Bedtime Architectural Stories

“ Just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth. But it is harder to understand why this form of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to succeeding generations of planners and designers”  - Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The Garden City and the Radiant City ideals are truly eighteenth century urban planning romanticism, with their rejections of urbanised society, excessive and unnecessary romanticism about the nobility and simplicity of ‘natural’ or primitive man. Everything should operate in a rational, regimented and harmonious way. This zone is for work, that zone is for live; it follows by inconsiderate insertion of civic space and large footprint of park and vertical towers that accommodate cars. Those grandeur urban renewal schemes replaces ‘slums’.  They make sense until we discover that they are at an expanse of city diversity of street vitality. They are go...

Long time ago there is a small city that sits within mountain and sea. It is so beautiful so that mountain is in your sight everywhere you go, this even happens to the city center. Citizens are dancing on the public space chess table, or spending the whole morning or afternoon in the outdoor area of the pub, sipping the infamous Cascade Lagar, wandering around the street, stepping onto historical brick pavement, connecting with enclosed heritage buildings. It is almost like a Harry Potter world. I would like to think that it is one of the best example of an idyll. This city is Hobart.   Here, heritage is not wasted artefact. Each building is a hesitant, a careful negotiation between tradition and emerging desires / functional requirement, they are carefully reappropriated as jewellery workshop, wool factory, cafes and shops. There is depth in the making of the city in contrast to the shamelessness of utilitarian efficiency.                 ...

  Long time ago there is a small city covered in jungle, it is so small to the extent that it will perish without further development. Then the nation started to make adjustments, old buildings torn down, private lands are expropriated to construct for a better future, the entire city becomes a laboratory for modernist ideologies. United Nation are also involved in the planning of the city. The success of its development, this modernist development in an Asian world, shocked the Western world. They cannot believe that an Asian city has achieved all the modernist ideals that once seems impossible to operate. However, this flourish is at a cost of losing identity. Old colonial heritages are not preserved because the ‘makers’ of the city seeks for a complete new start. This ambiguity of identity is also articulated in the diversity of language spoken across the nation. The intelligentsias are upset with this tabula rasa and bulldozing and they hope that the people will align with them...