Thesis feature: The Great Cornucopia of the Golden Mile
This article is adapted from the Master of Architecture graduate thesis by Keefe Chooi.
Modern Heritage and the Golden Mile
Reflecting on the past year of working on my thesis, it feels hard to place how I got interested in modern heritage and buildings, or why I sometimes have an innate feeling for them even though the memories and stories of these buildings pre-date me. Part of it may be a form of nostalgic fantasisation, or an unfounded affection for things that many may deem “hard to love”, and perhaps also shaped by my architecture education, learning about the Modern movement, and how much of its innovation and experimentation we take for granted today.
Figure 1 Collage of the history of the District
The Golden Mile District is captivating beyond the Complex, and I wanted to shine the spotlight on the district as a whole and the less talked about Golden Mile Tower. The district was envisioned as a new downtown by the state in the 1960s, but it was often at odds with the social agenda that architects and activists had. SPUR, led by William S. W. Lim, imagined a new Asian social urbanism filled with megastructures influenced by the Metabolist ideas of Fumihiko Maki. This very contestation, however, led to both parties unable to fulfil their aspirations.
Given the amount of conversation around the Complex, both public and in academia, I turned my attention to the Golden Mile Tower, arguably equally imposing and monumental in its Brutalist appearance. Designed by Goh Hock Guan in 1975, it was an all-encompassing megastructure with retail, entertainment and offices, and the Golden Theatre, once Singapore’s largest cinema.
Similar to the Complex, failures in the district led to spatial decay over the years, and was eventually taken over by the Thai transient migrant population, with its mall filled with Thai discos, pubs, KTVs, Buddhist shops selling religious effigies and massage parlours. In recent years, a subcultural undercurrent was introduced when The Projector entered, bringing along other related art and indie activities and a younger audience.
However, urban redevelopment may be a threat to these unique communities and activities. With the conservation and impending sale of the Golden Mile Complex, who knows what will become of the building’s intrinsic socio-cultural values? The developmental pressures and the unique socio-cultural and architectural values of the district thus form the basis of what I aimed to achieve, to call for a new placemaking to celebrate the unique built and socio-cultural fabric and extend its relevance into the future.
The Urban Sphere
The issue is studied at two levels: the urban and the building. At the urban level, the district’s surroundings are mapped to create a pedestrianised urbanism in the district that puts people, their activities and movements first, creating quality public spaces and ensuring constant footfall.
The district can be pieced to other cultural and heritage districts to create a network for visitors and pedestrians, such as capitalising on the adjacent buzz of Kampong Glam. It can also be connected to the surrounding green and blue assets to create a continuous green environment, and threading the district with other places of interests and nodes of transportation, down to the city centre.
Figure 2 Site plan of the Golden Mile District
These mappings culminate in the following urban strategies, where the district is proposed to be car-lite to create a more pleasant and contiguous pedestrian environment. Part of Beach Road is narrowed and redeveloped into a pedestrian street, while the carpark in the Golden Mile Tower is shifted to the basement. To activate these pedestrian streets, they are threaded with green spaces to connect people through to a proposed waterfront park fronting the Golden Mile District. The network also give rise to a series of new spaces and platforms for cultural activities and public recreation.
Figure 3 Series of urban strategies on the street level
Alternative Realms of Consumption
The value of the Golden Mile Tower is in the intersection of the imposing Brutalist architecture and built fabric with its eclectic socio-cultural fabric. To uncover it, the building is deconstructed into a series of processions to elucidate the relationship between the built and socio-cultural fabric, identify the key anchor spaces and key activities, to inform where and how the architectural interventions would unfold.
Figure 4 Deconstruction of the Golden Mile Tower
To achieve a new social urbanism, and highlight the diverse makeup of people, communities and activities, five main programmatic anchors are conceptualised, extrapolated from what is existing to enrich the megastructural mini-city of the building: the Discotheque, Market Atrium, Community Hub, Subcultural Hub and Creative Hub.
With the programmatic proposal in place, a single stroke of these lightweight steel parasitic structures is introduced to transform the existing built fabric for new programmes, alluding to the Metabolist ideals of change and growth over time. These structures created additive spaces to the existing building spaces, and allow for organic growth where expansion is possible, and transiency where change in the activities can happen within the structures, and add a layer of granularity and human scale by breaking up the megastructure scale. They become a democratising tool for the people and communities.
Figure 5 Floor plans, diagrams and section of the new Tower
The atria are main spatial anchors of the building, and these parasitic structures enliven these spaces by surrounding activities around the atria vertically and highlights the volume that it encompasses, creating a vertical space that is a cacophonic reflection of the programmes. In the Discotheque, the structures create new platforms for drinking, dancing and partying around the atria, creating a much more exciting and outlandish environment when it draws out and leads people through to the outside.
Figure 6 Discotheque Atrium
The Subcultural Hub punches its volume up all the way from the existing shops and fabric to the 11th storey in the tower, creating a visual connection up to the community deck and urban farm. The parasitic structures create a continuous series of platforms, social spaces and private pods. With the carpark relocated to the basement, a third atrium: the Market Atrium, uses the parasitic structures latching to the carpark ramp as a form for vertical movement. The market encourages a circular economy run by the local population of the building and others.
Figure 7 (Left) Subcultural Hub (Right) Market Atrium
Moving upwards brings us to the open rooftop of the building’s podium, and the parasitic structures create social and leisure spaces catered for transient migrant populations: it is now a community lounge, service centre, community pool and deck. Unused space on the roof of the cinema block is now an open air amphitheatre that looks out to the city and water, open for performances and movie screenings. The new spaces elevate the transient population: the ones who always find themselves being pushed out of public spaces in Singapore.
Figure 8 (From L to R) Community Pool, Rooftop Amphitheatre, Hotel Lobby, Sky Theatre
The hollowing out of office spaces allows for the subversion of the standard regular office layout in the tower. The tower is metabolised where units are removed and added, so it is proposed that some slabs are removed to create different double height spaces for the creative industries, shared spaces such as makerspaces, production studios and labs. Midway through the tower, the uniformity is disrupted by an explosion of the structures, which becomes the main lobby for a heritage hotel built as an extension above the tower, weaving a living population through the businesses and communities and activities, boosting the economy of the building and its population.
Figure 9 Section of the Golden Mile Tower
Zooming out, the character of the district, the Golden Mile Tower and its modern heritage contrasts the increasingly globalised city centre. These pedestrian urbanism and Metabolist strategies reconcile the large megastructural form with more human scale spaces that adapt to its built environment, its people, and activities. The result is a cornucopia with a varied mix of users, defined and run by the transient migrant populations and subcultures, that can also be appreciated by the wider population. The new structures add a new layer of meaning and elevate it into a beacon of cultural and creative activities.
Disclaimer:
This essay was prepared by Keefe Chooi in his personal capacity. The opinion expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of Docomomo Singapore.
