To Liang Court
Nowadays Clarke Quay is starting to look more and more like one of those other iconic waterside/warehouse urban renewal projects: Faneuil Hall in Boston, Xintiandi in Shanghai, Cockle Bay/King St. Wharf in Sydney. The rules of the game are quite simple, and widely applicable - take a single, couple or entire contingent of sullen outmoded buildings that once saw life as granaries, warehouses, shipyards, gut them of redundant fixtures (but making sure you retain any crucially "authentic" structural details that give the lie to its ex-identity, its industrial ghost), slap on coats of paint, perhaps a complementary extension annex in cool steel and glinting glass so that some interesting past-future dialectic gets going...and suddenly these dead spaces get turned into festival markets, cavernous dance clubs, dramatically spacious restaurants. They botched the job the first time around, though: the old Clarke Quay was a tacky series of souvenir stands, shops selling sparkly knick-knacks, pewter figurines and colored crystals, that sort of thing. Now, not only do we have a restaurant mix taking wide liberties with various cuisines - an Indochine venture channeling Vietnamese-Cambodian but with an obvious Tang dynasty terracotta-fixture fetish ("Forbidden City"), a fashionably borderless pan/South-Asian/Pacific rim bistro called Coriander Leaf - but there is also that free-falling theme-park ride which looks like a bungee harness or a giant slingshot; and those droopy sunflower riverside dining pavilions (if anything, I think this says "fuck the shophouses" and hurtles recklessly forward Tokyo-style for retro-futuristic contextless plastic architecture...).
Not so long ago, though, before this post-industrial infatuation with freshening up the godowns and derelict shophouses hit us, before light industry became perfumed ruins, Clarke Quay was basically just a vaguely functional dock with our own little Tokyo compressed into a neat mall package: Liang Court (and the adjoining Hotel New Otani). Liang Court is now being redeveloped by CapitalLand, which means that we can all expect another sparkling white-tiled and highly polished mall soon stocked with Bread Talk and Food Junction, maybe a satellite Crystal Jade outpost, with or without a new regional inspiration... In the basement, Meidi-ya and its spillover operations (Pokka Gelato, tonkatsu specialty restaurant, Four Leaves bakery) still draw the weekend Japanese expats in search of prepacked bentos and forty-five dollar punnets of Kyoho grapes. The anchor tenant, Daimaru, is now sadly reduced to a bargain basement crockery and houseware section. A mammoth electronics superstore now sprawls over most of the ground floor, casting the deathly pallor of its sodium display lights across onto the mall floors - which, previously a marbled chocolate-calico, have now been retiled in scintillant white. What I hope doesn't disappear: the bubble lifts that spirit the ambling consumer up to the now deathly quiet second, third, fourth floors, occupied by ailing rosewood furniture, clunky chinoiserie galleries, pallid watercolor scrolls, lonely lighting fixtures; as a kid I remember taking the lift up from the basement carpark with family in tow to Tung Lok for dim sum lunch (this before the islandwide invasion of Crystal Jade). The return journey on the lift down to the carpark was always the more thrilling one; surveying the milling crowd of shoppers below, the little tummy-whoop of vertigo as the bubble plummeted down its cabled track, the ground rushing upward to meet you. There was also Trader Vic's, a "Polynesian" restaurant where you ate out of hollowed coconuts and settings made out of woven leaves. You could dine very well there, on festive appetizer platters piled with samosas, spring rolls and other things you might believe are South Sea specialties just because there are maraschino cherry halves and pineapple rings interwoven with the frozen dim sum selection...but there were also roasted meat skewers and goopy fruit relishes and smoky grilled fish, and it was of course a bonus if you bought their act, played along with the tribal village theme, sipping a turquoise Tiki-tiki cocktail, nibbling on macadamias, borne aloft to a cloudless night on the beach by magical marimba and bongo beats...Nowadays of course we are all a lot more sensible about the dining out thing, and decide that we want to eat in light and airy surroundings. Instead of earnest theme restaurants selling you a Pacific island holiday fantasia of synthetic straw huts and swaying plastic trees, we achieve an equivalent transport just by fantasising about wonderlands of Danish chairs and lampshades in witty materials.
Not so long ago, though, before this post-industrial infatuation with freshening up the godowns and derelict shophouses hit us, before light industry became perfumed ruins, Clarke Quay was basically just a vaguely functional dock with our own little Tokyo compressed into a neat mall package: Liang Court (and the adjoining Hotel New Otani). Liang Court is now being redeveloped by CapitalLand, which means that we can all expect another sparkling white-tiled and highly polished mall soon stocked with Bread Talk and Food Junction, maybe a satellite Crystal Jade outpost, with or without a new regional inspiration... In the basement, Meidi-ya and its spillover operations (Pokka Gelato, tonkatsu specialty restaurant, Four Leaves bakery) still draw the weekend Japanese expats in search of prepacked bentos and forty-five dollar punnets of Kyoho grapes. The anchor tenant, Daimaru, is now sadly reduced to a bargain basement crockery and houseware section. A mammoth electronics superstore now sprawls over most of the ground floor, casting the deathly pallor of its sodium display lights across onto the mall floors - which, previously a marbled chocolate-calico, have now been retiled in scintillant white. What I hope doesn't disappear: the bubble lifts that spirit the ambling consumer up to the now deathly quiet second, third, fourth floors, occupied by ailing rosewood furniture, clunky chinoiserie galleries, pallid watercolor scrolls, lonely lighting fixtures; as a kid I remember taking the lift up from the basement carpark with family in tow to Tung Lok for dim sum lunch (this before the islandwide invasion of Crystal Jade). The return journey on the lift down to the carpark was always the more thrilling one; surveying the milling crowd of shoppers below, the little tummy-whoop of vertigo as the bubble plummeted down its cabled track, the ground rushing upward to meet you. There was also Trader Vic's, a "Polynesian" restaurant where you ate out of hollowed coconuts and settings made out of woven leaves. You could dine very well there, on festive appetizer platters piled with samosas, spring rolls and other things you might believe are South Sea specialties just because there are maraschino cherry halves and pineapple rings interwoven with the frozen dim sum selection...but there were also roasted meat skewers and goopy fruit relishes and smoky grilled fish, and it was of course a bonus if you bought their act, played along with the tribal village theme, sipping a turquoise Tiki-tiki cocktail, nibbling on macadamias, borne aloft to a cloudless night on the beach by magical marimba and bongo beats...Nowadays of course we are all a lot more sensible about the dining out thing, and decide that we want to eat in light and airy surroundings. Instead of earnest theme restaurants selling you a Pacific island holiday fantasia of synthetic straw huts and swaying plastic trees, we achieve an equivalent transport just by fantasising about wonderlands of Danish chairs and lampshades in witty materials.
posted by D at 11:14
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