Passe

Going, Going, Gone.

I played tour guide again this weekend, bringing my childhood friend from the UK around Singapore. I brought him to his old house in Andrew Road, just like how he had driven me to my old house in Chorleywood; a virtuous cycle fulfilled. Its amazing how much one remembers of their childhood. I also drove him around the CBD showing him the new office buildings that are sprouting up like wild grass, One Raffles Quay, One Marina Boulevard, One George, One Shenton, One Too Many. All of them almost identical; tall, green and glassy. Whatever happened to individualism?

It would be more tolerable if green and glassy + clean lines was a new concept, but it really isn't very novel. Just round the bend from these glass towers sits Afro Asia Building, with similar clean lines and rows of green glass windows. Of course they lacked the technological know how to bend and shape steel then, so thick heavy concrete was the medium of choice, inadvertently dating it. Nevertheless, it was modern in spirit; pushing the zeitgeist forward. Afro Asia Building looks kind of incongruous now, surrounded on all sides by towering office blocks with another behemoth rising from the ground just across the road. And soon, I am sure, this little architectural gem and milestone will be demolished, replaced by a clean lined, green-glass skyscraper. Perhaps, it is a little conspiracy on the part of all the new "Ones", to reclaim their architectural novelty by suppressing any hint of a lineage. Perhaps, I should move with my zeitgeist, and embrace its re-birth. But how does one embrace a re-birth with no memory of the birth?

"Nothing old is ever reborn but neither does it totally disappear. And that which has one been born, will always reappear in new form" - Alvar Aalto