Taking to the Air

Let Darren be the new Koolhaas

Saturday was a rushed day. I actually managed to squeeze in quite a bit today: visit my grandmamma in hospital (to wish her strength and that she continues to be in great health. Ps: how does one face death? Is life insurance the new ritual in contemporary society?), a trip to the supermarket to replenish groceries with my mamma and even a visit to the Asian Civilisations Museum.

A certain acquaintance I know dissed the ACM as being total crap, rationalizing that in terms of curating, the permanent displays aren’t amazing and that some of them are simply scoured from homes of the rich in Singapore (case in point: the Sulawesian jewellery that we see sitting in all their atas glory in the museum are but cheap nothings of a certain Mr Tatler who bought them for next to nothing in Indonesia). Whatever. I didn’t take very kindly to what he said, especially with the understanding that the ACM is a good effort.

This time, I was there for the Vatican ‘Journey of Faith’ exhibition with Ron, Kien and Yaokang. Granted it was religiosity in your face, it was still a worthy exercise at getting a sense of the cultural milieu in which the architecture belongs. During my 5hour transit in Fiumicino, I only had the chance to have a quick lunch of selected antipasti e prosecco, plus a quick hello to the Colosseo and Piazza di Spagna as well as made off with two Italian shirts of the (2002)-moment--no time to see the Vatican! FYI, I’m reading a module called Theory and History of Western Architecture at the School of Architecture now and my professor Li Shiqiao suggested it would be useful to have a look at the exhibition. And so, half the time, Ron and I were making sense of the types of columns in buildings, use of entasis in columns, and relating to the bodies of theories which we have been exposed to. I’ve got lots more reading to do in this largely new field and I’m seriously warning myself that it's beyond name-dropping Corbusier, van der Rohe, and Hadid.

Finally, I got to meet Darren this evening together with the boys. Happy! He’s been back from New York for a week and is staying through coming Sunday; school at Columbia doesn’t start till early September. I know his mind is still on architecture even as he catches up with us over bites of nasi lemak and popiah, or macaroon(s) at Bakerzin for that matter. His ex-schoolmate, Mark, also just back in Singapore (for a break from college in Ontario), was also present to join for us for our evening passegiata from Esplanade to One Fullerton, where we lingered over a really long conversation: talking about night-outs in Manhattan’s clubs like XL, Hell’s Kitchen, Roxy, drinks at MEPA’s Hotel Ganservoort and Maritime Hotel; exchanging views on how cultural context shape buildings, and in turn how people as audience give shape, form and meaning to buildings, both being sort of mutually constitutive; Haussmann's Paris; Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi's fabulous project, Commune by the Great Wall; and Darren citing the Koolhaas-ian notion of organic, non-Eurocentric urban planning theories for Asian cities (to which I give an anti-Orientalist thumbs up).

posted by Dennis She @ 2:24 AM