He asked me, what is a world?

Louvre window

When I was a little girl, my dad's visit to the flat in Singapore was a once-a-year affair, for two days or so. I would know about the day he was coming in advance, and would station myself at the louvre window of the bedroom which opened into the public corridor on the fourth floor of the high-rise. The lower two or four leaves were metal, probably aluminum: for privacy, and never opened. The upper four or so leaves were the milky glass kind with a safety wire grid inside. Those would be open. Over the whole opening was a security iron grille with diagonal grilles. When I was a little girl, climbing these grilles was easy and fun. When I heard footsteps, I would spring up and climb on top of the grille to look out to see if it was my dad. The corridor was sunk 1 ft 6 in lower than the flat, so from my position I would see the top of my dad's head as he walked by. It was a grand and exciting affair.

"From the Machine Age to the Life Age"

Kisho Kurokawa

Stuck lifts and rubbish from upstairs

When I was a child, one of my favorite activities was flying paper planes out of my 4th floor kitchen window down to the parking lot below. My mom turned a blind eye to that most of the time. She did not turn a blind eye to water dripping from our neighbor's laundry hanging outside the window upstairs onto ours. The remedy was to use a bamboo pole to hit the ceiling of our kitchen a few times as a warning to the neighbor upstairs.

My mom also kept an eye out for the "egg man". He would come in his truck, selling eggs to all the housewives in the area. I kept my eye out for the ice-cream man. Thinking about it, we were on the last or second last storey to be able to spot them on the street below. The egg man and the ice-cream man didn't worry about that. They shouted and honked their presence- and you would not miss them from the twelve storey.

Worrisome singles

(The Singapore Experience in Public Housing, Augustine H.H. Tan and Phanf Sock-Yong, 1991)