This also reflects a new sensitivity to the needs of clients, an acknowledgement of the need to make multi-residential living sustainable in the social, familial and personal sense. While the HDB is encouraging new apartment configurations to accommodate the extended family in public housing, at the other end of the property spectrum developers are building open-plan apartments—’semi-white plans’—to allow occupiers to customize their personal space. As with the idea of vertical landscapes, the aim is to replicate the feeling of living in a landed house with all the individuality that implies and a shift away from the standardization of traditional apartment design.
Waterson points out that ‘Inhabited spaces are never neutral; they are all cultural constructions of one kind or another.’6 In other words, they embody meaning. But an ongoing issue is the tension between architects and their clients as to who decides the ‘meaning’. There is always a tendency for architects to ‘over-design’ in order to control the ‘meanings’ embodied in the home. The problem with this is that the meanings are the architects’ meanings, not those of the people who will be living in the home. This is not a sustainable way to go about things. Happily, the houses in this book exemplify a trend towards a sustainable collaboration between architect and client.
It may seem an obvious thing to do, to design a house that is right for the occupants, but actually houses are very often designed to reflect only what the architect thinks is important. However, there is now a marked trend in Singapore to highly customize residential design. It is, as architect Alan Tay says (see the Sembawang Long Houses, page 70, and the Tree House, page 78), a matter of asking ‘how the client would use the house’ and this can involve a lot more than the basic programme, with its number of bedrooms, etc. Occupiers have an annoying habit of filling and decorating a house with their favourite things, which can often result in a contradiction between the way the house has been designed and the way it is used. An obvious way to avoid this mismatch is to work closely with the client from the beginning.
This is a powder room in the basement of The Coral House (page 86) that no one wants to leave because of its view of the sunken swimming pool).
Clients now often insist on being part of a collaborative process. This book has many examples of clients being actively involved. With the remarkable shophouse conversion by Mark Wee in Neil Road (page 26), the client had a clear vision of a sustainable marriage of heritage and the contemporary and made it clear, saying ‘I didn’t want a house, I wanted a home.’ In Chang Yong Ter’s award-winning Namly Drive House (40), the client wanted ‘two homes in one house’. The client at Guz Wilkinson’s The Coral House (page 86) comments, ‘I was born in Singapore. This is the tropics. And I don’t like being cooped up in an air-conditioned room. When we were looking for an architect, we were very mindful that we wanted someone who would blend with our taste and style, not someone because he has a name.’ At The Cranes in Joo Chiat (page 200), the client, whose day job is in shipping and whose boutique developments are almost a hobby, worked closely with the architect to devise a multi-residential model that catered for a new demographic of professionals, but nourished by the rich, local urban heritage.
Indeed, there are architectural practices, such as eco:id, who only work on residential projects that are truly collaborative and where there is a natural empathy between architect and client.
This is not just a matter of clients briefing their chosen architects. This is a whole new paradigm for the client–architect relationship, which involves an ongoing conversation between the two that is intense and highly personal. Sustainability—environmental, personal and cultural—is a key driver for all parties and it is an approach which is drawing attention from all over the world.
Sustaining a Changing Singapore
Sustainability is not an option for Singapore, it is an imperative. In environmental terms, this means conserving water, looking for ways of moderating dependence on air-conditioning, attempting to restrict the use of private motor vehicles and making the best use of the available land. This, in turn, has implications for the social sustainability of the country. Land shortage and the cost of land—as one architect, Chu Lik Ren, said to me, ‘Space is a universal constraint’—imply high-density, high-rise and smarter ways of using space. If the use of private motor vehicles is to be discouraged by ownership restrictions and financial imposts, then an affordable, convenient and efficient public transport system has to be provided. Moreover, such a system has to be attractive and comfortable if it is to compensate for the lack of a private car. In the same way, to maintain social harmony the emotional well-being of the community needs to be ensured by providing communal amenities to compensate for the constraints of apartment living.
Economically, the country needs to be infinitely adaptive, constantly sensitive to shifts in the global economy and alert to new opportunities. Hence, the government has placed great emphasis on education, aiming for a highly skilled, flexible and innovative workforce, significantly aiming to make Singapore the design hub of Asia and a centre of creativity.
The key to sustaining an adaptive economy is diversity and inclusiveness, and with more than one-third of the workforce of non-Singaporean origin, not to mention its natural ethnic mix, Singapore is nothing if not diverse. The challenge will be to address certain contradictions, notably the perceived need for a stable consensus (which tends not to entertain deviant ideas) as against the need for a plurality of competing ideas and values if the country is to remain genuinely adaptive and innovative. This points to what some people believe is a fourth dimension to sustainability—political sustainability.
The Oliv Apartments (page 48) create a vertical landscape, the green common spaces providing natural cooling to the apartments.
New Homes for a New Society
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Despite the encroachment of a ‘global culture’ and its inherent stress on freedom, individuality and independence, in Singapore the family remains the foundation of society, and accommodating the extended family is a major preoccupation. Designing for the extended family, however, must now take into account changing cultural circumstances
As in other countries, escalating property values in Singapore make it increasingly difficult for younger generations to buy their own home. One solution has been to turn to the mass market, in particular the resale HDB apartment market where (as we see in the Dakota Apartment, page 156) there is a growing appreciation of the potential to renovate for a more up-to-date lifestyle, allied to an emerging sentimental attraction to a housing type once looked down upon. Another emerging solution is to buy into places like Johor Bahru and Sembawang in Malaysia, where land is more affordable, and to commute to the city.
Younger people living at home longer have provided a boost to the sustainability of the extended family and pleased the parents. But it comes with a rider because changing mores now require greater degrees of privacy and independence. The result has been a new form of multi-generational house, one which distinguishes far more clearly than before between the respective private domains. Adult children’s quarters now tend to be far more self-contained, often with their own entrances, allowing the children to come and go as they please without disturbing the rest of the household.
At the same time, greater flexibility is being designed into multi-generational houses, which is about designing for