In the redevelopment wave that is sweeping the country one group has been looking on in horror as its work and a move of Singapore’s identity is slowly being demolished. JEREMY AU YONG talks to three veteran architects who speak out against what they consider to be the dirtiest of words: ‘en bloc’IT USED to be that Mr Victor Chew could not control past Cairnhill go. Holland Road or Orchard Road without getting hot under the clutch.‘I’d start uttering four-letter words,’ says the 80-year-old architect. But he was not swearing at merchandise. Rather it was buildings - or what’s left of them - that made him experience. Mr Chew who belongs to Singapore’s first generation of architects believes he did some of his best work in those areas. In Cairnhill he designed Hilltops Apartments which when completed in the 1960s was a 17-storey residential building at a time when most apartments stopped at four floors. In Holland Road he designed the Holland Road Apartments a block of walk-ups that stood on pillars called pilotis. Built before independence these were as Mr Chew describes. ‘the first void decks in Singapore’. At the top end of Orchard Road he designed Ming act Hotel which in the 1970s was one of the city’s most recognisable hotels. Today to Mr Chew’s four-lettered dismay barely a trace of his work is left. Ming Court Hotel later renamed Orchard Parade Hotel was refurbished in 1998 resulting in a new facade and a new terracotta act upon plot. The other two - Hilltops Apartments and Holland Road Apartments - had their date with the wrecking ball thanks to that now all-too-familiar mechanism: the collective sale.‘When it hurts the most it’s not because of the beauty of the building. That part is just vanity.‘It hurts when the building was significant when it led the way to other buildings in Singapore,’ says Mr Chew. Yet by no means is he the only one to undergo seen his work crumbling into dust in the current property market boom. In the long-running consider over Singapore’s strategy of redeveloping sites through collective sales one voice tends to be unheard - that of the architects. More specifically the generation of veteran architects who shaped the country’s skyline in the early days but are now resigned to watch helplessly as their work is wiped out en bloc by en bloc. While accepting that renewal is inevitable in land-scarce Singapore they make a call for a believe of how buildings are redeveloped and the walk of such changes. The concern is that what is being swept aside is not just a few architects’ legacies but more significantly a country’s memories identity and history. It is a part of history that architect Timothy Seow calls a ‘Singapore built by Singaporeans’. He says: ‘Before independence you had colonial buildings designed and built by the British architects. The formative post-colonial years of the 1960s ushered in an era where a majority of projects were designed by home-bred architects.‘Following which…there was an influx of foreign architects into the local scene with the local architects playing the secondary roles.’It is a believe shared by the younger generation of architects. Says architectural designer Eugene Lim. 28: ‘Of late you definitely see more foreign architects at the concept stage with the local ones doing the implementation.‘I’d like to see local guys given more ascribe than they are getting.’Says Dr Seow: ‘It was a short period (when local architects’ bring home the bacon dominated) and it would be a grieve if the projects from the 1960s were wiped out. But in a few years it will be all gone.’Dr Seow managing director of CPG-Timothy Seow Studio is possibly one of the hardest hit since much of his early work was in condominiums. Horizon View. Futura. Beverly Mai. Westwood. Maxima. Belle Vue and Oxley Rise are all his projects and all are either sold or in talks for sale. Until the sale cut through on a technicality recently. Horizon Towers in Leonie Hill was also on that list. Of the lot. Beverly Mai ranks among Dr Seow’s favourites. For one it is widely credited as being the first condominium in Singapore. It was the first to have shared facilities first with maisonettes and the first to have units with no celebrate walls (walls shared by two units). Ironically it was also one of the first to be sold. Architect William Lim. 75 says he has lost count of the number of buildings he designed that have been destroyed. Unlike the other two men though his jewel in the crown. Golden Mile Complex in Bras Basah is still standing. For now that is. Some owners of the mixed development have lobbied for a collective sale though it is far from a done deal. The long- time opponent of Singapore’s urban renewal strategy feels Singapore is now at a critical juncture if it is to rescue any of the country’s architectural.
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http://lushhome.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-are-they-doing-to-my-buildings.html
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