| December
2005
Our national icons
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Like many countries, Singapore likes to have emblems of nationhood. These
are supposed to represent something about the character of the country, or
tell something about the history of the people and the place.
Indeed, our emblems do both; the only problem is that the stories they hold may not be what our propagandists want to tell. Yet, they are wonderful stories, and I think, it's a shame we're seldom big enough to acknowledge them. One of the newest emblems is the spiky roof of the arts centre. It's a very modern-looking graphic, wonderfully evocative of our hopes of being cutting-edge. Yet it came about as an unintended consequence of a near disaster.
However, it got selected by our civil servants and then further design work proceeded. Halfway through, somebody realised that, My God!, it would be an oven beneath all that glass! Glass-roofed buildings are fine for European winters, but right here on the equator, you must be mad to build something like that. And so the spiky shades were added to the outside of the glass -- which now present enormous problems for cleaning and maintenance -- and these shades have become an icon. Isn't it wonderful that we've grown to love something that's a cover-up in more ways than one?
New Parliament House I have nothing good to say about this building. It has so little fenestration, it looks like a prison. It is grey, colourless and deadeningly conservative in form. No flair at all. It was designed and built by civil servants in the Public Works Department (PWD). And it faces the wrong way, as seen from this Google Earth satellite image.
To the north is the new and old Supreme Court buildings. To the east is the Old Parliament House and the Empress Place Museum. To the south is the Singapore River. All quite grand.
But to the west is a crummy cluster of buildings, including a podium-and-tower behemoth that, even by the standards of decades ago when it was built, was utterly uninspired in design and is now being tarted up with cheap shiny glass. This cluster I call the Indo-Russian market, because the mostly tiny, Indian-owned shops in there sell cheap electronics by the bulk to passing Russian seamen. There's a pervasive air of tax evasion about the area.
Yet, of the 4 possible directions the new Parliament building could face, the civil engineers in the PWD chose to face the Indo-Russian market. Why? Although the designers allowed for a garden in front of the new building, there was also an intention to acquire and demolish the Indo-Russian market. Perhaps a park would replace it. Doing so would open up a vista from the new Parliament building all the way to a Ministry of Information building (at the top left of the satellite image) .
But when the merchants who owned the three or four buildings that made up the Indo-Russian market heard about the plan, they raised a howl of protest. After some back-room negotiations, they were spared compulsory state acquisition, though it then left the new parliament building facing the wrong way. Today it remains intimidated by the bigger, taller Indo-Russian market just across its front lawn. My aesthetic instinct would have made the building face the river, turning its side to the market. I might even have created two separate buildings: a taller one on the market side housing parliamentarians' offices and the shorter, broader one on the Old Parliament side, housing the debating chambers. That would have created a central garden allowing the the New Supreme Court to look through it to the river, thus:
Alas, they didn't consult me, so a big cock-up occurred. Either the government kept their acquisition plans a secret for too long, such that when they finally revealed them (only to give way to the merchants) it was too late to re-orientate the new Parliament building, or even if they had a chance to redesign the thing, no new imagination came to mind. The construction proceeded on auto-pilot. So we're left with a colourless, forgetably conventional, prison-like building squatting in awe of an electronics market. Somehow, you could say our legislature deserved it.
It is quite fitting that our flower is not a pure-bred but a hybrid; Singapore in many ways is one too. Some hybrids are unable to reproduce though I don't know whether Vanda Miss Joaquim is one of those. However, orchids are almost always propagated by cuttings, and so probably all the Miss Joaquims we see in Singapore are clones! Now why is that also somehow fitting for Singapore?
Next, take a look at the plant as a whole. Orchids have aerial roots, and they don't really grow from the ground. So our Vanda's roots dangle about above ground. You might say, Singaporeans are like that too. We kind of have roots but they hang loose and are poorly grounded. Since the Miss Joaquim's roots have to be off the ground, the entire plant has to be tied to a wooden post, lest it flop into the compost and rot. The whole thing spends its life in a straightjacket, bound up with plastic restraints. You can't help but think, that's so true of Singapore life! On a separate note, did you notice that one of the forebears of Vanda Miss Joaquim is called hookeriana? Throughout our history, we've always had a subplot of hookers. From the earliest days of predominantly male immigrants who needed sexual relief in brothels, through the trannie prostitutes in Bugis Street serving soldiers and seamen to the "four floors of whores" in Orchard Towers, a thriving sex industry has always been part of the Singapore scene. Our national Vanda flowers quite liberally, but despite all efforts to keep the plant straight, it sprouts blooms that are gay-ly pink and lavender. And more. If you take a close, close look within the folds of the petals, under the skirt, as it were, you will see....
With that, I don't think you'll ever look
at our Vanda Miss "Bugis Street" Joaquim in quite the same way
ever again!
© Yawning Bread
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Footnotes None Addenda None
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The
history we would want to suppress is that the spikes were a desperate
attempt to solve a design failure. The original concept for the arts
centre had two smooth glass domes to roof over the concert hall and the
opera house. I remember that clearly because in the 1990s, there was an exhibition
of the shortlisted design concepts, including this one, together with a
public consultation exercise. I thought it looked like two gigantic
half-buried eggs when seen from the horizontal, or two gigantic compound
eyes (like flies' or bees') when seen from above. I voted against it.
This
is our national flower. It's a hybrid between Vanda hookeriana and Vanda
teres. It was the first orchid hybrid to be described in botanical
literature (in 1893) from Singapore, after being discovered in the garden
of a spinster, Miss Agnes Joachim.
