Community collage

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 1994 by Chris Abel

The dynamic form of this his new community centre is a metaphor for Singapore's vibrant multicultural society.

Singapore's statistically impressive public housing programme is both its best known and most controversial success story. The international image of Singapor itself is largely synonymous with that of the squeaky-clean, seried ranks of uniform high-rise apartment blocks designed and built by the island state's centralised Housing and Development Board (HDB). Created in 1960 in response to acute problems of overcrowding and squatter settlements in the city and modelle on European post-war programmes, the powerful HDB now houses 80 per cent of Singapore's 2.5 million population -- most owner-occupiers financed by generous government loans -- distributed among 20 new towns situated throughout the island, all interconnected by a famously efficient infrastructure of public transport. As well as sheltering most of the population, the massive programme of construction continues to serve -- as was intended -- as a self-driven economic engine, helping to sustain Singapore's buoyant economy with a guaranteed programme of public building, supplied by a host of associated industries, all amounting to 5 per cent of Singapore's GNP.

The decentralized new towns, which have their own economic and social infrastructure, vary in population from 70,000 to 250,000, subdivided into neighbourhoods of 20,000 to 30,000 people, which are further broken down in the most recent towns into precincts of 2,500 to 5,000 people. A matching hierarchy of public and commercial buildings provides local services, focussed on the tow centre, which is usually no more than five minutes' walking distance from the housing blocks. An essential and much-used feature of this carefully tended public realm is the local community centre, providing for child care, adult education, recreational facilities and a host of other amenities, small and large, which help to sustain an active community life.

The functional programme of Tampines North Community Centre, serving Tampines New Town at the eastern end of the island, is typical of these centres. The design by William Lim, however, is anything but typical, and is the positive outcome of the HDB's flirtation with a modest degree of privatisation, in which selected projects are subcontracted out to local architectural practices.

The choice of Lim's practice for the exercise was apt. A longstanding supporter of Singapore's social housing programme, if not of its architectural quality, the UK educated Lim has been at the centre of Southeast Asia's postcolonial architectural culture since its earliest Modernist beginnings. A founding membe -- with fellow Asian avant-gardistes Fumihiko Maki, Koichi Nagashima, Tao Ho, Sumet Jumsai, and Charles Correa -- of Asian Planning and Architectural Collaboration (APAC), Lim's pluralistic record epitomises the long and confused struggle of APAC and like-minded architects to reconcile global with local cultures and imperatives. Graduating from orthodox Modernism to Japanese-style brutalism, then experiments with Post-Modernism, Lim now veers between 'contemporary vernacular' and a mild form of locally inflected deconstruction. It is this last approach that Lim has adapted for the Centre, with unusual results.

With its colourful collage of assorted shapes and sizes, bound together by the strict order of the perimeter 'circulation frame', the Centre has been describe as a metaphor for Singapore's multicultural, potentially fractious, but disciplined society.(1) The regular, three-storey frame -- an updated interpretation of the traditional 'five-foot-way' -- provides both sheltered access to the separate activities buildings as well as a wrap-around sun-screen and mediates effectively between the smaller scale and irregular elements withi the frame, and the larger, repetitious housing blocks beyond.

The place is full of surprises and subtle pleasures, largely in the seemingly haphazard but in fact carefully contrived manner in which the activities buildings are split apart and differentiated from each other. A third of the whole complex, which is mostly naturally ventilated, is taken up with a three-storey-high, vaulted, multi-purpose hall, the largest space in the Centre fitting neatly into one end of the circulation frame. Thereafter the remainder of the rectangular block dissolves into a fragmented composition of separate an smaller elements and open, in-between spaces which encourage the circulation of air and provide diagonal, secondary routes across the complex. These landscaped pathways radiate from the main entrance building to join up with the circulatio frame on the other side, creating meandering, intimate ravines which subvert th larger and more predictable order of the frame. The larger order is further undermined by the obtrusive and irregular form of the main entrance building, which bursts through the tight corset of the frame to broadcast the happy disorder within.