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Idio-syncretic Waterscapes

Part 1 Project 2019
Yong Chern Goi
National University of Singapore | Singapore
In the post-independence scramble for survival, an emergent Singapore has recast itself as a paragon of prudent policy.

Its success has been a strange, recursive paradox- dependent on the continual manufacture of this image of success to a global audience of state, corporate, and individual actors. A city-state with no hinterland, it is entirely dependent on its own depiction to survive. The form of the physical city is thus irrevocably overwritten in the quest to identify and market an idealised self-representation.

Fort Canning Hill, like the waterfront once overlooked, has thus fallen victim to hyperlegibility. Once a heterogeneous site of complex and contradiction, its rich cultural, political, and architectural topography has been flattened into an inoffensive, sterile projection of heritage.

This project posits the reopening of the old swimming pool at Fort Canning in the form of occupable infrastructure, to reclaim for the public domain a refuge - a part of the richer space of a messier past.

This symbolic, idiomatic and utilitarian superimposition hopes, in integrating with the wider systems of the city, to disrupt the established, unquestioned methods that govern urban order.

Yong Chern Goi

Tutor(s)

2019
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