentioned recently . Loos there would complain bitterly about the low high-mindedness of the Austrian company to build a significant part of their city, hitherto occupied by the walls demolished.
While there is a parallel remote is not clearly understood because Koolhaas rescue in Portrait of a Potemkin Metropolis or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa the idea behind the filthy city set that shone through the article by Adolf Loos. Thus, apart from demonstrating an extensive scholarship, the architect journalist again seek the endorsement of an intellectual hero initiation, constant reference of many who were linked in their early to Modern Movement in architecture.
S, M, L, XL. Conrad Bakker, 2006
The highlight of the Singapore case is that it is a very interesting example of the exacerbation of the design illustrated in the contemporary metropolis. An economic paradise that has largely given up freedom for the sake of safety and comfort of its citizens, under the aegis of a ruling class led by the stimulation of meritocracy . That nation island of 640 km2 and where they live now 5 million people, located along the Straits of Johor, between powerful nations such as Indonesia and Malaysia, is a very interesting phenomenon of social construction on the basis of extreme sacrifice and strong collective discipline.
Singapore demonstrates how development can occur in a multicultural society, taking in consideration the waiver essentials for living, as we have understood the European civilization over centuries now. With nearly $ 50,000 per capita GDP, its economic and political model, which prides itself on being a reflection of those western ways, and built over fifty years, would be a successful procedure to overcome delays secular. A system that you try to follow other countries and nations, some as vast as China, now immersed in the incredible transformation that is taking place.
Marina Bay Sands Resort . Moshe Safdie & Associates. 2010
According to Koolhaas' new preface to that article, the Asian island would also be a kind of anticipation of what would be happening in our metropolitan areas, where the waiver of privacy and freedom is spreading in an inexorable way. However, the author describes admiringly the development of Singapore from the perspective of extreme decisions have been taken to transform a space gradient island metropolis par excellence in the XXI century. It would be so, for the architect of Rotterdam, a shining example of another space potemkinizado .
Both Loos and Koolhaas used this fable fin de siecle to question the implementation of an idea of \u200b\u200bthe city that would seem reprehensible. For Loos, to show the mediocrity of a supposedly historicist architecture in line with the tastes of the bourgeoisie Vienna, consisting of new rich and poor. In regard to Koolhaas, would not be so clear their motivation, whenever and critical acid. It would seem that his fascination for radicals and complex processes of urban transformation and metropolitan, the bow only to try to unravel and describe the ideological mechanisms that facilitate such massive changes in some areas contemporaries.
In a continuing journey through the world, the Singapore Flying Dutchman would be revisited early in the decade of the 90 and reflected in the text that said, his astonishment with the processing done: I turned
eight years in the port of Singapore. We were not grounded, but I remember the smell, sweet and putrefaction, both overwhelming.
Last year I came back. The smell was gone. In fact, Singapore was gone, renovated, rebuilt. There was a completely new city.
and its extract is then called Green Plan, territorial transformation objectives in a comprehensible only guided by a pragmatic end, a collective attitude that does not stop at environmental ideologies which are currently used elsewhere. Europe, for example. They express Goh Chok Tong, Prime Minister of the former colony 1991:
Our vision is an island with a greater sense of insularity: most beaches, marinas, resorts and possibly amusement parks, and improved access to an attractive coastline and a city that embraces more closely the coastline as a sign of their island heritage. Singapore will be wrapped in a blanket of vegetation, both areas guarded by the man and protected tracts of natural growth in water bodies intertwined in the landscape.
The ideal of a tropical city of excellence, without complexes or romanticism.
Plano the extensive public transport network of Singapore. Singapore MRT
For Koolhaas, Singapore would be the climax of the operational and as Westerners can not understand the ongoing process in this metropolis, something that was seen as aberrant, due to our own polite way of understanding the world. The island at the southern tip of Peninsular Malaysia would be for us the victim of a process of rationalization which would border on the paranoia of the extreme right and logical. Indirectly, this insight would be thus a reflection of organizational failure in Europe and America, to get the cities to be required in the situation current expression of dissatisfaction collective unconscious about our contemporary setting.
This island metropolis to Koolhaas also represent a stark criticism of the political structure that has given stability to the West. As the text continues, this island stands as a highly effective alternative in the midst of a landscape of almost total pessimism about a possible future, a possible world relevant ambitions clearly defined long-term strategies, a ruthless determination to avoid waste and chaos in the wake of democracy left in other places.
That society is in a fairly pronounced, construction one man, Lee Kuan Yew Chinese would rule the former British colony for decades under the umbrella of a call to Neo-Confucianism and the support of his political organization, the Popular Action Party.
In his autobiography, From Third World to First , Yew describes as at one time, back in 1960, his village was in the position to march alone on the path of history and progress. They remember the enormous difficulties of facing such a situation: There are books that teach you how to build a house, how to repair engines. But I've never seen one that says how to build a nation based on a collection disparate Chinese immigrants, Indians, British and Dutch as the West Indies and build a future when the previous economic role there, as a military warehouse in the region to the British Empire, suddenly disappears.
difficult at the time of independence, Singapore was already an important port in Southeast Asia but, at the same time, its economic base was weak, based only on a very basic logistical services. In two decades this heterogeneous group of people achieved a dramatic transformation from being an extremely poor and poor society to achieve a level of prosperity equal to that of any advanced country. As Yew his book entitled From Third World to First .
For this, the habits of Singapore set out to systematically and radically change the face of the island, their social structures and also would reform a fragile economy, an effort of an intensity and dedication, at least, spectacular. And no regrets. But what is truly remarkable is that this was the result of a form of government supported by systematic planning that drew the best advantages of geographic and economic situation relatively favorable.
Project for the Scotts Tower in Singapore. OMA Rem Koolhaas, 2007
territorial transformation incardinaría Singapore in overall economic planning. That process would begin with the establishment of zoning and compartmentalisation of space very strict, which has been produced specifically planned development phases and in which the enlightened elite in power have neglected the real needs of the population. From a simple port economy, the first evolve to a space-based industrial low wages and a disciplined work force, then later would incorporate an intensive industry talent and knowledge, to bet finally become a commercial node and central services for Southeast Asia.
in 1960 would create a public body, the Housing and Development Board (HDB, with full powers for land management, with reference to what would have been done about it in Britain and the Netherlands especially . A bureaucracy intelligent and very well organized initially directed to the needs of housing and space for production, manufacturing concentrated in huge multi-storey structures, close to the renovated port facilities. HDB for decades guided the transformation process involving an initial many international experts. As the Dutch Winsemius, a former finance ministry official, involved in the re-industrialization of the Netherlands to represent a crucial role in the planning process of economic change on the island until 1980. And urban planners and architects as Charles Abrams and Fumihiko Maki, a prominent member of the Japanese Metabolists.
Today, the Dutch would look admiringly what happened in Singapore. Megacities Foundation Nederland invited in November 2002 to Dr. Liu Thai-Kerr, urban planning consultant's Republic of China, to give one of its annual conferences to be entitled Urbanising Singapore: Optimising resources. There Steef Beuys, the Ministry of Spatial Planning, the famous VROM, paralleled Singapore as a model to imitate metropolitan development.
Location Trasnporte major infrastructure in the Straits of Johor. Singapore. Metropolitan World Atlas. 010 Publishers, 2004
While Singapore is a positive effort to overcome a very poor growing conditions, while also establishing a pattern of geographic colonization high unsustainable long term. The contemporary metropolis, in order to function, represent the highest concentration of plundered resources globally and managed at specific points on the planet while systematically devastating the land surface. Machinery would be necessary and essential to the operation of advanced capitalism. The problem is that global fortified cities, where life reaches a high comfort level, gradually reduce their numbers to a few enclaves. This, with the consideration of the extent of poverty worldwide and also to the rest of the metropolitan and even within the same megaregiones prosperous.
However, the metropolitan island continues to be admirable as an expression of extreme degree of sophistication has reached that tecnobiosfera we inhabit.
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