Bygones of a Nation

This project aims to to celebrate the local consequences within Singapore’s built environment. It investigates ideas of preservation and identity and placemaking, the provocation of a true vernacular that looks at the immediate condition of place. The conditions that contain the memories of the everyday, conventional and mundane. The vernacular relishes itself as past and present iterations of itself, staking significant junctions in the perpetual urban development of the city through the megastructure.

This proposition creates a centre of localities. Forming a new “complex” of distinct local commercial conditions and phenomena. The hybridization of local artefacts and typological shifts needed to forge an enduring identity. The Market, the shophouse, the void deck, The bazaar and the HDB block. These objects represent the true vernacular of Singapore. These objects come together in compliance with the grid negotiating the existing immigrant enclave of the people park complex. Each being key interventions of their own revealing moments of intersections, disconnect and connect, revelation and concealment. These acts of intervention each seek re-integration of citizens and newer immigrants in becoming the true city room an ensemble of working class commercial urbanity. It hopes that this cross pollination of culture drives the displacement of migrant programs into the vernacular spaces, resulting in a transmutation of cultural activities.

The project explores architecture’s role of preservation and conservation and the social and cultural significance it can have. It questions the things that we choose to delete and rewrite within our built fabric and how that would ultimately construct the identity of place.