National Museum in Singapore, Part 1. Over the past decades, art museums have outgrown their spatial footprint; be it an 18th or 19th century heritage facility or a contemporary addition. I mention these centuries, as during that period major modern museums were founded.
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Hong Kong: a lesson in stairs (Central Market). In a recent blog, I described the origins of Central Market. I’d like to add that more detail of its history can be found at Timeline; at the Central Market website under Our Heritage Conservation; and in the comprehensive documentation Study on Historical and Architectural Context of Central Market.
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Hong Kong: the history of Central Market. Since ancient times, public markets—coined mercatus in Latin, which means trading, dealing or buying, as well as the physical place where those activities occur—have served as the identity and social lifeline for countless cities and towns. Food markets in particular have played a significant role as community-gathering places.
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Ballenberg: a vernacular architecture museum. My first visit to the open-air architecture museum at Ballenberg, Switzerland took place during my first year in architecture school at the EPF-Lausanne. It was one of the few required excursions during my studies, and, with discernable reticence, we embarked on several buses to travel from Lausanne to visit one of Switzerland’s national treasures.
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Bathroom at the Novotel in Hong Kong. It is typical that many students in their early years studying architecture will find themselves in front of what they think is an unsurmountable challenge when tackling a simple yet robust project.
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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.
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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
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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.
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The cooling board table. This piece of furniture may be one of the strangest objects that I have ever encountered, and definitely the strangest that I own. Ever since learning what its true purpose might be, I have rethought how it should be used with other pieces of furniture and objects in our home (Portraits of a Collection).
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The history of mirrors goes back to the first human gaze in a pond of still water, which in around 6000 BCE evolved to become the ubiquitous object that we call a mirror. To create mirrors, man started with polished stone (or volcanic glass when available), later fabricating them from various metals, finally ending with rough polished man-made glass backed by mercury. This technique was invented in Venice, which during the Renaissance held the monopoly for the production of mirrors.
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