sorry

hmm. just tots. i hope i dun come across as callous or apathetic, or too sombre.

the above tschumi manifesto is to be taken literally.

this post is in reply of the drownings in lower seletar reservoir yesterday. the flagship project of PUB's Active Beautiful Clean waters programme.

earlier i posted some whimsical pictures of the model remy and me made. basically we participated in the masterplanning of the lower seletar reservoir park. those in the team and the clients had harboured very lofty ambitions of the project. images of pple kayaking, playing in the waters, splashing abt, aplenty. children of the sun and water. sparkling clean water.

never this....

in the project team, not a single member having a passion and knowledge of outdoor sports, no one an expert on water safety. for every project, we were instructed to design with safety of the public in mind. a very intangible and subjective notion.

therin lies the very vast gap between the user and implementor. the completely dissociated history of water culture in spore (ie, u dun see orang lauts, bumboat operators, or kelong fish farmers drowning do u?) vs the utopian imagery of unbridled safe fun, the total regulatory rationalisation of safety factors design.

for every designer and user, there are thousands of pple trying to bridge the huge gap. the huge gap precisely becoz of the complete disempowerment of roles of user and designer,

and there we were, carelessly drawing up plans, carried by euphoria of being released into the play pool, photoshopping images from somewhere else, misleading the general public from our supposedly higher academic standing. the river sectional drawings were not scrutinised in detail.

i am sure certain things cannot be faulted, certain things are purely accidental. however a tinge of uneasiness hangs in the air. that i had participated unknowingly in a dream that turned out to be someone elses' nitemare.

remy told me once that koolhaas wrote that architects and planners should be tried for war crimes because of the profound effects of subjugation and control they had on the masses via design. and we, unknowingly, murdered pple with our naivety, idealism and aultruism.

sorry.