Tourists arriving at Singapore are often greeted at the airport by teenagers… … studying. Whether it is at the aviation gallery, eateries like McDonalds, or empty corners of the airport, Changi Airport is home to students looking for somewhere quiet and comfortable to hit the books…
An empty piece of land is not something that will catch our eye as we go about our daily lives, but for photographer Darren Soh, it sparked his on-going project that documents the building of Marina Bay Sands. Presenting at the inaugural PLATFORM, Darren showed a full-house crowd at Sinema his “progress pictures” of the integrated resort since construction began some four years ago. The photographer, who has made several photo collections of the Singapore landscape, said this island is one big construction site and that makes emptiness in Singapore’s landscape significant and something worth documenting.
Indeed, living in a country where everything is so transient, Singapore’s landscape has been extensively photographed. However, most works on it that I’ve seen focuses on the death of landscapes and its decay. It’s become a knee-jerk reaction for photographers living here — just look at the number of photographers who have been flocking down to Tanjong Pagar Railway Station now that it’s future is in limbo. Darren’s project responds to this Singapore condition from a different time frame — its beginning and birth. More importantly, his project freezes the never-ending construction work that we are seemingly surrounded with and allows us to reflect, and even marvel, the building of Singapore.
Coincidentally, I recently had the privilege of helping do some background research for an architectural project that looks at the conditions of emptiness in Singapore. The findings of architect Thomas Kong’s project will be presented in ‘Zero’: Alternative Scenarios for Architecture in a Post-Bubble Era on 16 June in Rotterdam.
As a number, zero is neither negative nor positive but we often assign a degree of negativity despite its neutral meaning. A vacated site similarly lies in a liminal state with potentiality. However, architects have been taught that the only thing they could present to society is a building, to fill the void again. But what can they learn from the way in which individuals and groups appropriate empty sites in towns and cities? And in broader perspective, what can zero offer as we live through the Great Recession, when the myth of continuous economic growth is shattered, the assumption of ready capital for development can no longer be guaranteed and architecture students are taught only one mode of survival as a professional?
One of the things that makes Tanjong Pagar railway station distinctly Malaysian for me is its signage. Like the Malaysian flag, the signs are in blue and yellow.
The typeface used in the signs also evokes memories of another era. The guys at Typophile have correctly nailed the typeface as ITC Serif Gothic, which was designed in 1972 by Herb Lubalin and Tony DeSpigna. This was forty year after the station was completed, so the signs are actually quite a recent installation.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS \ Jason Devadason
This sign was removed in 2004.
Dragons, watermelon, bumboats and doves — these were just some designs of public playgrounds built from the 1970s to early 1990s in Singapore. Built by the HDB, they were based on local themes and icons, and were unique spaces for a generation of Singaporeans who grew up with fond memories of them.
This is an on-going project. View photos of the playground and find them to relive your childhood!
UPDATE
Read my article at CNNGo for a short history of these playgrounds or my Singapore Architect essay on what we’ve lost with their passing. Also in the works — a more detailed history of the playgrounds and I may have tracked down its designer…
The fragility of Singapore’s multi-racial society is a very big part of the national ideology. Having to pay the utmost sensitivity to the four official languages here — English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil — how has that affected design?
Public signage is one very good indicator of this because it’s meant to be read by all so how it is designed is a good gauge of how we handle this issue.
A common way of handling this issue in design is to reference a ‘foreign’ element instead. In 1969, Minister of Foreign Affairs S. Rajaratnam explained to The Straits Times why Singapore was celebrating the 150th anniversary of modern Singapore with Raffles as the founding father.:
“In a multi-racial society at this stage of evolution, we could be inviting trouble were the founder to be selected from either the Chinese, Malay or Indians… by choosing Raffles, an Englishman, we have chosen a neutral person least likely to excite racial passions.”
In a similar vein, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew explained in his 2000 memoirs, From Third World to First, why he recruited Gurkha policeman as sentries for his home:
“To have either Chinese policemen shooting Malays or Malay policemen shooting Chinese would have caused widespread repercussions. The Gurkhas on the other hand were neutral, besides having a reputation for total discipline and loyalty.”
This goes some way in explaining why our public signage is dominated by the English language.
It is one of the four official languages. It is the most neutral because none of the dominant races are tied to it. And, as an English-educated society, almost every Singaporean is suppose to know it.
Another way of handling the issue is to be fair to all the races: use all four official languages.
That seems to be the way older signs have been designed to handle this problem of communicating to the public. Based on my observations, newer signs often just use English and sometimes Chinese because it helps them reach out to the most people today. Besides having more languages in a sign is often costly because of the increased printing space. One of the few agencies that still consciously make use of all four languages is the MRT train system.
Another more recent phenomenon in the design of signs indicates how important tourists have become in our landscape.
Go figure where most of our tourists are coming from! Strange how we’re willing to spend money on making a place inviting to our tourists but not our older generation who may not understand English…
The two approaches to design public signages to solve the problem of public communication seem inadequate to me. The former favours an exclusive, even ‘foreign’, language while the latter is built on a legacy that can be costly and inefficient. This is where I think a pictorial language such as Isotype can be developed locally to be used with existing English signs.
Symbols could be designed to assist in public communication. In a way, they exist extensively for drivers here already, so why not built upon that and use it more extensively for public communication? It could prove to be a more neutral and effective than choosing the language of English alone, at least people who don’t know the language can recognise shapes.
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