Choice

Laundry poles

Before highrise

An earlier memory... Up till the age of ten I had lived in a house like this in Malaysia... "Zinc-roof house" they call it. The road that led up to it was covered with flattened frogs, because it was really a village. The path that led to the house was unpaved dirt, on rainy days it was just mud. There were two really shaggy looking dogs, one about to die. Flies abundant. Wasps and other insects. Mosquitoes for sure. In the monsoon season huge swarms of black flying ants. Sometimes snakes hide in the gutter and killing it was always a loud affair involving all the neighbors (mostly spectators.) One or two heavy sticks were kept in the house... for snakes and robbers.

The living room was so high we played badminton in it. There was an alter at one end, a typical Chinese altar, all red, with smoking incense standing in ash urns. Sometimes the shuttlecock gets lost among all the paraphernalia of the altar. We preferred the shuttlecocks that had real feathers, not the plastic ones - those are heavy and don't sail as well. I buried hand scrawled notes in the ash urns, I can't remember what I drew or wrote, possibly stick figures saying hello.

My dad's family (him, my mom, my brother, me) lived in one room on the right of the main entrance to the house. To the left (if I remember correctly) the great grandmother's room. Standing right inside the door to that room is an old full-size grandfather's clock, the real kind that worked with a real pendulum. My dad had to adjust it from time to time - though I never figured out what he did. My great grandmother used to eat rats as a tonic food, they said. She had real bound feet, the last generation. When my great grandmother died, the garden with all the flowers in the world was burned. The flowers were as tall as I was. Past the altar on the other side of the living room was the kitchen, and on one side of the kitchen was my aunt's family's room. I don't remember my cousins at all - except that they were older girls. What was the kitchen like? I think there were old fashioned stoves, or maybe gas cylinders. Big burnt woks of course. The bathroom is at the other side of the kitchen - a real wet place, with a big earthen jar filled with water and a couple of plastic scoops.

Have you ever heard rain fall on a zinc roof? It is the most soothing sound in the world. The roof may leak, we place buckets all around the house; but the sound is worth the rainy day.

High-rise urban legend

Living in a public housing block, everyone knows what you mean when you said you hear noises from the ceiling at night. Particularly the kind that sounded like marbles hitting the floor. Especially when we were kids, all sorts of legends were circulated - generally in the vein of there are inhabitants "in between the floors." It makes me hair stand even now.

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.

Gangsters, mischievous children, bad neighbors, dirt, police

(Homes for the People: Study of Tenant's Views on Public Housing in Singapore, Stephen H.K. Yeh, 1969)

Worrisome singles

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

Ornament and world-view

(Antoine Picon)

Anecdote about symbolism

A personal anecdote about symbolism: When I first came to Cambridge I took one of those little tours they had in Harvard Yard, and when we came to Memorial Hall, the guide said - What do you think this is? And someone (or a couple of people) answered - a church. The guide said - This is not a church, but it really looks like a church doesn't it? That's because it was designed to be a church...

I accepted that, but the fact was I didn't think it looked like a church. Perhaps that's because I didn't come from a place where churches looked like that. But this remained in my mind, that Memorial Hall looks like a church, so when I was working some days this past summer in the information station and people came to ask where is Memorial Hall, I would direct them and say "it is that building across the street that looks like a church", and they all get it straight away. So, I bought into a symbolism I only just learnt... It works, and it was useful for giving directions.

End of anecdote.

Las Vegas

Art and Need

(Four Elements of Architecture, Gottfried Semper)
(pencil emphasis not by me)

"Art knows only one master - the need. It degenerates when it follows the whim of artists, even more so when it obeys the powerful patrons of art. Its proud determination can indeed raise a Babylon, a Persepolis, or a Palmyra from the desert sands, whose regular streets, mile-wide squares, stately halls and palaces impatiently wait in their sad emptiness the population that the despotic ruler was unable to conjure. The organic life of Greek art is not its work; it flourished only on the soil of need and under the sun of freedom."

On cultural imposition

Adolf Loos: "It would be nonsense to impose on people a cultural form that went against their inner feeling."

Is the loneliness of the high-rise the loneliness of the city?

We might think here of Paolo Virno’s distinction between the “multitude” and
“people.” The latter positions individuals in relationship to larger shared identities in which individuals recognize themselves and with which they see shared experience, while multitude (which Virno characterizes as the dominant tendency of the present) describes subjects incapable of recognizing themselves in social groupings or of imagining shared experiences. The individuals of the multitude are bound together as multitude by the recognition in one another of the shared experiences of alienation.

- Contemporary Ornament: The Return of the Symbolic Repressed by Robert Levit

Loneliness of the High-rise

"American Style"

Issue #2: Culture

Certain themes will emerge. One of them is a constantly evolving set of oppositions in an ongoing "battle of the styles," as the early writers often called it. Simply put, these contests occur between things like engineering and architecture; the old world and the new; traditional forms versus function and experimentation; commerce and utility versus art and beauty, the rational mind versus the spirit; the machine versus humanity; size versus scale. Together they form a kind of collective anxiety, the American struggle with the space between the ideal and the actual...Americans don't clothe or house themselves with ease, as do the people of Sweden say, or the Ivory Coast. They struggle with culture self-consciously, like Jacob wrestling with the angel....Someday, Americans will find out who they are -- and be comfortable with it. Meanwhile, the by-products of this process are pretty interesting if we pay attention. It is their in-betweeness that is often most American.

- Skyscraper, Prologue: The Skyscraper Problem - A Question of Style, Roger Shepherd