By Phan Ming Yen

Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore
Jiat-Hwee Chang and Justin Zhuang, photographs by Darren Soh
Ridge Books (2022) / 352 pages / SGD 65.00  

If you live in western Singapore and if sometimes you travel home by public transport from Orchard Road area, there are some places you will pass by or catch a glimpse of: the former PUB building (now a gilded 111 Somerset), the solitary Church of Our Saviour in Queenstown, the foliage-covered Pandan Valley along Ulu Pandan Road and the ominous Jurong Town Hall building that surveys all that lie before it.

And you would have journeyed through Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore.

I had picked up this 352-page volume – its 18cm x 23.5cm x 3cm size certainly not designed to be read on the go – fearing a severe and polemical discourse. I finished it feeling as if I had just disembarked from a tour of my country, rethinking and relooking anew at the landscape and life around me.

Right on its onset, its three authors (it grew from architectural historian Jiat-Hwee Chang's research into the work of Singapore's pioneer architects and their iconic modernist buildings before he expanded the scope of his work to the uniqueness of Singapore's modernism and subsequently bringing onboard collaborators, writer Justin Zhuang and photographer Darren Soh) state that they hope the book will serve as a resource and reference, and engender conversation.

Divided into six sections comprising 32 illustrated essays, the trio takes the reader through the histories – architectural and social – of buildings and landscape, most of them "planned and built during the era of rapid socio-economic modernization and nation-building in the 1960s and 1970s" and an earlier period of colonial modernity between 1930s and 1950s and the era of "late capitalism in the 1980s".

Each essay lies between a 2,000- and 2,500-word limit, is meticulously footnoted and accompanied by archival photographs which, in terms of their selection, are rich enough as standalone photo essays. The writing style is readable, blending historical research (of both architecture and society) with the anecdotal. While the referencing of the backgrounds of architects or government policies may be heavy-going to those outside the field, each essay often ends on a thought-provoking note and the writing is peppered with humour throughout: there is, for instance, the account of how old standalone cinema buildings were "saved from demolition by a seemingly unlikely savior – the Christian community."

Chang, Zhuang and Soh hope the book will be a resource for "understanding how Singapore's reputation as a modern global city was built upon the progressive ideals of those who came before" and that it will stimulate further interest and research into modernism and "make the modern environment we live in a larger part of our everyday conversation".

                                                                                                                 Indeed, as the section titles imply – 'Live', 'Play', 'Work', 'Travel', 'Connect', 'Pray' – any reader can dip into the book and, from its discussion spanning expressways, overhead bridges, hawker centres, HDB flats, shopping malls and columbariums, be sure to find at least one place within the pages of this book that he or she would have been to, passed by or lived in or have made a memory within.

And for me, therein lies the quiet magic of this book. Each chapter opens a page from a personal past and shines a new light on memories of childhood, student days and early work life.

Chapter 2, for instance, which looks at how People's Park Complex was an early pioneer in the podium tower concept and of "integrated living in a denser city", brought vividly to mind the hustle and bustle of its shopping and eating areas when I first visited Singapore as a child in the late 1970s. I remember People's Park Complex as being the go-to place for affordably priced calculators, cameras and radio-cassette players, oblivious of the fact that in 1973, the six-storey podium with a 25-storey residential block above it was Singapore's largest shopping complex then and how its success subsequently led to the building of 15 other podium towers across the country's central areas.

Further down into the book, in the chapter titled 'Institutes of Higher Education: Systems Planning to Support a Technocratic State', I found myself once again as an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore making my way up and down the seemingly endless flights of steps from Yusof Ishak House to the Central Library area and then through anonymous corridors to lecture halls at my faculty. I recall asking myself many times, in my first few months there, a silly question: Why is everything all over the place?

Now, more than 35 years later, I am relieved in knowing that I was not the only person who found the campus, as described within the chapter, a site where a "series of meandering, up-down pedestrian walkways and bridges connected the various buildings in a manner that was disorienting to navigate and physically tiring to use". The footnote to this statement reinforces the sense of humour found throughout the book: "One of the authors is also speaking from the experience of using the campus for over 25 years."

The rationale for the design, of course, was that the campus was built at a time when the then vice-chancellor Dr Toh Chin Chye (who was actively involved in its planning and design) was concerned about student activism and its disruptive possibilities on site. Hence, the dispersed layout and a campus with "no central spaces easily accessible by all students" and where most of the open spaces are made to "feel like transitory in-between open spaces for circulation, or landscaped areas not meant to be entered". This resulting layout was a "disconnect" to that originally envisioned and proposed by Dutch urban planner and architect Samuel Josua van Embden (1904–2000).

Another building given prominence in the book which brought back memories is the Church of St Bernadette from 1959 by pioneer architect Alfred Wong (1933–) at Zion Road. For the authors, this is probably the best-known church designed by Wong. My first former workplace was once across the church. Sometimes, we used to walk past the church enroute for lunch. However, being not of the faith and often plagued with daily deadlines then, I never found a reason to enter this place of worship.

Upon reading now about the unusual plan of the church resembling "a compressed hexagon that looks like a diamond" and the authors highlighting how the church's floor plan created a sense of "greater lay participation in the church's liturgy" which was being adopted at the time worldwide and finally formalised in the recommendations of the Second Vatican Council, a sense of regret falls – that once I had an opportunity each day to visit this sacred and historical sanctuary.

Such encounters within the book are endless for those from Generation X. Read any two or three chapters at random and you would find yourself back home in the realm of memory, whether of joy relived or regret revisited.

You would also look at the daily and the familiar anew: now as I see Jurong Town Hall daily when I take the train, I cannot get it out from my mind that its "brutalist aesthetic may be read again as a harbinger of the future".                                                                           

Beyond architectural history, the book is a nesting dolls of social history, both comic and tragic. How many of us remember the 1970 court case (recounted in the chapter 'Pedestrian Overhead Bridges: Staying Safe Amidst Accelerated Development') in which a pedestrian sued a driver for knocking him down while he was standing on the centre line of Upper Serangoon Road? And how many of us also recall (highlighted in the chapter 'Pan-Island Expressway: Speeding up and Spreading out Modern Life') that in the same year, a man was killed when four concrete beams weighing 272 tonnes fell from the six-lane flyover that was then under construction over Thomson Road?

In summary then, the experience of revisiting Everyday Modernism, either in part or as a whole, is akin to that of dipping into Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the novella in which Marco Polo describes the many different cities he has visited to Kublai Khan, each city of course being a description of Venice. Just as Calvino's book can either be read in chronological order or in groups of chapters (or prose poems) as denoted by the author or in any order and in effect to customise one's own journey through Venice (so to speak), one can do the same with Everyday Modernism and curate one's own journey through Singapore of one's past, present and possible future.

And just as Calvino's work is haunting and meditative and speaks of longing, loss, desire and hope yet at time not without a tinge of playfulness, Everyday Modernism leaves one with the same aftertaste.

This is nowhere more evident than in the photography of Darren Soh which opens and closes the book. Soh's photographs of buildings and the urban landscape of Singapore devoid of human beings recall the works of Edward Hopper's mature style, whereby in his paintings of urban settings and interiors, a sense of silence and estrangement – as described in The Met's website – is pervasive.

Perhaps this visual sense of loneliness and silence is appropriate: as a space to allow the reader to settle the mind before embarking on a journey and as time for the mind to reflect upon arrival.

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