Building utopia - James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates' design of the Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore

Architectural Review, The, June, 1996 by Peter Davey

Singapore is perhaps the nearest place there has ever been to Thomas More's Utopia: pure and prosperous, a place where hard work and decency are enforced with severity. Part of the city-state's success lies in providing excellent education. Stirling & Wilford's contribution to Singapore's polytechnic programme humanises what could have been a monstrous bureaucratic institution, by giving it dramatic figure and a network of gentle, particular places.

Temasek is just one of the four polytechnics in the Government of Singapore's programme to educate the cohorts of managers, technologists and designers that it has decided are necessary to ensure the prosperity of the island state in the twenty-first century. With no obvious resources of land, raw materials or fuels, the island state has to rely on the skills and brain-power of its three-million population to provide goods and services that the rest of the world wants to buy. The Government's almost Confucian policy of enlightened market management has proved so effective since the state became independent of Malaysia in 1965 that the average income is one of the highest in Asia, higher than in many European countries.(1) But investment in infrastructure and in education must continue at ever-increasing pace if the multi-racial society and the economy are not to falter.

Temasek Polytechnic will cater for 11 500 students, have about 1000 academic staff and some 500 support employees. The accommodation for all these had to be built in one go: a huge undertaking that has virtually created an instant academic town(2) some few kilometres to the east of Singapore City. The site must have been a tangle of untamed tropical rain forest a hundred years ago, but now that is almost impossible to imagine. It lies a little to the north of the main motorway from the City to Changi airport. Immediately to the east is the Tampines New Town, a product of one of the government's earlier infrastructural projects in which much of the population of the old city was transposed from picturesque but insanitary slums to high-rise slabs which offer late twentieth-century internal decencies, and a measure of orderly open space with some well-used public amenities.(3) To the south of the site is the Bedok Reservoir, and beyond that the rolling grassy hills and picturesquely disposed clumps of trees of what appears to be an eighteenth-century landscape park. In this direction, only the tropical heat and humidity (and the towers of another New Town) remind you that Capability Brown was not at work.

The centre of the polytechnic terminates a main north-south axis of the New Town across the local main road, Tampines Avenue One. A gigantic six-storey horseshoe of building raised a further storey-height from road level terminates the view from the New Town and forms the focus of the institution. Yet the curve is not quite an ending. It is pierced with a huge hole: a window that from road level shows the sky, but which gradually reveals the idyllic landscape to the south as you mount the ramp to the place enclosed by the horseshoe. This plaza is the administrative centre of the organisation and provides a social focus, being surrounded by an arcade which shelters visitors to banks, shops, and exhibition galleries from tropical sun and showers. In a sense, the arcade is a modern extrapolation of that wonderful south-east Asian device, the five-foot way,(4) into the late twentieth century. Above the arcade are the offices of the central administration, into which the library tower locks on the south side.

The horseshoe acts as the hub of the whole organisation. From it the spokes of the four schools: technology, business, design and applied science whizz out into the parkland. Technology and applied science form the long main front of the complex towards Tampines Avenue One. Their great length is broken down on the north side by short projecting wings which have laboratories stacked over eight lecture theatres on the lower two floors. Between these orthogonal projections are clusters of special labs rotated at 45 degrees to the main axis to form stubby towers. Both these and the projecting wings are heavily carved into with strong notes of colour on the revealed inner faces: a device that gives human scale to the otherwise daunting length. (In the end, the long front wings will not be as dominant as they now seem, for the car parks that run between them and Tampines Avenue One will be shaded by large leafy trees.)

The strategy of keeping the outer skin or carapace of the complex very pale lilac and allowing the inner parts exposed by dissections to glow with rich colour is one of the most fundamental place-making disciplines in the complex and refers to the Singapore tradition of using bright colours on buildings. The single-banked concourses that run along each school-spoke are both the main circulation arteries and channels in which casual social interaction is encouraged. They are covered, yet open at the sides to encourage cooling and through breezes.(5) Individual schools are denoted by the colour of the ceilings, but the colours of the stout round columns that form a magisterial order as they march along the middle of the long plans are absolutely magical. It's simply paint: cadmium yellow, a vibrant but unstrident orange, scarlet, a lovely dusky pale blue, a strange soft slightly purple brown, deep almost Prussian blue, aquamarine. Each colour has great particular intensity, and the columns seen in enfilade flicker away with a piper's enticement. What could have been rather grey and rational academic pedestrian streets (though they could never have been quite that because of the views over the parkland and garden) have been given senses of place and procession by applied colour. How daring and naughty. The often vibrant colours of early Modernism have been lost in black and white photography, oxidised paints and the doctrine of truth to materials. We have to look back to the nineteenth century to see similar joy in applying colour, and perhaps even to the almost mythical magnificence of Greek paint to recall similar confidence in its use on such a scale. Undoubtedly, the colours will degrade over time as they are eroded by weather, light and students (though, in Singapore, the latter will perhaps not be as destructive as elsewhere). But the magic can always be restored easily, provided that the management keeps its nerve and commitment.