In the past, I have always been taken round Singapore. With a day to spare before the flight back, I took myself off to explore.
First, because it was close to the hotel, I wandered the streets of Kampong Glam, the still surviving lowrise Arab neighbourhood, including Haji Lane:
After 48 hours of attending an endless round of events at the World Architecture Festival, I have a better sense of how architecture operates. First, it is astonishingly international. Mariana Simas, the Brazilian architect from Sao Paolo with whom I was a judge, was familiar with small local projects, and the architects who had built them, in Vietnam. Second, the geography of influence has tilted strongly towards Asia and Australasia. The Americans seem conspicuous by their absence. Third, architecture as a profession, at least in terms of the bigtime global operators, is predominantly male (look at the line-up of winners), except where it relates to interiors. Fourth (and this is a statement of pure prejudice), much of the most interesting and thoughtful architecture is being done in Australia and New Zealand, both of which have strong and independent national traditions, support their own architects, believe in innovation, and are interested in the relationship between architecture and the natural environment. The winner of the World Building of the Year Award was a21studio for their chapel in Vietnam.
I’ve been on the jury for most of the day for an award for the use of colour in architecture. First, we were shown a project in Lund in Sweden where colour is used to enliven a pedestrian bridge across the main railway line. Then, two bank projects from the southern hemisphere – the new National Australia Bank headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and the new ASB headquarters in Auckland, New Zealand – both of which use colour inventively to break down corporate uniformity. Peter Cook (in bright floral shirt) did a presentation on a new university building which he and his partner, Gavin Rowbotham, have done for the University of Vienna which uses intense colour throughout from the brightest orange to brilliant yellow. A young Vietnamese practice then showed a more temporary community project which uses colour in fabric. We ended with a large multi-generational private house in Kuala Lumpur and a repurposed factory on the outskirts of Adelaide. Luckily, the decision of the judges was totally straightforward. We all agreed that only Peter Cook’s law faculty building used colour with total conviction, making colour integral to the conception of the project rather than applied to it. It was unanimous.
I walked through the Gardens by the Bay during the day and even more by night, pleasure gardens on a grand scale, in a tradition which goes back to Kew, full of exotica and buildings of no purpose, but a form of visual delight. This is a view by day:
And by night:
Richard Rogers gave the keynote address to a packed audience on the subject of ‘Citizens and the Compact City’. It was an extraordinarily impressive account of his career, ending where it could have begun with the house he designed for his parents in Wimbledon which was motivated by so many of the ideas which he has subsequently explored, including transparency, single span roofs, and a strong sense of community use even in a family house. Almost all of what he said seemed wholly relevant now: the use of brown field sites, opening up high streets, protecting green spaces. Of course, it’s all about use and planning and people as much as it is about architectural design, but that’s what has differentiated him as an urbanist (going back to Masaccio) from his peers.
It’s slightly disconcerting to find myself being whisked by taxi from Changi airport straight into the centre of Singapore. I haven’t forgotten the shock of arriving first direct from Bangkok and experiencing the extraordinary contrast between the pandemonium of Bangkok and the Swiss-style order and neatness of Singapore where everything is immaculately planned and laid out through centralised planning by the Singapore Redevelopment Authority. I’m here for the World Architecture Festival, a grand talk-fest and awards-fest for the world of architecture, including Richard Rogers and Peter Cook and Moshe Safdie who designed the building we’re in (in three months):
Shanghai is undergoing an extraordinary boom in private museums. Given land and buildings by the municipal authorities, private collectors are then free to shape the museum according to their taste and collection. The first we visited was the Yuz Museum. I thought it was opening in 2017. I misheard. It is opening on May 17th. An aircraft size building, it was indeed constructed by the Russians in the 1950s. A beautiful large, industrial building with large galleries to the north and a new build by a Japanese architect at the front to accommodate bookshop, cafe, ticketing, restaurant and private members’ room on interleaved decks. The Power Station of Art is actually a public museum, built at great speed by the banks of the Yangtse to coincide with the opening of the Shanghai Bienniale on 1st. October 2012. We met Li Xu, the deputy director, who spoke charmingly and openly and in impeccable English about the problems of state funding, which are the same everywhere: an interest more in the building than the programme; a lack of commitment to the project’s sustainability; hardware more than software. By the time we got to the Jingan Sculpture Park, the sun was out, blue sky and blossom. Continue reading
In Shanghai we took the van into the deep suburbs to visit Zhang Huan in his new studio complex. The gates opened and there was a camera crew to record our arrival. We were taken first to a large, long space, as large as the Turbine Hall, where he was showing a monumental work based on a photograph of Mao and party officials, infinitely mournful, in ash, the lost dreams of his parents’ generation and of his youth. it was hard to tell whether it was political or merely nostalgic. Philip quoted Susan Sonntag.
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I felt a Proustian moment of recognition as we approached Zeng Fanzhi’s studio. I had been here before. I had. I visited with Fabien Fryns, who also brought him on a private visit to the RA. He’s got an unusually developed interest in the history of art and since my last visit has acquired a wonderful Caspar David Friedrich drawing, two Morandis and an Egon Schiele. He’s in the process of designing a museum for the exhibition of his own and other people’s work. It’s being designed by Tadao Ando.
We spent the morning in 798 district – larger, more established and more obviously a tourist destination than it was three years ago (and perhaps inevitably less interesting). I’m finding it hard to make sense of the different strands of Chinese art practice. There’s a traditional strand of beaux arts practice brought in by the French in the 1940s and represented by the amazing rotunda of casts in the Academy, and which was added to recently from Copenhagen (hard to imagine us adding to our collection of casts). It seems that students are still encouraged to – or possibly required to – draw from the antique following the conventions of traditional academic practice, now abandoned in the west. There’s traditional Chinese ink painting, still practised traditionally, but also being reinvented, as evident in a recent exhibition Ink Art in Contemporary China at the Met. There’s contemporary abstract art. And there’s art in a more international, experimental manner as represented in private collections. But it’s very hard to work out how they interact, if at all, except all strands seem to be represented at the Academy.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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