What's behind 17A? for Going Places

Back when it used to be a prominent red-light district in Singapore, Keong Saik Road and its surround have left a lasting impression on author Charmaine Leung’s identity – impactful enough for her to write a book about her memories and experiences of the neighbourhood. 

While Keong Saik has lost not only its notorious roots but also a certain sense of community since then, the stories live on in Charmaine’s book 17A Keong Saik Road, revealing a colourful but wistful side of Keong Saik that is beginning to be forgotten. 

1. Your book name is also an address. How is this significant? 

My mother operated a brothel here when I was growing up from the 70s to the 80s. I will always remember it as a place that ‘separated’ my mother and me. We had to live apart from each other. 

Growing up in 15A Keong Saik Road

But, it is also because of this address that I had the chance to meet many amazing and courageous women who influenced my life till this day. Their spirit of resilience and how they persevered to make life work against all odds are a constant inspiration for me. 

Charmaine's grandmother and her mother posing in a studio

Today, 17A Keong Saik Road is the address of a restaurant.

Tell us more about your neighbours living in the area.

The people who lived in the neighbourhood were mainly Chinese, though a small population of Indians also lived in Keong Saik. The Chinese community were made up of clan associations and business owners who had their businesses on the ground floor units, brothel operators and ma je who worked in the brothels, ladies (dai gu liongs) who were sex workers, as well as others who needed a roof over their heads after a long day’s work. 

I lived at 15A Keong Saik Road with my nanny, and the neighbours who lived directly above our unit at 15B was a family of seven: the father was a lorry driver, his wife a fishmonger, and they had three daughters and two sons. They also made parts of their space into cubicle rooms and leased them out to a seamstress and a cosmetics salesman who worked in Outram Park. 
 
There was a great sense of community and belonging amongst the neighbours – a village-like atmosphere where everyone who worked and lived on those streets was friendly and seemed to know, or know of, one another. We could easily tell who was a gai fong (resident of the street) and who was a visitor to the area.  

What was it like growing up in Keong Saik? 

Growing up on Keong Saik was colourful. The sense of community in a village-like manner was probably the closest thing I could experience to living in a real kampung. 

Little Charmaine posing at 'her playground'

As a kid, I was allowed to run along the covered five-foot walkways on Keong Saik as long as I did not cross what the adults called my ‘boundaries’ – the junctions at Keong Saik and Kreta Ayer Road, Keong Saik and Neil Road, and Teck Lim and Neil Road – where the traffic was heavy with cars. I also got to roam the grass areas at what is known as Duxton Plains Park today. I used to run up and down the green slopes, playing catch with my childhood playmates.

Which building was a major part of your childhood?

The triangular-shaped building. It used to house Tong Ah Coffee Shop. This used to be the place where residents of Keong Saik gathered in the morning for breakfast and their daily dose of gossip. I loved having the butter and kaya toast from Tong Ah for breakfast! 

What is one thing that has not changed?

The sheltered ‘five-foot ways’. It is the one thing that has not changed for me in Keong Saik no matter how the inhabitants of the street, residents or business, have evolved over time. 

I still feel that same ambience I used to feel walking under these covered walkways today. This is especially around the area near the Chinese temple located at 13 Keong Saik Road where, as a child, I used to look up at the large lanterns hanging above me as I passed them.

What is your one favourite building in the neighbourhood?

It is the building at 15 Keong Saik Road but not because I used to live there! 15 Keong Saik Road has what I would consider the best view of the entire Keong Saik stretch. It is situated at the intersection overlooking the three streets of Keog Saik, Jiak Chuan and Teck Lim Road. It was very good for people-watching. Today, it houses the Singapore office of ARD German Radio and TV.

What is one particular memory of the place that does not exist anymore?

Instead of thinking of a place, a whole community of ma je who was living and working on Keong Saik comes to my mind. They used to be such a common sight in the Keong Saik area and in Chinatown. 

Ma Jie celebrating at a gathering

The friendships they had with each other left a deep impression on me – they were always looking out for one another, and coming to the rescue of their ‘sisters’ in need. Today, very few of them are left, and the last of them are probably in their nineties. They are a part of our history that will be forever lost.

What building has been particularly well preserved over the years?

The Chinese temple at 13 Keong Saik Road looks exactly like how I remembered it when I was growing up, and when I revisited the area in early 2000s. Although it did not add any fresh colours of paint like some of the other shophouses in Keong Saik did, it is well preserved over the years and has stood the test of time.

How do you feel about the evolving changes in the neighbourhood? 

What I miss is the old neighbourhood with the people who used to live in Keong Saik. Today, it is a very different community, made up mostly of businesses, restaurants and cafes. I don’t think many people live in Keong Saik anymore. In that sense, it will never be the same Keong Saik for me. 

However, I am glad to see the conservation efforts in the area. In Singapore, many old buildings have been demolished to make way for new developments. At least, I know I will always be able to point out to visitors where I used to live and play amongst these houses and alleys.

How do you think a balance can be achieved between making space for the new and preserving heritage?

I think preserving heritage does not necessarily have to be a trade-off between the new and the old. Holding onto the past for the sake of preserving heritage may not be realistic. It is also about evolution, and perhaps looking at adaptive reuse, that is, how an old building can be used in today’s context. 

Take for example, The Warehouse Hotel at Havelock Road which was awarded the 2017 Architectural Heritage Awards for restoration and innovations. The character of the former warehouse has been retained while innovations were introduced to adapt that building to a new use, making it relevant for the travellers of today. 
 
We also need to continuously educate people on the importance of heritage, and make it interesting for our future generations to want to know, explore, and make their own interpretations of heritage.

What is the lasting legacy of Keong Saik that you want people to remember?

I hope people can remember Keong Saik as a place where our forebears had come to settle from China, worked hard to make a living, and left an imprint here. It was not merely streets that provided entertainment to pleasure seekers, but a place where a community of people, despite their difficulties, persevered in working towards the hope of a better future. 

Keong Saik can, and should, serve as an inspiration, or a reminder, of how far Singapore has come as a country made up mainly of immigrants who left their home countries to make a life for themselves.

17A Keong Saik Road recounts Charmaine Leung’s growing-up years on Keong Saik Road in the 1970s when it was a prominent red-light precinct in Chinatown in Singapore. An interweaving of past and present narratives, 17A Keong Saik Road tells of her mother’s journey as a young child put up for sale to becoming the madame of a brothel in Keong Saik. Unfolding her story as the daughter of a brothel operator and witnessing these changes to her family, Charmaine traces the transformation of the Keong Saik area from the 1930s to the present, and through writing, finds reconciliation.

House with an Atrium for IndesignLive

In a quiet Queenstown neighbourhood, a family house by RT+Q Architects defies the disadvantages of its site and poses creative solutions to bring light and air into its interior spaces.

It is not an easy accomplishment to design a house that retains a façade of privacy on its public-facing exterior, yet feels bright, inviting and filled with natural light behind its public face. Yet, it is a spatial juxtaposition that appears as a natural solution within the aptly named House with an Atrium by RT+Q Architects, which has designed the residence to make the maximum use of its site and to respond to the owners’ programmatic requirements.

From the very beginning, the clients – a couple with three children – expressed their desire for a design that would allow plenty of daylight into the interiors of their house. A challenging task for a site situated on a North-South facing plot of land and sandwiched between two other residential properties. The configuration of the rectangular plot also hindered the design team at RT+Q from designing big openings at the East- and West-facing façades. As a solution, the team chose to design a house with a large, double-volume atrium that pierced the first and second levels of the residence, bringing in light and air without attracting too much heat from the afternoon sun.

“One feature of a lot of our buildings is that their front façades do not give too much away but, internally, the houses still feel very open,” says Rene Tan, Director of RT+Q Architects, highlighting the recurring theme within a lot of firm’s projects. Within the House with an Atrium, too, the titular central void is instrumental in creating a sense of openness and space from the inside.

With the courtyard and its two-storey high green wall, the configuration of the communal spaces around the inviting atrium became a logical choice. On the first floor, the design team positioned the gallery and the dining area directly across from each other, providing expansive, unobstructed views of activities taking place at the opposite, East and West ends of the house, while placing a spacious living room at the front of the house facing out to the vibrant green wall. On the second floor, the team designed a master suite overlooking the atrium’s courtyard and the spaces below, giving the clients a broad overview of the entire house from the comfort of their room. Other bedrooms were given more privacy by being set back from the atrium via elongated circulation spaces around the internal courtyard.

In a similar, strategic move, the RT+Q team incorporated open light courts and glass floors above selected areas of the basement to bring natural light below ground and make the lobby, tuition and entertainment areas, as well as various service spaces, a welcoming, well-lit continuation of the family spaces above. The choice of materials, like light grey concrete and marble throughout the basement and upper floors, further enabled the team to create a sense of space and openness within the 7,700 square foot home.

The team took special delight in designing the first-storey staircase, which was crafted in the same spirit of bringing lightness and various transparencies into the dwelling. “The owners were adventurous enough to go with a different kind of staircase,” says project lead Allan Tongol. “As a result, we went with perforated steel as a chosen material for the treads and the rises, making the whole structure, just like the house itself, look transparent and light.”

Tradition and Inclusivity in Balance for IndesignLive

For the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre, DP Architects merge traditional Chinese influences with a forward-thinking design vision to create a venue that fosters socio-cultural interactions.

As a new cultural landmark complementing the neighbouring Singapore Conference Hall in the central business district, the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre (SCCC) is a thoughtful amalgamation of functional and educational spaces with an expansive programme driven by innovation and anchored in culture and arts.

Designed by DP Architects with landscape consultant DP Green, the new building is the answer to a design brief that called for a forward-looking, and spatially and socially inclusive building that would create a welcoming destination for diverse groups of visitors.

The new venue walks a fine line between fitting in with its surrounding context and standing out. The SCCC is a one-stop destination for performances, exhibitions and cultural activities. To bring coherence to the composition of programmes held within, DP Architects gave the building a clean and contemporary look that also connects to the neighbourhood around it.

DP took inspiration from traditional Chinese three-tiered architectural compositions, and organised the SCCC in a functional stack for clarity of programmes, circulation and planning. Articulation of the architectural language reveals itself in three distinctly defined tiers: an elevated base that offers public spaces below, a solid body that contains all the main functions, and a glass crown for performances and cultural activities.

The DP team also drew inspiration from traditional Chinese landscape art to conceptualise the SCCC building and connect it to the setting around it. “The landscape is usually expressed with rough strokes (皴 in Chinese) to outline the coarse nature, while the building is depicted with more refined representations,” recalls Wang Ying, Associate Director, DP Architects. Likewise, in the SCCC, the juxtapositions exist between the box form and the multi-faceted podium, between the transparent top and the opaque bottom, and between the smooth crown and textured base. The juxtapositions create a balanced dialogue, echoing the artistic sensibilities found in Chinese landscape paintings.

As a result, the subtle implementation of Chinese architectural and artistic influences and the clean, contemporary expression of these ideas in the final design allows the SCCC to serve as a beacon of cultural identity and heritage, while remaining harmonious and inclusive of broader communities. According to Ying, “The mix of contemporary ideas in the facade treatment and traditional architectural convention in the planning embodies the spirit of respect. The architecture remains true to Chinese culture and heritage while becoming a conduit for interactions from various socio-cultural elements.”

A House of Wellness

ONG&ONG’s winning competition entry for the Singapore Red Cross House celebrates the organisation’s rich history and lifelong legacy of altruism and philanthropy. Olha Romaniuk writes.

http://www.indesignlive.sg/articles/projects/a-house-of-wellness

Attempting to reinterpret history from a contemporary perspective is never an easy feat. However, for the design competition that sought to redevelop the Singapore Red Cross House earlier this year, the design team at ONG&ONGdid just that with a winning design proposal that addressed the main historical and programmatic considerations of the brief, updating the Red Cross House with a fresh, new look and addressing its historical legacy along the way.

For the SRC – an organisation with a seventy-year heritage and history rooted in local and international humanitarian efforts – the design team at ONG&ONG faced a twofold requirement that demanded a preservation of the original Red Cross House structure and an introduction of a new building within the existing site. The final design, more than just blending the old and the new, had to reflect the spirit of the organisation and meet and anticipate the current and future needs of the Singapore Red Cross.

According to the ONG&ONG SRC redevelopment design team, “The original SRC House, together with its classically iconic façade, needed to be maintained and incorporated into the new grounds. SRC also required a new building in order to expand its repertoire of services and capabilities, where a revamped site would provide state-of-the-art facilities in a modernised setting, catering for the present needs and requirements of the SRC, while keeping an eye on possible future expansion.”

As part of the design proposal, ONG&ONG’s design team introduced a new building that took full advantage of its site, while referencing SRC’s nostalgic and rich past, and its existing building’s surrounding context. Thus, the team proposed to restore the original Red Cross House building to its initial 2-storey form and convert it into a space for the Red Cross Academy and a thrift store, adding a new 10-storey office tower and connecting the existing and new structures via a landscaped plaza and a detached office lift core.

The new and the old buildings convey the history and legacy of the Singapore Red Cross in a variety of ways. The tower is unmistakably indicative of its organisation from the very first glance – the north and south façades feature the Red Cross’s colour scheme in a composition of concrete geometric fins, folded like paper planes and forming the organisation’s distinctive logo. Meanwhile, the original structure reminds of its days of glory, with a restored shape and proportion that recalls the building as it used to be decades ago.

The ONG&ONG team bridges the original building and the new tower with an elevated event plaza, creating a physical transition via a detached office lift core that connects with the event space. “Beyond bridging the internal spaces of both the original and new SRC structures, the plaza not only provides the means and space for any number of SRC initiatives and engagements, but also allows the institute to easily and efficiently accommodate an increased number of people and volunteers,” says the design team.

In fact, it is the consideration for the volunteers and the people behind the Singapore Red Cross’ mission of selflessness and altruism that drives much of the design of the SRC House project. ONG&ONG’s overall design strategy emphasises its WELL Building Standard and systems, reaching for an optimisation of a built environment that would sustain the health and livelihood of the buildings’ users through well-ventilated, well-lit spaces that promote overall wellbeing.

“Taking into account that many of the new SRC House’s inhabitants and end-users would be there in the spirit of volunteerism, health and wellbeing were definite points of emphasis for us when approaching the SRC redevelopment project,” concludes the design team. “These design standards represent a holistically modern approach to health – with all amenities and facilities, even lighting and air quality, all geared towards nurturing and sustaining the buildings’ end-users.”

A Pavilion That Invites Pause for IndesignLive

http://www.indesignlive.sg/articles/projects/a-pavilion-that-invites-pause

Offering a welcoming breather in the heart of Singapore’s busy business district, DP Architects’ Archifest Pavilion invites the public to connect with each other and with the surrounding environment through design.

It has been a busy few weeks leading up to the highly anticipated opening of Singapore’s annual Archifest, organised by the Singapore Institute of Architects with the purpose to celebrating the architecture and the built environment of the city. With this year marking the event’s 10th anniversary, the festival saw the return of the Archifest Pavilion – a symbolic structure at the epicentre of Archifest’s activities – designed by DP Architects in the spirit of this year’s theme of Exhale that questions the rapid speed of life in dense cities.

“SIA’s theme challenged us to influence the city’s pace of life with architecture,” says Ang Guo Zi, Associate Director at DP Architects. “Can architecture alone really induce a city to ‘rediscover its own rhythm’? Located in the heart of the Central Business District, we found the context of that question excitingly provocative.”

For those working or living in the Central Business District, it has been impossible to miss the rising scaffolding and strips of colourful netting swiftly taking shape in the usually open green lawn space anchoring Raffles Place and its high-rise surroundings. Serving as a statement and as a functional space, the Pavilion answered to this year’s Exhale theme most profoundly, perhaps, by simply having been situated where it has been – a high-density, high-activity location filled with working professionals rushing to and from their daily meetings in a charged, hectic and, often, breathless environment.

The design team that included DP Architects, DP Engineers, DP Green, Illuminate lighting design consultancy, contractors and engineers Shanghai Chong Kee Construction Pte Ltd and Keon Consult Pte Ltd aimed to achieve a purposefully colourful and ephemeral look for the Pavilion’s structure. Seeking to make an immediate impact with energetic bands of colour, the Pavilion’s design sought to create an intimate and unique relationship with each of its incidental viewers, with hues of colours inviting visitors to pause, look up and appreciate their surroundings. Seeking to revitalise and enliven the busy urban landscape with its presence, the Pavilion aimed to elicit its viewers’ basic responses to vibrant colours and to influence the psychological and physiological responses to gradations of light for a positive reaction.

Apart from creating a colourful, albeit temporary, addition to the Raffles Place site, the DP Architects design team also approached the project with a sustainable point of view. The team developed the Pavilion’s skeletal scaffolding structure from the contractor’s existing stock with the goal to reuse the steel on future construction sites after the structure’s disassembly. Similarly, the team imagined the Pavilion’s polychromatic fins of colour to be reusable as well, with the multiple layers of colour to be composed of safety netting material to create density in colour and form and to be reused at upcoming construction sites after Archifest’s conclusion. Through the usage of the chosen materials, the design team also hoped to “invert the usual connotations of construction sites such as a sense of dislocation and loss” and to look at them instead as marks of progress and achievement.

“With the Archifest Pavilion, we wanted people to find a moment of wonder and respite in the heart of our bustling city,” says Ang. “There is no particular take-home message – each individual should frame his or her own story, own experience and memory of this transient place.”

Building Family Ties for Habitus Living

RT+Q has designed a total of 83 houses since its inception in 2003. “The office is set up in such a way that everyone eventually does one house,” says Rene Tan, the firm’s director. With the number of its residential projects approaching high double digits and each team member’s active involvement in the design process, every new residence the firm does is a unique collaboration between the design team and the client, allowing each house to be a distinctive reflection of its owner’s identity, while retaining the sophisticated aesthetic that is a constant across the firm’s many residential works.

It is in this spirit that the House with Pianos has been designed for a couple with three young kids, and the family’s four treasured pianos. Having reached out to RT+Q after seeing one of the firm’s previous jobs, the clients asked for a comfortable, safe and accommodating home for their growing family, where their children could play freely both indoors and out.

“The spaces in the house are generally kid-friendly,” says project lead Virly Martadinata. “On the first floor, big sliding glass doors open up to the pool deck that leads to the front garden, so the children are able to play both indoors and outdoors without going through the main entrance. On the second level, there is a double volume family area, where the parents can look over their kids from the walkway outside of their master bedroom, or check in on them through a one-way mirror in their walk-in wardrobe.”

The semi-detached House with Pianos and its unusually wide plot posed a couple of challenges to the design team, including the task of getting the natural light and ventilation into the internal areas along the party wall. To minimise the dark spaces, the team shifted the building form’s main volumes that were initially stacked one atop the other to allow for vertical and horizontal openings and penetrations within the volumes to bring in light and air.

“The overall form started with a simple box sitting on another slightly narrower box,” says Martadinata. “The top box has shifted and skewed away from the party wall to allow for natural light and also to create an overhang for the pool deck below.” This design move also allowed for an integration of multiple courtyards and outdoor decks on the upper floors of the house, facilitating ventilation and adding bit of greenery into the living spaces, with additional punctures in the slanted roof bringing washes of light into the rooms below.

With the client not wanting too much furniture to clutter the house, the rich materials and the double volume spaces have instead taken centre stage. The first storey floor plan became an open, expansive space, maximising the use of the wide site, with the living, dining and dry kitchen areas merging seamlessly into each other, both visually and through the use of fair faced concrete and homogenous tiles. On the second floor, the design team used fair faced brick cladding to emphasise the double height family room, immediately highlighting the glass bridge, glass lift shaft and walkways connecting the bedrooms above. Using warmer materials like brick cladding and timber for floor surfaces on the upper levels, while confining the hardier, cooler materials mostly to the first level, the design team created a subtle distinction between the public and private areas, while retaining the visual linkages across the floors and connecting the spaces and the family as one.

Designing Sustainable Waterborne Communities for IndesignLive

In an exhibition on low energy waterborne communities, professor and architect Jason Pomeroy and his students unveil their design solutions for future developments on water. Olha Romaniuk writes.

http://www.indesignlive.sg/articles/in-review/designing-sustainable-waterborne-communities

Ahead of the release of his latest book titled Pod Off-Grid: Explorations into Low Energy Waterborne Communities, which explores ideas behind self-sustaining, low-energy communities on water, Jason Pomeroy of Pomeroy Studio opened a month-long exhibition on the same subject at the Raffles Design Institute with a design talk that examined the possibilities of waterborne design as a response to rapid urbanisation and sustainability challenges of urban developments. To an audience-filled room, Pomeroy presented the design explorations of his students from last year’s two-week academic workshop in Venice, in which the participants from Raffles Design Institute and other universities investigated new approaches to designing sustainable waterborne communities. As an additional outcome of the Venice workshop, Pomeroy also unveiled his firm’s own concept for a waterborne community at Isola La Certosa near Venice with a vision for a new development anchored in agri-aquaculture and green tourism.

Pomeroy opened the talk with some powerful demographics about global urbanisation. “Since 2007, half of the world’s population has been living in urban areas,” said the architect. “This number will increase to 75% by 2050. Fifty per cent of our global carbon emissions are caused by the built environment, 80% of which are caused by cities.”

As a response to the startling statistics, the Venice workshop titled POG (Pod Off-Grid) and Play or the zero-carbon water-borne community and conducted from January to February 2015 and July 2015 under the supervision of Pomeroy, was conceived as a multidisciplinary think-tank to explore approaches to designing communities that would offer viable alternatives to land urbanisation. Under Pomeroy’s supervision, students from Università IUAV di Venezia (Italy), James Cook University (Australia) and Raffles Design Institute (Singapore) explored opportunities for sustainable solutions applicable to the surrounding context of Venice and rooted in social, economic, environmental, spatial, cultural, and technological parameters.

“We asked students to step outside of their comfort zone and start designing something at a very different scale, in a very different climate and in a very different social environment. We took students out of Singapore and put them in a very ancient, urban museum of nostalgia that is Venice,” explained Pomeroy.

Pomeroy’s brief to his students was to create a concept design for a modular waterborne community in Venice that would incorporate an essential kit of parts comprising a city, as set forth by Pomeroy – the Hub, the Spine and the POG (or a pod off-grid). Guided by these parameters, students collaborated on new design ideas to reduce the pressure of higher density developments on land, looking at the issues of urbanisation through a sustainable and contextual lens. The ideas generated during the workshop, though Venice-specific in their programmatic aims, showcased a promise of their adaptability to a variety of waterborne settings around the world.

At the heels of the workshop, Pomeroy and his team at Pomeroy Studio also created their own proposal for the Venice waterfront, identifying current problems within the City of Canals and offering a sustainable solution to support the local economy through agri-aquaculture and green tourism. Rather than altering the historic fabric of the city with new interventions, Pomeroy Studio selected a more remote site for development. Pomeroy and his team reimagined Isola La Certosa – a former military island – as a new hub of green tourism that could serve as a counterpoint to the historic tourism within the cultural sector of San Marco. The proposal, in line with the brief of the Venice workshop, as ideated by Pomeroy, utilised POGs as essential parts of the new development, providing a mix of residential typologies for those working in agri-aquaculture and green tourism to sustain the local community.

Concluding his talk, Pomeroy spoke with optimism about the diverse ideas on self-sustaining waterborne communities generated during the Venice workshop as applicable within different contexts. In Pomeroy’s words, “All these ideas explore how to address the sustainability challenges of tomorrow and can be applied to different waterborne settings around the world. What may be applicable to Venice in 2014 should be able to adapt to Dhaka in 2020.”