People’s Park Complex in Singapore-Part 3. Re-invention is what has always interested me professionally and as a teacher of architecture. Perhaps seen through a conceptual lens, the sketch below shows the simple yet straightforward transposing of a colonial morphology into a new modernist ideal of the 1970’s urban renewal program.

People’s Park Complex in Singapore, Part 1. There are some buildings that at first do not strike you. In fact, their demeanor reflects your preconception of what is good or bad architecture—an attitude that is far too often spontaneous and not rational enough to constitute a meaningful critique. For me, this was my dislike of the People’s Park Complex in Singapore.

“…a brutal high-rise slab on a brutal podium,” that is “in fact a condensed version of a Chinese downtown, a three-dimensional market based on the cellular matrix of Chinese shopping —a modern-movement Chinatown.”

            Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL

Stage 1: podium

The People’s Park Complex in Singapore, Part 2, (called the Grande Dame of modern Chinatown or an Emblem of Asian Modernism) was part of the experimental architectural megastructures described by architectural historian, Reyner Banham and was built in two stages.