People vs Place: The Conservation Dilemma
I recently chanced upon a video on the Louisiana Channel where Renzo Piano, as part of a group of 10 renowned architects, was asked to give advice to young architects. He opened by saying that “this profession is about making a better world, and it is certainly about making places for people to meet and stay together.” His statement definitely made me reach deep down into my inner conscience. Through conservation, are we truly creating a better world?
For Golden Mile Complex (GMC), it was a milestone success in our country’s history to conserve the first large scale brutalist building in Singapore. The colossal effort by interest groups within the architectural community to rally like-minded voices was indeed commendable. But if architecture is about making a better world, how would saving GMC make the world better, or are we happy to settle with the fact that it has served its due in making this world a better place and it is time for it to move on to be a new place?
In the many conversations I had about GMC, questions about the Thai community never fail to surface, some were left flabbergasted when I explained that they have to move out as the building will be renovated with higher rents that would not make sense for the current Thai tenants to reoccupy the space. Communities and culture such as this that have flourished over time are hard to regenerate once a place is gone. The taxi driver refers to it as the “Thai place” (for fear of confusing it with its other lesser known cousin, Golden Mile Tower). My father, however ,calls it the typewriter building, an imagery that I keep till this day. Interestingly, this year’s NDP theme song’s MTV portrayed GMC as a spectator stand- a whimsical caricature by the MTV’s animation creators. When GMC renovates and reopens after a successful collective sale of the building, this collective imagery of the typewriter and spectator stand would very well persist, but it shall no longer be that “Thai place”.
Rewinding back to our Save Dakota Crescent initiative between 2016-2018, I can’t help but draw parallels to GMC’s impending demise of its “Little Thailand” moniker. The decision to move all the HDB rental flat occupants to an estate close to the area was not an easy one. Grassroots and NGOs were hot on their heels tending to the residents’ needs, explaining to the residents what the move entailed and the expiry date for them to move.
We were wary of the political impact if the estate was conserved as that would inadvertently imply that there wasn’t a real need to displace the residents in the first place. We therefore realized that in our conversations with the Grassroots and Member of Parliament, our intent for conservation had to be aligned to theirs- lifts do not serve every floor which causes inconvenience to the aging population staying there, and the buildings were also dangerous to live in due to the poor upkeep of its structure.
Through the many tours that Dakota Adventures carried out through the site, the general sentiment was a collective memory of it resembling places around Singapore that was built the same time as Dakota Crescent (such as Queenstown’s Princess Estate and Balestier’s St Michael Estate) but now have been demolished. It dawned upon us that our angle of argument for conservation had to also skew towards one that fosters a sense of belonging and identity for Singaporeans who have witnessed the rapid disappearance of many recognizable icons such as the National Library at Stamford Road, National Stadium and National Theatre. Similar to GMC, that collective memory of the place will nonetheless be retained, but the essence of the place consisting its residents would have to move.
Through the many tours that Dakota Adventures carried out through the site, the general sentiment was a collective memory of it resembling places around Singapore that was built the same time as Dakota Crescent (such as Queenstown’s Princess Estate and Balestier’s St Michael Estate) but now have been demolished. It dawned upon us that our angle of argument for conservation had to also skew towards one that fosters a sense of belonging and identity for Singaporeans who have witnessed the rapid disappearance of many recognizable icons such as the National Library at Stamford Road, National Stadium and National Theatre. Similar to GMC, that collective memory of the place will nonetheless be retained, but the essence of the place consisting its residents would have to move.
In the interviews that Dramabox conducted with the residents, we heard many heartwarming anecdotes of how residents would call out their neighbours from their open balconies to answer their doors, or how the smell of food permeates the corridors from the neighbours kitchens, or how balcony doors had to be painted to make their units recognizable from below. All that will come to nothing once the 6 successfully conserved buildings and dove playground will be rejuvenated to make way for new users. Till today, the future use of these buildings still hangs in the balance and I can’t help but wonder whether conserving the buildings was the right thing to do.
Cai Yinzhou, a close ally to the Save Dakota Crescent campaign and founder of Dakota/Geylang Adventures, will always open his tours at Dakota Crescent with this statement. “Does the people make the place or the place make its people?” I never thought hard about this statement, but of late, it made me think twice about it.
Are we doing enough for the conservation of modern buildings? Or are we ok to perpetuate what we deem as conservation today in Singapore which only involves the retention building structure with the unavoidable displacement of existing communities? Could we see the livelihoods of human beings as important as the building itself? After all, aren’t we all architects trying to make this a better world, making places for people to meet and stay together?
