Clockwork Configurations

Loo Boyan

Imagine you would stare exactly 5 kilometres off a coastline and decide that that would be your new ground for architectural contention. You would sum up your thoughts by conceiving a ship / factory right there, abandoning all maxims of civil engineering for naval architecture. You would tread new ground(water), beyond the physical limits dictated by planning, just to know what you can achieve. And then there is more.

93 years back, the publication of Tony Garnier’s Une Cité Industrielle1 informed of the separation of land into parcels, tagging them as appropriate into functions organic to urbanism. Imaginary lines drawn on paper became actual physical sites of ideological battles latent with heterogeneous pressure. That very idea is not unlike Singapore herself, who has often battled at its coast to build and rebuild its coastline facing wrath from the choppy Singapore Straits. Its land is subdivided into parcels – from 5 main regions to 55 planning areas.

At the point where functionalism pushes land planning to its limits, water as ground (and dumping ground) becomes less a daunting thought and more a hydrological ambition - a flippant retort towards the aimed exodus of the industrial image towards an economical front in developing nations. With topographical influence at its minimal, (like the Cite Industrielle, on a plateau in Southeastern France) the range and depth of the sea becomes the first and perhaps only layer of inhibition. Such featurelessness shall influence buildings to generate themselves as landforms, as undulations to respond to muted landscapes.

This suggested infinite capacity for expansion and, as such, an escape from romantic ideas about place, for a place2 (heavy industries) which has surely little if not no inklings about romance becomes strangely appropriate. Superstudio did it and claimed irony – exaggerating concepts of a technological utopia to the point of absurdity. The fashioning of industrial landscapes, usually out of reach of architects but often the bread butter for engineers and technicians encounters an intentional role reversal, a possible dystopia and utopia.

Yet, was it Anthony Burgess who mentioned in A Clockwork Orange if it was better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him? Inventions generate reinventions, reinventions are reinvented. The skewing of ideological thoughts, like a skipped beat in clockwork, generates new momentum in discourse.

1 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/118760/Cite-Industrielle

2 http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=63