Macro-Radicalism in the Age of Crisis

Ma Xiao

In 1975 during a talk organized by Rotary Club Central on “Alternatives to Public Housing”, Tay Kheng Soon presented the research1 based on Leslie Martin and Lionel March’s urban investigation that served as an antithesis of high-rise living as the only solution to Singapore’s land scarcity. When being asked by the press, Mr. Liu Tai Ker, who was then the Chief Architect of HDB, gave a political answer in response to this technical proposition, that, “he obviously has a different calculator from mine.”2

Such studies on low-rise high density housing were initiated approximately 40 years ago at Cambridge University. Leslie Martin and Lionel March, in their book Urban Space and Structures, and later in the essay From Sky-Scraping to Landhugging, proposed various speculations and hypothetical situations based on mathematical models that suggested a non-direct variation between the plot ratio and density. It is further demonstrated that the equivalency in plot ratio can be achieved using perimeter blocks with much lower heights compared to its skyscraping compatriots. In the thesis The Wrong Calculator, the perimeter configuration proposed by Leslie Martin and Lionel March propagated itself into a mode of massive urban model that thrives on the flatness and connectivity. Not only did Martin and March’s theory manifest itself as an anti-HDB statement here, it also suggests a departure from Corbusian ideology that was adopted by Singapore in its early stage of development.

Being a model of “Macro-Radical” approach, a term coined by Erik G L’Heureux, “one that proposes largescale speculative changes to the city, economy, politics, culture, transportation, hinterland and architecture to counter the negative climatic effects of development and current models of urbanization”3, The Wrong Calculator offers an alternative vision that echoes with its predecessors such as Constant Nieuwenhuy’s New Babylon Project and Yona Friedman’s Space City, a grand speculation that is created to reassert the authority of the architect as the visionary in order to make direct influence on the making of the new sustainable world in an age of crisis. The “Macro-Radical” approach, being the most latent paradigm in architectural field in the current age of crisis, has essentially extended the scope of design and architecture to related fields such as

1 Newsintercom. "NewSintercom » Tay Kheng Soon and SPURS: Activism in the Early Days of Singapore’s History." NewSintercom. 15 May 1999. Web. 10 Aug. 2010. <http://www.newsintercom.org/?p=18>.

2 Ibid.

3 L'Heureux, Erik G. "Radicality", Winy Maas MVRDV. Vol. 4. Singapore: Department of Architecture, School of Design and Environment, National University of SIngapore, 2008. Print. Ong Siew May Distinguished Lecture Ser. 2008 "Sustain/Ability" p. 10 infrastructural, economical, sociopolitical, ecological and cultural aspects, creating an amalgamation of specialized domains in which the agency of design needs to be repositioned. Nonetheless, as architects are compelled to deal with increasingly larger contexts and the mushrooming eco-cities, the unprecedented crisis that we are facing today points to more than a shift in the scale. It spells an opportunity to rethink the alternatives in the process of expanding the scope of architecture and urbanism: in this case, the reinterpretation of Leslie Martin and Lionel March’s theory that was crystallized more than 40 years ago.