Foreword

• a time of intense difficulty or danger:the current economic crisis

• a time when a difficult or important decision must be made:[as modifier] :the situation has reached crisis point

• the turning point of a disease when an important change takes place, indicating either recovery or death1

Singapore has always been in crisis: a communist insurgency, a colonial contamination, a claustrophobic position, a racial tinder box, a poverty underbelly, an economic collapse and now an environmental apocalypse. Crisis is opportunistic. Crisis empowers. And crisis fuels action. In the case of Singapore, crisis is a surgical instrument, sometimes sharp; other times blunt that keeps the city state in an atmosphere of continual change --a process of radical transformation the envy of the world.

In Singapore, crisis keeps the economy moving forward and the jack-up cranes rotating throughout the night. This ballet of construction, silent but ever going, illuminates the blackened sky, expanding a landscape for the country’s expansionist desires one square kilometre by kilometre. Architecture fills the land with objects and forms, infrastructure and parks, highways, and subways, facilitating a growing city as if there is no other choice. In the race to fill herself, Singapore and her architects dance with ever increasing speed and freneticism. If only one had a moment to rest and see what has been made.

Through a series of probes into the milieu of this amazing architectural laboratory on the equator, at once the darling and punching bag of our architectural heroes, Singapore Transcripts peers onto the landscape with eyes wide open – looking at what has been built over 45 years of reaching for the first world. The devices of architecture and graphic diagramming are employed as detectives, forensically uncovering the mythic, the hidden, and the less obvious along with that which one pretends to know. Has a crime been committed? In most opinions: no, yet the scene is nevertheless dramatic and titillating.

Singapore Transcripts depicts a foundation to a city as a speed bump to the country’s own frictionless efficiency. It represents a moment of pause and reflection in an orgy of doing.

And yet, Singapore Transcripts remains Singaporean at heart, embracing crisis as opportunity in an offering of future visions to spur the experiments and radical transformation forward, if ever so slightly, askew.

Erik G. L’Heureux, AIA LEED AP, Editor Assistant Professor Department of Architecture National University of Singapore

1 Oxford English Dictionary, http://oxforddictionaries.com/view/entry/m_en_gb0191250#m_en_gb0191250, Sampled August 10, 2010

2 See articles by Michael Sorkin, Rem Koolhaas, and William Gibson.