Research Method (Sarah)

Introduction The research method is outlined by an alternative study of the plan. This study will look at three main aspects: the technical specifications of the subject matter, the personal account, and the literary interpretation. The architectural plan is traditionally represented without the human figure, or as Robin Evans has pointed out, drawn as “amoebic” figures. Architectural drawings are often studied with a technical slant, although architecture has long been considered as “social artifact”1 . Thus literature, accompanied by photographic illustrations, is emergent as a device to test architectural apparatus, particularly in the domestic realm where aspects of dwelling and occupancy are not as closely recorded in formal documents as its physical history (e.g. building completion, demolition). This enables us to investigate the relationship between the building plan and its occupants, to understand the architecture as a dwelling. Technical specifications The Pearl Bank Apartments, built in 1972, was built to offer a transcendent mode of living that differentiated the upper­middle class. More than its unprecedented stature that boasted an elite model of high­density living, an interior component was specifically marketed as a key selling point
— the living room. In the original Pearl Bank
Apartments sales brochure, the text and images boast a large and brightly­lit living room attached to a double­volume atrium core. It can also be observed that the presented section is faithful to the modernist tenets that uphold the open plan, with minimal interior partitions that allow for spatial continuity. Interior walls are directly defined by the building structure, the vertical elements comprising of ten radiating shear walls each 22.9cm in thickness. Despite its towering 128 meters, tallest of the time, the vertical elements were erected at such top speed that the horizontal elements had a difficult time catching up, owing to efficient slip­form construction. Although a preceding prototype for condominiums, building construction efficiency today has surpassed this slip­form method to utilise prefabricated internal walls instead. 客厅 每间公寓，不论是两方，三房或是四方式，都有一间堂皇宽阔，设计美观
之客厅。加上高雅舒适之家具，更增加优美享受的气氛，是客人有宾士如
归之感。 客厅窗户，面向海港，视野宽阔，全无遮儗（拟），远近明媚风光可一览
无遗。

Living Room Every condominium unit, be it two­bedroom, three­bedroom or four, has a luxurious, spacious and well­designed living room. With the addition of elegant and functional furniture that elevates a pleasant ambience, visitors can feel at home. The windows of the living room face the harbour, offering a vast, beautiful and unobstructed panoramic view.
Al_Sayed, Kinda. "On the Evolution of Thoughts, Shapes and Space in Architectural Design."
Design Computing and Cognition
DCC
, 2012. Springer.
1

Research Method (Sarah)

As the 44­year­old building continues to devalue as the oldest 99­year leasehold residential building in Singapore, there is an urgent need to raise funds for its refurbishment, and to replenish its dwindling occupancy, not to mention sanitise itself from its dubious occupant history of sex trade and foreign workers. As families age with the building, owners are desperate to sell their huge apartments due to high maintenance costs. However, without a conservation order from the government or an extension of the 99­year leasehold, the apartments are extremely unmarketable.
This has led to some owners resorting to the subdivision and subletting of their apartments to generate rental income and ensure that the extra space is not wasted. It is also deemed preferable to rent the apartment out to a few parties, rather than one party to combat the problem of unreliable tenants, particularly expatriates who terminate the rental contract midway due to retrenchment. Alas, the extravagant living room is no longer a given in a Pearl Bank apartment unit these days. There are four types of apartment units: two­bedroom (1,400 sq ft), three­bedroom (1,900 sq ft), four­bedroom (2,300 sq ft) and penthouse (3,300 sq ft). Although legislations for the subletting of privately­owned property by the Urban
Redevelopment Authority (URA) are stringent, these spacious units remain eligible for legal partitioning for subletting, easily allowing each occupant at least 10 square meters (108 sq ft) of space. However, maximum occupancy including the owner is capped at 8, regardless of the size of the property. Short­term rental of less than six months is currently prohibited, but there has been a rising trend of short­term rentals popularised by established websites like Airbnb and HomeAway that promote and facilitate the booking of tourist accommodation with a local host. Since 2013, there have been pleas for laws to be updated with this trend 2 . Nevertheless, prefabricated internal partition walls have come as a timely stop­gap measure for the deteriorating
Pearl Bank apartment units. The Building and Construction Authority (BCA) has comprehensive guidebooks on internal wall systems and drywall partitions available on its website, promoting the “ease of installation and replacement”3 , urging owners to “easily improve their home layouts according to their needs and remodel their homes when desired” 4 . The building efficiency of wall systems is tabulated in terms of Buildability Score, with dry partitions walls and precast concrete internal walls having the highest Labour Saving Index S
, being 1.00 and 0.90
W
respectively. A BCA flyer proclaims that dry partition walls have “emerged as the new focus to modern technology in homes”5 , and
“major developers have led the industry into using dry partition walls between rooms in their residential projects” 6 .
The benefits of the dry wall system lies in its cost­effectiveness. Despite meeting heavy duty requirements, it is substantially lighter (85­90%) and slimmer than conventional brick walls, thus accruing major savings in labour and logistic costs, and maximising inhabitable space. The dry partition wall mainly comprises of a layer of sound insulation flanked by cement board or gypsum board panels 1200mm in width mounted on a steel track with studs spaced by
600mm. On top of high acoustic performance and stellar fire ratings, M&E systems are also easily embedded within these walls. A dry wall partition is estimated to be $3.60 to $9.00 per square foot7 . In the specific penthouse unit I am studying, dry partition walls have been installed in two major communal areas, the living room and the dining room. Four bedrooms in the basement have been combined into two double­room suites.
2

Yap, Jacky. "Singapore Government Insists Short­term Rental Is Illegal." Singapore Business Review. September 2013. Accessed
June 01, 2016. http://sbr.com.sg/source/e27/singapore­government­insists­short­term­rental­illegal.
3
Building and Construction Authority.
All You Need to Know About... The Buildable Wall Systems.

https://www.bca.gov.sg/Publications/BuildabilitySeries/others/bswall.pdf.
4
Ibid.
5
Building and Construction Authority.
Dry Internal Partition Walls for Quality Homes.

https://www.bca.gov.sg/SustainableConstruction/others/dry_wall_flyer.pdf.
6
Ibid.
7

"Office Drywall Partition Singapore | Drywall Installer and Contractor |." Local Home Renovation Singapore. Accessed June 02,
2016. http://renovation4home.com/office­drywall­partition/.

Research Method (Sarah)

The owner and her five tenants share a foyer, a rooftop balcony, as well as a pantry­cum­laundry area (originally bedroom) that is maintained with a monthly cleaning fee of $68. From here, it can be seen that a simple dwelling has been transformed into a site that facilitates several monetary and economic transactions.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE From the owner: “That time we moved out partly because SCGS has no direct bus and the girls need to change 3 buses, which took more than an hour to reach home. As for MRT they have to take bus to Little India to catch one and takes about an hour too. We didn’t feel safe to let them go to Little India. So we rented and moved into Leedon Heights which is only
6 bus stops away. We wanted to train them to take public transport. We sold our car too so they had to solve the transportation problem themselves like going to ballet and piano classes etc. Partly we were planning to go to US for the girls’ further education and also for Joe’s autism therapy. I talked to his mother Luli but she wasn’t keen because of China pride. But I’m still praying to work things out. Another reason is also because there were groups that were working on en bloc sales and there was no peace for about ten years. Since we had to move out we thought it’s better to lease out for a period of time and let things precipitate. The living room is huge and more than a thousand square feet. If we don’t partition and rent out nobody will maintain it if its public. Only when the spaces are rented out will the individual tenants take care of the spaces for us. That’s the first consideration. You felt the differences because you were staying here before as a home. The tenants or others who came felt the common spaces are spacious compared to recent developments. Even URA and
FSB officers had no objection when they came here to inspect. The other bedrooms have no changes and we combined two rooms to make a suite, i.e. 4 bedrooms became 2 double room suites. Only huge living and dining areas are partitioned. But we still provide a pantry laundry area and we have to pay someone to clean up. Just this little space costs $68 a trip to clean up. The tenants don’t care about public spaces and become very dirty if we don’t get cleaners to come in and clean fortnightly. So imagine what would happen to the living room and dining room if we do not lease them out and it would cost us perhaps a thousand a month just to maintain them. After the girls go overseas for their study I will go too. Joe’s education is my first priority. I will find money to send him for therapy and education. So praying for scholarship for my two girls and if there’s a reasonable offer we will sell the house. Everything is like a layer cake you have to overlay to have a clearer picture. Another question you may ask is why we can’t we rent out as it is (without partitioning). Rent to one party and a few

Research Method (Sarah)

parties make a big difference. It’s better to split the risk. Expats always have the problem of halfway termination due to retrenchment or other reasons. So we can ensure rental collected, and pay for our rent elsewhere uninterrupted.” My family lived in Pearl Bank Apartments in the 1990s, at a time when the building was no longer considered prime property as advertised in its 1970s brochures. I lived with my extended family in the penthouse apartment, altogether thirteen people in one household. Our previous house had been a four­room HDB flat in Clementi, my maternal grandparents’ home. It was growing too small to accommodate all of us; a familial intimacy mouldered by hectic work patterns, toys and baby walkers. While awaiting the completion of my parents’ marital home, we moved into a unit in Pearl Bank Apartments, which was acquired by my maternal aunt. THEORETICAL EXPOSITION / LITERARY INTERPRETATIONS Introduction: Role of the surface in interiority Before the eighteenth century, the art of the interior was thought to be distinct from the art of the exterior, yet equivalent. The interior had been articulated by ornament; “the literal covering of the inside of an architectural ‘shell’ with the soft ‘stuff’ of furnishing”8 . The classical house comprised of a spatial order of rooms that allowed for a complementary order of ornamentation. With the rise of ornament’s subjugation to the wall concretised by Adolf
Loos and Le Corbusier, the ornament degenerated into decoration, which then “came off the walls and turned into possessions”9 . Nineteenth century modernity saw the conception of the domestic interior as a compartmentalisation of public and private, work and respite, as well as gendered spaces. The notion of interiority thus extended to its belonging to its inhabitants and their relationships with consumption, objects, events and cultures. There a doubleness is planted in the interior. The three­dimensional space merges with two­dimensional signifiers in the form of personal possessions. Baudelaire’s ‘The Twofold Room’ laments: “Yes this hovel, this home of everlasting boredom, is indeed my own. Look, there are the fatuous bits of junk, my dusty and chipped furniture...”10 Domesticity now thrives in an interior that has been frequently conflated with its exterior. The walls that provide interior surfaces have been made suspect in the recognition of the interior as a “conceptual apparatus”11 with unstable rhetorical meanings. The bifurcation of the interior is foremost condensed in the inherent two­sidedness of the wall or boundary, creating a site of negotiation. Architectural historian Charles Rice situates the role of surfaces in the relational production of the interior. This is not relegated to the physical formation of the interior by architectural structure. Rather than a “hermetic seal” against the exterior, the interior surface is activated by “the inhabitant’s relation to the city and its world of publicness”12 , consolidating artefacts from the exterior to constitute private life.
Dwelling thus sets off an extension of the interior surface. As Heidegger has suggested, “A boundary is not that at which something stops but… that from which something begins its essential unfolding.”13 Iain Borden calls this boundary a “thick edge”14 . The boundary also represents a threshold in which movements across it are marked and the wall is thus intrinsically linked to its openings. The interior wall that subverts interiority In the heyday of Pearl Bank Apartments, the apartment units represented the desired home of the upper class, being
8


Rice, Charles.
The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity
. London: Routledge, 2007. Brooker, Graeme, and Lois Weinthal.
The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design. Bloomsbury, 2013.

10
Rice, Charles.
The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity
. London: Routledge, 2007.
11
Brooker, Graeme, and Lois Weinthal.
The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design. Bloomsbury, 2013.

12
Rice, Charles.
The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity
. London: Routledge, 2007.
13
Heidegger, Martin.
Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

14 Borden, Iain, and Jane Rendell.
InterSections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories. London: Routledge, 2000.

9

Research Method (Sarah)

a hybrid of a bungalow and high­rise apartment. In comparison to its complex catacomb configuration and generous allocation of space, the ubiquitous HDB of the time was a far cry. Today, the apartment units represent the desired home of migrant groups that are absolutely unbothered or ignorant of its original spatial grandeur or disreputable occupant history. These expatriates are attracted to the fashionability of these studio apartments created by partition walls. Thus, the interiors of these apartments have been reconstructing themselves according to its marketability as a piece of real estate. The materiality and geometry of the newly­added walls and doors is telling of this fact. Citing
Georg Simmel and Gordon Clark, Jane Jacobs describes the fluidity of money, of how it “settles out into ‘things’, like bricks and mortar, that give it presence; that quite literally lend it form and value”15 . But a phenomenon unravels. In the subdivision of an apartment home for subletting to unknown tenants, the role of the interior surface in the production of interiority is made ambiguous. The erection of internal partition walls disrupts the clarity of where the domestic interior begins, as a differentiation of interior surfaces occurs. The domestic “thick edges” that were once the collector’s cache have become untouchable and unappropriated in spaces that newly perform as mere conduits. The nineteenth century logic of containment began with two distinct domains of the interior that endured into contemporary design protocol; it espoused the use of corridors, stairs, landings, halls and vestibules to “dissipate the clammy heat of intimate relationships by collectivising them”16 and privatise the individual. This is characterised in ‘The Functional House for Frictionless living’ by Alexander Klein, which Robin Evans critiques to be a self­proclaimed model running on an attenuated device that attempts to eradicate accidental encounters thought to hinder the domestic machine. In the subdivided apartment home, this attenuated device is put in place by the simple addition of dry wall partitions, in order to ensure privacy and comfort under a roof shared with strangers. However, in this case, there is no longer a clear delimitation of interiorisation or exteriorisation. In the provision of public spaces for the tenants, purely circulatory spaces are inadvertently stripped from the individual homes. In each of the five newly­divided home units, the linearisation of access routes has become absent, in an incidental reinstatement of the sixteenth­century “matrix of connected rooms”17 that existed before the corridor plan. For example, the owner’s master bedroom now directly connects to her daughter’s bedroom, that directly connects to the kitchen area. There is also no living room in the owner’s unit. From its materialisation, placement, decoration, to its spatialisation, the partition wall create and affect a jumble of public and private. In the words of Deleuze, “The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior is only a projected interior.”18 The placement of partition walls also transforms the structure of access, informant of the reconstructed movement patterns of inhabitants. “The wall and the door were the determining elements in the configuration of reforming architecture; the wall as the means of a general sequestration, the door to give specific structure to personal relationships”19 .


Jacobs, Jane M., and Susan J. Smith. "Living Room: Rematerialising Home."
Environment and Planning A Environ Plan A 40,

no. 3 (2008): 515­19. doi:10.1068/a40357.
16

Evans, Robin.
Translations from Drawing to Building. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

17
Ibid.
18
Väliaho, Pasi. apping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
M

2010.
19
Evans, Robin.
Translations from Drawing to Building. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

15

Research Method (Sarah)

The Functional House for Frictionless living by Alexander Klein (1928) Testing the domestic apparatus with literature and photography The opposition to moments of encounter in the domestic realm may have well been rooted in an aged assumption that these encounters are necessarily abrasive. The subject matter, together with a study of literature enables us to uncover the psychological dimension associated with interiority, testing the domestic apparatus thought to provide an optimal sequestration of public and private. Fondly recalling her time living in a shared property, Tania de Rozario writes in her memoir: “You and I shared two rooms
— one to sleep in and one to work in. We sublet the rest of the house to other artists who used the third room and the kitchen as workspaces. It was the ideal home. A place everybody could afford, in which beautiful things were created everyday. The space had not been occupied for years, and sat along a small lane in the Upper Thomson area. Prior to us, a construction company had stored its materials behind the bolted doors. Rumours of sex work still drew foreign workers to our doors, looking for leisure. By the time we were done with the place, it probably drew more attention to itself than it had before. One housemate painted the exterior facade red while the wall that separated us from the household on our left, was covered in blackboard paint. The chalk drawings that changed depending on whatever was happening that day, both amused and scared our neighbours. Our drawings of cartoon termites drinking champagne disturbed the exterminator, in particular.” 20 In Tania de Rozario’s recollection, she makes no mention of common domestic apparatus like the living room or even the bedroom. The selection and usage of rooms seem completely arbitrary, disregarding their original function, merely distributing spaces for work and rest, and using the “kitchen as workspaces”. This shared house was “ideal” in her perspective, as she relished in the humble abode that was made home by the daily collective creation of beautiful artwork by her and her tenants. Here, it can be inferred that the flexibility of use is not correlational to the flexibility of the physical architecture, i.e. the interior walls. Rozario and her “housemates” took joy in the shared spontaneity and unconventional appropriation of space and surfaces made possible in the non­hierarchical and amiable relationship between the renter and her tenants. They were notably unbothered by the history of the property’s occupancy, even deliberately intensifying the provocativeness of the property by the use of red and chalk doodles on
20


Rozario, Tania De.
And the Walls Come Crumbling down. Singapore: Math Paper Press, 2016.


Research Method (Sarah)

the exterior facade that incite reactions from neighbours and visitors. Altogether in her prose, Rozario paints a unique picture of a home that cannot be found in the original premise today. Scouring for a photograph that represented the true essence of his late mother, Roland Barthes was intrigued in the sole two­dimensional image that provided a link between history and memory and an understanding of the relation of the historian to this memory. Barthes believed that photography would “supplant the monument”21 as the modern locus of cultural memory. This reflects a paradigmatic shift from site of memory to sight of memory. The act of memorialising has been displaced from the stone of the physical monument to images that provide an annex of
“personal and collective memory in a way that few monuments could hope to match”22 . The monumental force of architecture has greatly depreciated not only in frequent demolition and re­adaption due to urban renewal, but also the physical mobility of individuals that no longer inhabit spaces in ritualic patterns. The subdivision of the apartment unit demonstrates another way in which this monumental force is disparaged. In order to recall the domestic interior so familiar in my childhood, I would have to examine architectural plans against old photographs and personal recounts, a tripartite model of study crafted by Evans. His method involved 1) a plan­painting­literature correspondence, 2) the plan as format of social life and 3) the plan as a spatial system of access23 . This method allowed him to discover the spatial fluidity of an open plan found in the matrix of connected rooms found in the Villa Madama. This helped to draw the conclusion that the movement of the inhabitant is not strictly controlled by the interior walls, but more by the perception of the inhabitant. In the sixteenth century, all rooms were treated publicly and there was no desire for privacy. In reading his analysis, Evans postulated that the matrix of connected rooms was “appropriate to a type of society that feeds on carnality”24 , expunged by the nineteenth century dictum that imposed moral purity.

Similarly, if in the subdivided apartment unit interiority no longer begins at the door
, it reveals social aspects of domestic life in privacy and decorum that has been affixed in the partition walls to normality. The plans which denote a kind of constructed movement across thresholds and boundaries (or the lack of them) come to life with literature and illustrations that inform of how the inhabitant has reacted or adapted to such a construction. In a single dwelling, we may then witness the flux and flow of various entities involved in the construction and inhabitation of the interior.

21
22

Barthes, Roland.
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Durant, Mark Alice. "Photography and Monumentality : Saint Lucy." Saint Lucy RSS. 2009. Accessed June 01, 2016.


http://saint­lucy.com/essays/notes­on­photography­and­monumentality/.
23
Zhu, Jianfei. "Robin Evans in 1978: Between Social Space and Visual Projection."
The Journal of Architecture 16, no. 2 (2011):

267­90. doi:10.1080/13602365.2011.570104.
24

Hill, Jonathan.
Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users. London: Routledge, 2003.


Research Method (Sarah)

Research Plan

Week

Date (2016)

Task

1

23.5.2016 ­ 29.5.2016

Complete chapter structure

30.5.2016 ­ 5.6.2016

Complete chapter structure

2

­ technical specification
­ personal experience
­ theoretical exposition/ literary interpretation
(3 x 1300 words)

­ technical specification
­ personal experience
­ theoretical exposition/ literary interpretation
(3 x 1300 words)

3

Go down to Pearl Bank Apartments on Saturday (11.6
2016)
Jun 5­10: Sarah in KL
Jun 12­26: Sarah in Japan

4

13.6.2016 ­ 19.6.2016

Start writing introduction

5

20.6.2016 ­ 26.6.2016

Start writing introduction

6

27.6.2016 ­ 3.7.2016

Draw plans and axonometric (depending on what I can acquire on 11/6, I may or may not begin to do this while I am away) Finish introduction

7

4.7.2016 ­ 10.7.2016

Write arguments

8

11.7.2016 ­ 17.7.2016

Write arguments

9

18.7.2016 ­ 24.7.2016

Write personal voice

10

25.7.2016 ­ 31.7.2016

Write personal voice

11

1.8.2016 ­ 7.8.2016

Write conclusion

12

8.8.2016 ­ 14.8.2016

Write conclusion

13

15.8.2016 ­ 21.8.2016

3pm, Aug 17: First Draft Submission

14

22.8.2016 ­ 28.8.2016

15

29.8.2016 ­ 4.9.2016

16

6.6.2016 ­ 12.6.2016

5.9.2016 ­ 11.9.2016

3pm, Sept 7: Final Submission