In Federico Fellini’s delightful autobiographical film ROMA, there is a segment about an old neighbourhood of Rome circa 1950. A man washes himself from a tap on the kerb; washings hang in front of facades, strings of onions and chilli dry outside windows, an assortment of colourful tenants banter from room to room, sharing the use of the common kitchen and bathrooms, living raucously but somewhat harmoniously in one single apartment, under the grand edict “respect each other … and no busting each other’s balls.” Here, children cycle along its corridors, or horseplay on the streets while adults have their dinner alfresco in the company of friendly strangers at the restaurant downstairs, right beside passing trams.
You can exactly apply to this situation, what Walter Benjamin once wrote about Naples circa 1920: “Porosity is the inexhaustible law of life in this city. … Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar, so … the street migrates into the living room. … Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen constellation. The stamp of definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended for ever, no figure asserts it ‘thus and not otherwise’.”
In our modern architecture history we find A+P Smithsons and friends pro-posing a milder version.
Orhan Pamuk in his essay “Why I didn’t become an architect,” described his visits to many old apartments in some old neighbourhoods of Istanbul. Wandering from crowded apartment to crowded apartment where different families live together and people kept their doors unlocked, he saw old women sleep on beds pushed against walls, little children watching TV, people drinking tea, women cooking. He observed that many of the spaces have been altered and people use them in their own new ways different from the original intended use: “the room in which the woman was working was not a proper kitchen; the only access to this narrow space was through a room in which an old man was resting in underpants.”
Jump cut to present day Shanghai. In some old neighbourhoods within the inner ring, we see the same gregarious “porosity,” the same lively re-appropriation of existing spaces for new uses.
Now compare this with The Royal Tenenbaums’ huge American townhouse, filled with rooms secreting interiorised worlds of each member of the talented, wealthy and dysfunctional Tenenbaum family. Each desperately tries to escape from the alienation of their collective world.
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For our Punggol Housing Competition scheme designed in collaboration with LINGHAO Architects, we had to plan housing at high plot ratios of 3 and 3.4 and below allowable building heights between 64 to 75m. The typical design scheme would be to maximise the building height, with blocks of over 20 storeys giving more open space in between buildings.
Instead of high-rise apartments, we proposed 6 to 8 storey high blocks with 4 apartments to each floor, arranged closely together to define narrow lanes and small open spaces. These intimately scaled outdoor spaces, we imagine, would become lively outdoor living spaces for the community there.