Expédition urbaine à Singapour

Bravo à La Fabrique de la Cité pour l’organisation d’une passionnante expédition urbaine début juillet à Singapour.

Nous aurons l’occasion de revenir sur cette ville (notamment sur les sujets “smart city” et “espaces publics”), mais en attendant, on peut lire les publications que consacre le think-tank à cette expédition : ici.

L’occasion aussi de lire la présentation que fait de Singapour Rodolphe de Koninck dans son article “Singapour, l’énigme territoriale” (ici) (cf. la carte ci-dessous qui montre comment l’île a été physiquement agrandie et remodelée).

Et aussi de relire ce qu’écrivait Rem Koolhaas en 1995 :

“Almost all of Singapore is less than 30 years old; the city represents the ideological production of the past three decades in its pure form, uncontaminated by surviving contextual remnants. It is managed by a regime that has excluded accident and randomness: even its nature is entirely remade. It is pure intention: if there is chaos, it is authored chaos; if it is ugly, it is designed ugliness; if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity.

(…)

“In the late sixties, Singapore architects – savagely synthesizing influences of Le Corbusier, the Smithons/Team X, self-conscioulsy Asian speculations derived from Maki, a new Asian self-awareness and confidence – crystallized, defined, and built ambitious examples of vast modern socles teeming with the most traditional forms of Asian street life, extensively connected by multiple linkages, fed by modern infrastructures and sometimes Babel-like multilevel car parks, penetratd by proto-atriums,, supporting mixed-use towers: they are containers of urban multiplicity, heroic captures and intensifications of urban life in architecture, rare demonstrations of the king of performance that could and should be the norm in architecture but rarely is, giving an alarming degree of plausibility to the myths of the multilevel city and the megastructure that “we”, in infinitely more affluent circumstances, have discredited and discarded.

(…)

“The irony of Singapore’s climate is that its tropical heat and humidity are at the same time the perfect alibi for a full-scale retreat into interior, generalized, non-specific, air-conditioned comfort – and the sole surviving element of authenticity, the only thing that makes Singapore tropical, still. With indoors turned into a shopping Eden, outdoors become a Potemkin nature – a plantation of tropical emblems, palms, shrubs, which the very tropicality of the weather makes ornamental.

Source : Koolhaas – S, M, L, XL – Singapore Songlines. Portait of a Potemkin Metropolis… or Thirty Years of Tabula Rasa – 1995