LOUNGE HOUR
KUU furniture for the interiors of private club in Yiwu.
blog
TEA TIME
On a tea valley among low hills in Anji, a group of women are coloured spots with bobbing straw hats in a field of luscious green picking tea. Each sits on a plastic stool, briskly snapping off young two or three prong leaves of the famed ‘white tea’ in Anji. Its white a reference to the pale clear yellow-green liquid that gives the subtlest whiff of the vegetation we see before us.
The young leaves are left to dry in woven bamboo trays in a dim shed, to be weighed and sold to a factory before they are processed and packaged into the familiar tins nestling in hard gift boxes in the tea shops of bigger cities. The couple who owns this small plantation complain that they hardly make enough to cover the daily wages of these women pickers who are employed at 80 yuan per day, for a month each year.
Every April, the picking season starts with the man arranging these women from the distant Hebei village to be sent by train, then packed ten to a mini van, to this cluster of one-room buildings where they would work, eat, sleep, and play for an entire month.
For these women, they are here for the money they say, but admittedly also for a bit of fun away from the routine of their village lives, like schoolgirls camping on double-decker bunks, chatting the night away.
URBAN RENEWAL AND I, PART 3
A few more years later, I went to study in Barcelona in a course called the Metropolis, ruminating the correlation between urban built form and the living culture it engenders. This had special concrete meaning for me as our main lectures were conducted at the CCCB, in a courtyard building that was a former orphanage with a new contemporary wing added by Torres and Lapeña. We were in the thick of the action in the old Raval. Everywhere was walkable; the same walks felt different each time. The Collegio library where I did my research in, was a rich walk along bending narrow lanes, across the Ramblas to the Cathedral square. There I learnt about those ideas in the 60s in re-organising urban life. One of the essays I had written there was about remnant Japanese Metabolist ideas cast ashore in Singapore, later published in translation in a special issue on Metabolism in a Japanese magazine called Kenchiku Bunka, guest-edited by Hajime Yasuka, who recently curated the major Metabolist exhibition at the Mori Museum in Tokyo.
(Half ‘A’-frame tropical Metabolism: Golden Mile Complex, Singapore)
What I gradually grew to grasp is that the talk in the ‘60s had morphed into quite a different animal in present times. Insidiously, the Asian boom in the past 20 years had transformed the alleviation of congested living conditions in urban ‘renewal’ into urban ‘redevelopment’ as a tool for economic development. We had gone from doing it for the ‘people’ to ‘branding’ the city. Every development decision was down to ‘market forces.’ My home, which became a parking lot, remained a parking lot for many years. Its land value, smack in the core of Orchard Road, in the meantime had risen astronomically.
Three years ago it was ‘redeveloped’ into another snazzy shopping mall called Orchard Central, while Cuppage Plaza had also since been re-‘redeveloped’ into luxury service apartments called Somerset Orchard Residences.
(Orchard Central, formerly car park lot, and before that a row of three-storey shophouses which included the Rollei camera shop, Queen’s flower shop, Princess flower shop, Corona flower shop, Roland’s Hair Salon, Chin Bee provision shop, a Chinese medicine parlor.)
Metabolism indeed, but based on very different value$. I now live and work in Shanghai, as I have in the past eight years, in a district of small streets where I can walk to buy my provisions or have a coffee at a small cafe. Singapore which has meanwhile become the success story of urban transformation from Third World to global hub of this and that, remains only a place I visit; one in which I feel culturally somewhat estranged. What if, you ask? Look a little further north to Penang: a simplistic comparison, ignoring macro-economics, local politics and such, Penang’s Georgetown, which has the same urban structure of narrow streets of shophouses as pre-re-development Singapore and has kept its city intact, now has been accorded UNESCO’s World Heritage City status. It is now a natural draw for global tourists wanting a little specific culture. As for me, for transient relief, present-day Georgetown is my past that I can still return to. At the end of this long story, you can say that my sense of homelessness is caused somewhat by deviant ideas of urban renewal.
URBAN RENEWAL AND I, PART 2
Many years later in my final year at a Singapore architecture school, somewhat British-RIBA styled then, we were told to work on a comprehensive thesis project, one which entailed first, fabricating some nagging ‘issues’, choosing an appropriate site, then making a master plan to finally fit, your master piece of an architecture.
I did not make a master plan but instead wrote a text which I vaguely remember: “… I don’t believe in master plans: master plan, the Master plans …”
My thesis project was about tearing down the facades of a row of to-be-conserved shophouses along the Singapore River. The Urban Renewal Department in Singapore had been re-organised as the Urban Redevelopment Authority and in 1985, stopped razing the older (“core” in their parlance reminiscent of the ’60s again) shophouse areas in the city, lifted rent control, and began a conservation programme. Those shophouses at my ‘site’ were to be conserved, sold to entrepreneurs, and turned into restaurants and bars, mainly for foreign tourists, as the local tourism agency proposed.
In my project, like Singapore’s master planners, I demolished the soon-to-be-reconstructed-to-original facades leaving the insides revealed through glazed fronts. Above would rise a single row of hotel rooms on Corten steel stilts hovering 35 meters high like a rusty apparition, an artifice of arrested ageing, amongst the carefully planned downtown skyscraper skyline. My only dictated rule for this hotel is that one is allowed to stay in a room only for a maximum of 24 hours, after which one has to move to another room along that stretch. To go from bed to bathroom, one has to move from inside to outside along a gangway, momentarily glimpse the surrounding city from high up (hell, that god’s eye view again, don’t we all love it) then back in again.
On hind sight, my “issue” was rather personal, as I now think what architecture should be.
… to be continued …
WIM WENDERS DIDN’T QUITE
Dear Mr Wenders,
I’m going to start with the much cliched “don’t get me wrong…,” which I think is flippant and redundant, but somehow suits this purpose.
Don’t get me wrong Mr Wenders, I do like your films very much, but while I enjoyed your little film about SANAA’s Rolex Center in all its 3D splendour, and despite the annoying voice-over of the ‘building’ that unnecessarily narrates to us in no uncertain terms what it does and how it works and where its poetry lies, I somehow feel somewhat uneasy. You see the building as form, as “landscape,” which it certainly looks like visually. As a film maker, you see it (the “protagonist,” you call it) as a place where things “flow” in a seamless interplay of ‘space’ and ‘time,’ like scenes unfolding in your moving camera’s eye. You even made Sejima-san and Nishizawa-san ride around in segways, she beaming with joy, and he deadpan outside (but we are sure, exhilarated inside as the never-smiling young Masatoshi Nagase’s character in Jim Jamusch’s Mystery Train says, “I’m already happy inside.”) In your film, the sense of this building is lovingly presented as ‘flow,’ and this ‘flow’ is derived from you, the framer of things. That is, defined from a god’s-eye view of things (or an angel’s view of things as it is likely in your case.) Then you made the characters act out these scenes of ‘flow.’ This is a little different from what SANAA intended, which is making a simple one-space environment where different things happen, the difference between ‘before’ and ‘after,’ and what Mr James Leng in the previous blog observed while walking around, then tentatively began to discern how different the building is from conventional ways of framing architecture in terms of function, efficiency and detailing or even space and time.
Yours, etc.