Exuberant Singapore. A Love Story of Radical Ambition in the Face of Ecological Catastrophe. Erik G L’Heureux, AIA LEED AP and 2009, are shockingly familiar, an uncanny resemblance that resides in one’s architectural subconscious: two islands crossed by rivers and lakes, surrounded by ports and sea traffic, visions of the Garden of Eden. Large landmasses to the North anchor the two island visions where a multitude of new towns are dispersed across the landscape; Utopia has fifty-four, Singapore only twenty-five. But Singapore is only 44 years old, Utopia: 493.
This is a love story. It is a story of our own love for Singapore. It is a narrative of Singapore’s desire to remain relevant. A tale of Singapore’s continued foresight and ambition. As in all love stories, there are seemingly irrational and extravagant ideas that create acts of absurdity. Yet in the context of love, everything seems completely appropriate and entirely plausible. Singapore’s unique history of perpetual transformation is combined with speculations of a future Singapore illustrated with visions of a Singapore reaching for its logical conclusion. But more than any fiction, this is about Singapore’s survival and the strategies required to overcome its historical burden and self-created geographical challenges.
Scene Three: For the Love of Topos, for the Love of Water, for the Love of the City Rudolph De Koninck, in his text “Singapore,AnAtlas of Perpetual Territorial Transformation”, notes of Singapore’s Topophilia. Topophilia is a love of ground, a love of place, a love of topography, and it sets the stage for an amazing history of battle. Land fights sea growing day by day. Sea attacks land in a slow process of erosion. A give and take forming the basis for Singapore’s continued transformation and continual reinvention, fighting ocean currents, monsoon deluges, and territorial reclamation. Topos is fundamental to the island’s existence. Without topos the amazing Singapore Story would be just a seafaring myth awash in the Straits. Then again, for Singapore, land equates with modernity; surely a floating city is bound to sink.
Scene One: The First Hydrological Nation State Set in 1516, a map of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, the first Hydrological Nation State. Scene Two: The Most Developed Hydrological Nation State Singapore, 2009 – the most developed hydrological nation state – looks forward to its own radical transformation in the next eighty-eight years, a tripling of the nation’s history of autonomy. The parallels between the two scenes, 1516
Singapore’s topography has been entirely constructed from its earliest 4