Singapore is many things, though few of them as described by
friends before I arrived there last week. Mostly it is lush and green, and the
trees in the carefully tended parks are heavy with staghorns and epiphytes.
Orchids grow in roadside plantings, and everywhere there is the heavy smell of
the tropics.
The city is clean, and well organised in a bustling sort of
way. The streets are full, but not chaotic, and the markets crowded with
hawkers selling tropical fruit, clothes, mobile phones, and miracle cures for
baldness and skin disorders.
It is also the city of the future, or rather futures,
because the different versions of this event compete and intertwine. The oldest
of them are the brightly coloured tower blocks with ground level food halls and
wide marble courtyards. The newest are the glass and steel towers of the
business district, clustered spiky in a single block overlooking the river.
Neither has the colonial era disappeared. Neoclassical churches
mix with colonnaded public buildings. All around is the distinctive Malay
architecture that borrows everything from Moorish arches to Corinthian
capitals. There are mosques and temples for every order, single story shops and
gigantic malls.
And then there are the futures to come. Bright arcologies,
buildings punctured by light and ribbed with walkways and gardens. Some are
being built, others only wood and plastic models that cover the floor of the
gallery of the Urban Redevelopment
Authority.
The poet Alvin
Pang described the diorama, at once infinitely speculative and reassuringly
concrete, as perhaps the city-states true artistic expression. It is certainly
remarkable. Crowds of students and tourists come to see it, and observe the
shapes of a city that is outside obscured by heat, rain, traffic and the
necessities of the material world.
