The developers unveiled their latest project on an inexplicable patch of undeveloped land off the side of Balestier Road, since it was the only spare space on the island they could get a tender for. They had a famous Chinese architect, whose name escapes me at the moment: a slight elderly man with luscious grey hair, skin the colour of faded leather. He wore mirrored shades to the press briefing.
“The project… such and such…” he was saying very quickly and softly in Beijing-accented Mandarin. Even the interpreter had trouble keeping up, and had to ask him to roll back his statements once or twice. The message which was passed on to my ears (twice-removed, as I followed the press briefing on a Twitter thread on my phone) was that this was an attempt to surpass post-modernity in aesthetics as well as in metaphysics, moving beyond previous attempts to slough off the ghost of architectural modernism—he mentioned at one point a quip from a dead Japanese colleague that there had been no serious attempt to defy the concrete block in the last ninety or so years since Le Corbusier. Then he cut the ribbon, and the big white tarpaulin that had covered the front of the building was slid off by a pair of frazzled-looking Bangladeshis, and the public was treated to the first sign of things that were to come.
It looked and functioned as any typical three-storey mixed-use townhouse that had been springing up in our cherished heritage districts for the past two decades now, except the façade was cast entirely out of a curiously-textured green soapstone. The lower levels looked sturdy enough, buttressed by a set of reinforced concrete piloti, within which nestled the prerequisite first-floor shops, lobbies, cafes. But when the first furtive onlookers tried to take photographs of it the technological magic was revealed. No building appeared on their smartphone screens or in the viewfinders of their vintage Leicas; the images I saw of the event depicted a gaping patch of sky in an open field between the metro station and a funeral parlour. It was impossible to believe. Going by the descriptions circulating online I was convinced there was a building there; people described with great detail the sheer conservancy of form, the subtle yet powerful massing, the preternatural elegance of the slender piloti, the thoughtful yet daring intermixing of space-uses and artistic vision. But no image of the building ever reached my eyes.
“It is in a constant process of forgetting itself,” explained the developer’s representative in an interview for the Tatler. “It is the architect’s gift to a city which he thinks has forgotten what it means to be a city. The effect was achieved with the latest innovations in nanotechnology and material semiotics—creating, in effect, a form which resists inscription in physical media.” The architect, it turned out, grew up in a mainland Chinese city where entire neighbourhoods were uprooted and regrown in a matter of months. He had been wrangling with the trauma ever since.
Somehow, the project succeeded. What property launch doesn’t, in a city like this? Tenants filled the ground floor: a couple of five-dollar-a-loaf bakeries and a coffee-shop-cum-craft-beer-bar-cum-burger-diner with a menu the size of a small novella. The apartments were sold at a comfy three thousand dollars per square foot. Though the building could not be represented, it could clearly be occupied and patronised; people of all sorts (me included, when the hype had died down) went on a sort of pilgrimage to the site, marvelling at the apparent sturdiness of the walls. The only downside, as far as we could tell, was that it was very clearly un-Instagrammable. Other than that, it was a very fine building indeed, and all my colleagues and friends in architectural circles appeared to think so too.
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I didn’t think much of it until one of my friends, who is very rich, happened to move into a unit on the top floor. “It was a bit of a joke by my partner, but that money wasn’t going to invest itself, and with the kids on the way we figured living somewhere more central would be good for their future social prospects,” she explained. (I never questioned why she thought Balestier was central, but geography works differently for the rich than for you and I.)
I was invited for one of her many housewarming parties. I stood around awkwardly in the miniscule flat holding a plastic champagne flute while clad in a blazer that was simultaneously too cheap and too extraneous for the occasion. Around me were all manner of socialites in brandless white tees and hand-stitched coveralls talking about non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrency investments. It was all sociologically very interesting but I needed to get some air. I squeezed my way to the balcony (thankfully, they had one) and all but folded myself over the railing into the cool night breeze.
My friend’s partner was there. He was perhaps the only other person in that party (other than me) to be dressed in a shirt. He was a buff, thirty-something looking Dutch dude with tattoos of various nonsense Chinese characters running down his forearms. Something in me told me he had a job advising financial service firms on the intricacies and dangers of operating in dynamic and unpredictable East Asian environments. I flashed him a courteous smile and finished the last of my champagne.
There was a rumbling in the air and I realised with horror he was trying to talk to me. “You Singaporeans always drink so quickly?” he asked (or I think he did; it was hard to hear him over the crowd).
“It’s good champagne,” I lied, which seemed to be the right answer. He laughed very heartily and put both his hands on the railing in front of me. I noticed with some detachment that it was made out of the same green soapstone as the rest of the building. My attention desperately needed a way out of this mess: it was fast dawning on me that my friend hung out (or slept!) with people who were not my kind of crowd. I put my hands on the railings too and was immediately amazed by how cool they felt to the touch: it was stone, with all the firmness of it, but with an inner lightness like it was pretending to be balsa wood. I said nothing, and let the sensation ground me in the moment.
Ignoring my disinterest, the Dutch dude continued speaking. “You know, we got lucky with this place. We really did. It’s so hard finding anywhere decent to live in Asia that isn’t tacky as hell. But the architect really sold it. This was the last unit they had available, can you believe it?” He laughed again, a short, choking kind of laugh, like he was suddenly taken aback by the place he had found himself in. His face was, I realised, very red. “Are you interested in architecture, by any chance?”
I carefully mentioned that I worked with buildings and the designs of buildings in some aspects of my day job, and he took that as a sign to continue. “This apartment was designed by a famous Chinese architect. I didn’t know that when I bought it. Don’t take me for a racist, but Chinese architecture can be really you-know-what sometimes. All cheap metalwork and useless curves. Postmodern bullshit. I don’t buy it one bit. Anyway, you have to really hand it to those piloti…”
I was tuning him out very hard. My hands were gripping the railings of the balcony which seemed very important to me for some reason. I looked down at the empty street and tried to recall what the front of the building looked like when I came in, or when I had read descriptions of it during the press briefing. Funnily enough, the image of the front came to me in perfect detail, which perplexed me as I had not quite noticed in my memory the building’s distinct lack of windows on the front.
“Did you guys always have a balcony?”
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There were other discrepancies in the months to come. Tenants complained of late or absent deliveries when it turned out the back doors of the building did not line up with where deliverymen told their colleagues they would be. Water was accumulating in the false ceilings. Contractors were hired to redo sections of cracked balcony glass when it was revealed those sections were never cracked in the first place. It seemed, for a while, that the architect had been right on more levels than one. The building seemed to be undergoing a process of internal disagreement as to what it was supposed to be.
Some of the lawyers and crypto investors and their East Asian consultant boyfriends moved out very quickly. They quickly found new homes in the spare properties they had lying around the island. The overpriced bakeries moved online and the trendy coffee-shop-cum-craft-beer-bar-cum-burger-diner became a coffee-shop-cum-craft-beer-bar-cum-burger-diner-cum-food-truck. Once the technological appeal had worn off it turned out few wanted to live in an ontological disaster waiting to happen. It would have been a happy ending for my friend and her partner were it not for the fact that nobody wanted to buy an ontological disaster waiting to happen either.
The original architect had since absconded the country. His developer’s representative had to be reached for comment. She appeared that month in an interview for the Tatler, looking as sleepless as the makeup artists could let her get away with. In accompanying video, she had bags under her eyes. “Technically speaking, we never labelled this as an investment opportunity,” she shrugged. “We never technically called it a building either.”
There was no public outcry when it collapsed, and it took nobody with it. One moment there was an occupied space and the next moment there was not. Surprisingly, a few people had stayed to witness this. They were the architectural purists, the ones who had stuck by the project since its announcement years prior, the ones who had snapped up the first units and now doggedly hung on to the collapsing fragments of soapstone and concrete as it slid into itself. I read on Twitter that they saw themselves as the harbingers of a coming war, one that our city had not known it was fighting, but was already embroiled deeply in now that they had let a building like this reach its shores. In the press photos, I was struck by how pained yet triumphant their faces looked as their life savings folded around them. In a way, I think the architect had succeeded.
As time went on, I came to forget what the building was even called, but that was mostly because it had one of those trendily generic names like The Court @ Balestier or 369 Square.