Unities of Habitation

1

In search of some stuff I needed for Thursday's dinner party, I hopped on the NEL to Little India. Thought Y might've been working at spell#7 but she wasn't, so I had the better part of the afternoon alone to ramble around the place. I'd heard a little about Tekka Market from enthusiastic family (the thosai?), and in the full midday heat the place was swarming with hungry workers on lunch break. I guess given the location, there was an expectedly higher proportion of Indian food stalls, including a bryani "specialist" with a snaking queue, a couple sarabat stalls where it looked like they still tarik the teh (most drink stalls nowadays seem to pass teh-si off as tarik, foamless and headless at the top). The wet market side held the biggest surprise - I think this guy was featured in the thickass ST National Day supplement. A couple stalls away and already you sense something is amiss. The stall with the kaffir limes and curry powder packets is playing a pulsating Hindi dance track, but what's that other refrain floating up above the mix...a clarinet's insistent singing, buoyed along by a driving double bass, frenetic manouche guitars...that sweet sound of dixieland and hot jazz is coming from just around the corner, from Chia's Vegetable Supply. In a wet market devoted chiefly to the spices and herbs of South Asia, here is a man who will sell you tarragon and sorrel. I think. I didn't get a close enough look, but I assume that's the market he's aiming to corner.

On the other side of Serangoon Road is Tekka Mall, a vaguely oval-shaped and largely untenanted place. It's pleasantly light-flooded, thanks to the skylight that stretches across the entire ceiling. Nothing much of interest, except that the basement has a strangely extemporized feel to it, businesses that look like they've just moved in, a little nervously, aware that this isn't exactly a point of peak human traffic, and have that half-hearted moved-in look because they are prepared to move right out again if business doesn't pick up - which it quite probably won't. There's a money changer in an uncommonly well-polished booth, a couple of forlorn snack stands, and one of those Japanese-inspired S$10 barber kiosks. It put me in mind of one of the most exhilarating things about densely constructed Asian metropoles - their sometimes slapdash layout. It could be vegetables sold straight out of parked lorries in Bangkok, or fake Rolexes spread out on the pavement in Taipei. If there isn't enough proper space to set up your little shop, snatch a little parcel underneath the stairwell, on a rooftop, in the slender hollows between walls, wherever. If this is programmed space, say, those perpetually unstable few square metres next to the entrance to the Gallery Hotel (I've seen champagne boutique and florist), then maybe the compactness makes your stuff look sleeker and more sharply editorialized (and therefore more tasteful). If not - if you find yourself having to hawk your wares at the perilous junction of an escalator and a cliff, then you get a free dramatic backdrop for your retail environment.

The best example of this, I think, is the entire thrilling extent of the most dramatically sited piece of urban architecture I've ever seen - the long and winding outdoor escalator in Hong Kong that links Central to the Mid-levels (already the name implies dynamic contours, the drama of ascent and descent). The escalator only goes in one direction at any time, of course. In the mornings, if you're seated (as I was) at a Central tsa tsan teng (breakfasting on a floppy fried egg, some greasy ham and a bun slathered slick with butter, all washed down with milky tea) with a good view, you get to savor the slightly alarming spectacle of office workers commuting to work on foot, whisked breezily along as the escalator rolls relentlessly downwards, from the heady heights of soaring condo blocks perched on the Mid-levels all the way down to the banks and office buildings of Central HK. After the morning rush hour the escalator runs upward. As a tourist in HK, this has to be one of the most heart-stopping things to do (that only rarely gets a guidebook rec) - taking the escalator upwards from Central - preferably at night, when sodium streetlights supply deepened contrast, and HK's neon heraldry is ablaze. It's pretty much a regular escalator, moving along at the normal speed (the reason why watching the morning escalator commute is vaguely exciting is because the commuters do the work of walking downstairs while also being expedited by the descending current). The awesome thing about it is that you get to be shuttled up above the thrumming activity of Central, surveying gradients and greenery, slowly weaving in and out of the sometimes treacherously perched citiness of HK. The vistas are straight out of Blade Runner, except that they have the additional drama of dizzy heights and staggered placement. In this bit of the city, buildings sprout up not so much where it is most propitious, but (almost) rather where it is least feasible. The Mid-levels may not be the most densely crammed part of HK - rather scattered compared to cheek-by-jostling-jowl Mongkok, for instance - but the mix is electric as well as aesthetic. Instead of the user's-choice pleasures of selecting a desultory itinerary through Parisian street warrens, here you are offered a glimpse at how buildings, and thereby cities, choose themselves: how they wind down the path of their own construction, how an urban organism battles the terrain for the ownership of it. An all-night convenience store balances itself at the edge of a makeshift park; the park that is forced to retreat from an encroaching hairpin bend in the road; the road that is impressed upon by the Italian cafe and its outdoor tables and chairs teetering over the pavement... Everywhere along the escalator's trajectory there are adhoc vendors and hawkers secreted in the interstices, shops and restaurants whose occupation seems tenuous. The skinny buildings they inhabit creep up against the suave curve of the escalator scaffold, press up tightly to a grassy cliff face.

Or else, in Tokyo, where residual spaces are daily annexed to outcroppings of retail space, a ramen bar that seats four people or a one-chair barber kiosk...oops, a bit of a lengthy digression, this. My point - that untenanted space holds promise for a yet unconfirmed commercial use, but that even a seemingly saturated environment is ripe for further exploitation. Maybe what we need is for entrepreneurs to behave like parasites, or toadstools after the rain. Fleeting, modular architecture, nearly weightless and eminently transplantable. A city of flux, of inhabitation and disappearance.

2

After finding what I needed at Phoon Huat (171 Bencoolen), I headed for Rochor Center, where R told me I could find a thrift store (except I don't think this is an American thrift store, and certainly not in the hipster sort of way) that sold those standard-issue touchtone Telecoms telephones that everyone had at home in the 80s. This was my second attempt, and again I couldn't find it. I did find several fo jiao wen wu xuan though, selling large chrome-plated gold ingots, figurines in the likeness of that long white-bearded dude with the gnarled staff, variously shaped musical fountains (can plug in, one!). Also a mom-and-pop CD-VCD-DVD shop playing an assortment of Hokkien evergreens, and a couple of artisan workshops. There was an old man squatting on a stool handpainting couplets onto a chestnut-shaped ribbed red lantern, and an unmanned, shuttered shop with two unfinished guzheng propped up against its entrance. There was a kopitiam too of course, a huge furniture showroom, and a toyshop of the old-fashioned sort (five stones, marbles, kuti-kuti), a bank, post office, household miscellany... Walking this nearly self-sufficient complex, this machine for living , I thought of Le Corbusier and his unrealized vision for la ville radieuse. When he made his audacious proposal in the 1930s for a tabula rasa Paris, for its serpentine streets, tiny ruelles and allées to be bulldozed in order to make way for multi-laned highways, flyovers, concrete apartment buildings, glass and steel skyscrapers, Parisians were naturally outraged (except...hadn't they just been outraged at least twice in 50 years, first by Haussmann's designs and then the Eiffel Tower?) Here in Singapore, of course, there was no time for outrage, not when the SIT and then the HDB confidently pressed forward with plans for modern high-rise housing for a burgeoning modern population anxious to appear modern. What Le Corb proposed and had rejected in Paris, the city mapped as an efficient function, got realized to some extent in the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, a "machine for living" extended to an entire apartment complex interwoven with shops, services, social space. What Rochor Center seems to me is an application of these principles that seems to work. You might not agree with the facile color scheme of the four HDB blocks that sit above the four-storey terrace of shops and services (red, blue, green, yellow), but the mechanisms of Corb's machine are evident: anonymous cell-like residential units with easy access to essential amenities in one neat package. Well-oiled, too: residents milling about running errands, chatting in passageways, shopping, working. And today, squinting in the afternoon sun, I had to admit that even the colors had a garish postmodern rightness to them. Maybe this is what we need - to take Rochor Center as our modular SimCity building block, extend it as much as possible, propagate these machines for living. Or, in a clunky translation from the French, these unities of habitation.