- Robert Powell’s “Singapore: Architecture of a Global City”

From an essay I wrote some time back on the Capitol Theatre:

The city, sociologist Rob Shields once argued, is always “a ‘crisis-object’ which destabilises our certainty of the real”. Indeed, cities are sites of constant change. Sanjay Krishnan, a literary scholar, remarked that in Singapore “scaffolding seems the only unchanging feature in a city that sees itself in permanent transition”.

There is a small temporary hut on stilts in front of the construction work at Zhong San Park, next to the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall; the stage for an old chinese opera. It is a magnificient sight, with its gaily painted canvases propped up on wooden poles, juxtaposed against the drab grey scaffolds from the construction work behind it – the beginnings of yet another business park. From this view, it is almost as if the opera tent is backed up into the corner, because the grass patch is empty and has no markings on it, and yet the opera tent squeezes right up to the edge of the plot, and the scaffolding for the commercial developments also grows taller and taller behind it.

See the entire set here on Flickr.

“There seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of many individual images…. Each individual picture is unique, with some content that is rarely or never communicated, yet it approximates the public image, which, in different environments, is more or less compelling, more or less embracing…”

-Kevin Lynch, From “The Image of the City”

Kevin Lynch sent researchers out into cities and asked them to draw their own personal versions of maps of the cities. What he noted then was a “strong element of topological invariance with respect to reality”, as if “the map were drawn on an infinitely flexible rubber sheet; directions were twisted, distances stretched or compressed, large forms so changed from their accurate scale projecion as to be first unrecognisable.”

“Debord’s map images a fragmented city that is both the result of multiple restructurings of a capitalist society and the very form of a radical critique of this society. Its figuration of a type of inhabiting is simultaneously related to and distinct from Fredric Jameson’s “aesthetic of cognitive mapping”, a concept most succinctly described in his classic article “Post-modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Jameson concludes that fragmentations of urban spaces and the social body create the need for maps that would “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of the city’s structure as a whole.” (Tom McDonough, “Situationist Space”)

Exercise #1 – Maps of Places I have previously lived (as recalled from memory)

in 2009 i made some quick sketches, large amounts of discrepancies from reality and realisation that drawing involved many SPACE WARPS (map of kent ridge is decidedly flawed in too many ways as i havent been back to kent ridge in some years years despite living there previously for four years). decided to draw roads as single lines because roads do not constitute “double lines” to me, they seem to be single-line paths, and i have always recorded map sketches in this way.

1. shacklewell lane, dalston

2. lordship road, stoke newington

3. kuok foundation house, kent ridge terrace

4. eusoff hall, kent ridge drive

“When Stamford Raffles and William Farquhar sailed into the Strait of Singapore in 1819, they found an island whose muddy coastline and estuary were the only accessible areas. Crocodiles infested the waters and tigers and wild boars roamed the thickly forested hills. The sparse population of Chinese and Malay fisherman, tradesmen, and pirates lived in attap-covered huts along the riverbanks, or on floating villages.

Now less than two centuries later, Singapore is a thriving, cosmopolitan city with nothing left of its wild beginnings. Even the farmlands, the plantations, and the kampongs have disappeared to make room for more high-rise buildings and highways.

Fortunately, in the last twenty years, Singaporeans and their government have come to the realisation that cultural inheritance is not the only aspect of the island’s legacy. By preserving the magnificent variety of tropical trees, plants and flowers, the exotic mangrove swamps, and the drastically reduced fauna, Singapore is working towards a healthier environment as well as a more aesthetically pleasing one.”

a. ferris wheel scene, chris yeo’s in the house of straw, 2010
b. photo i took at dawn, singapore river, 2007
c. gaspar noe’s enter the void, 2009

I first saw the phrase “Blue Hour” thrown around in photography forums such as like skyscrapercity, but for quite some time I always thought it was some internationally franchised club that happened to set up shop at locations with magnificient aerial views of different urban cities.

This was largely due to the odd way in which it is sometimes spoken about, almost as if the Blue Hour is actually a physical space and not a time of day.

Absolute Giganten is the story of the other side, but also from the Blue Hour. It is about a boy about to sail from Hamburg to Singapore, never to see his friends again. On the last night, on hearing the news, they are determined to have the best night ever. After a terrifying, epic night, they spend the last morning together, wordlessly, silently, drifting off to sleep just as the day approaches. A story about leaving is often also a story about where you came from.

Paul Ricoeur writes: “Whence the paradox: on the one hand, it has to root itself in the soil of its past, forge a national spirit, and unfurl this spirital and cultural vindication before the colonialist’s personality. But in order to take part in the modern civilization, it is necessary at the same time to take party in scientific, technical and political rationalism, something which very often requires the pure and simple abandonment of a whole cultural past. It is a fact that every culture cannot sustain and absorb the shock of modern civilization: how to become modern and to return to the sources.”

Paper found at Wharf Road Project, London.

From Burial: Unedited Transcript: “I don’t know if it exists any more at all. A lot of those old tunes I put on at night and hear something in the tune that makes me feel sad, – a few of my favourite producers and DJs are dead now too – and I hear this hope in all those old tracks, trying to unite the UK, but they couldn’t, because the UK was changing in a different direction, away from us. Maybe the feeling of the UK in clubs and stuff back then, it wasn’t as artificial , self-aware or created by the internet. It was more rumour, underground folklore. No mobile phones back then. Anyone could go into the night and they had to seek it out. Because you could see it in people, you could see it in their eyes. Those ravers were at the edge at their lives, they weren’t running ahead or falling behind, they were just right there and the tunes meant everything. In the 90s you could feel that it had been taken away from them. In club culture, it all became like super-clubs, magazines, trance, commercialized. All these designer bars would be trying to be like clubs. It all got just taken. So it just went militant, underground from that point. That era is gone, now there’s less danger, less sacrifice, less journey to find something. You can’t hide, the media clocks everything. The internet or whatever, but DMZ and FWD have that deep atmosphere and real feeling, the true underground is still strong, I hear good new tunes all the time.”

(…)

“I spend a lot of time wandering around London, I always have. Sometimes it’s because I’ve got somewhere to go, sometimes it’s because I haven’t got anywhere to go. So I’d be wandering endlessly, getting in places. Being on your own listening to headphones is not a million miles away from being in a club surrounded by people, you let it in, you’re more open to it. Sometimes you get that feeling like a ghost touched your heart, like someone walks with you.”

(…)

“I love that, like old churchyards, factories, places out of the way. I used to get taken away to the middle of nowhere, by the sea, I love it out there, because when it’s dark, it’s totally dark, there’s none of this ambient light London thing. We used to have to walk back and hold hands and use a lighter. See the light, see where you were and then you’d walk on, and the image of where you’ve just were would still be on your retina. You couldn’t see anything, but you’d see stars. Loads of the drums on the new album are just a lighter. I love lighters and Swan Vesta matches, the drums on every tune are the same, this little noise.”

Denis Darzacq - La Chute

Some years ago I read about how Georges Perec related the parachute to his memory of the death of his father (killed during the war) because it was like “pere-chute”/”chute-du-pere” (french for fall of the father). I was also fascinated by how we called it a “rubbish chute” here, and that mental image of our rubbish in freefall.

When I look at Google Earth/Google Maps Hybrid view, I always imagine falling from a great height. Like a parachute jump.

Highrise Shanghai Collapse

At around 5:30am on June 27th 2009, an unoccupied 13-storey residental building still under construction at Lianhuanan Road in the Minxing district of Shanghai city toppled over, killing one worker. this is an amazing picture, considering how structurally intact the rest of the building seems to be, except… that they forgot to attach it to the ground a little better.

Telegraph: “Sub-standard workmanship has been a major concern in China’s building sector, as the country rolls out enormous city expansions and finishes off vast infrastructure projects to keep pace with fast economic growth. Construction-related accidents last year included the collapse of a steel arch on a new railway bridge, which killed at least seven, and a crane which fell on a kindergarten, killing five.”

Even if the details are somewhat sketchy, what intrigues me is the Xinhua news agency report that the sole fatality in this incident had been a worker who was in the building retrieving his tools, and that he had tried to escape from the building by jumping out of it. I’m supposing he was still subsequently flattened by the building, but the point is that jumping out of a tall building might not necessarily everyone’s reaction to realising that the building is collapsing.

Would you voluntarily jump out of a building if you knew you might die in it or also die in the attempt to jump out of the building? Or would you stay inside the building where you knew it was certain to be fatal?

Starting from the 1950s, Mao Zedong initiated two successive totalitarian movements called the “Three Antis” and “Five Antis” to “rid urban areas of corruption” by targeting wealthy capitalists and political opponents.

During this period of terror, hundreds of thousands were driven to suicide: “If you jumped into the Huangpu River and were swept away so the Communists didn’t have a corpse, they would accuse you of having escaped to Hong Kong and your family would suffer. So the best way was to leap down the street.

In Shanghai, people jumping to their deaths from skyscrapers became so commonplace that they acquired the nickname ‘parachutes’.

Parachute: from Fr. parachute, lit. “that which protects against a fall,” hybrid coined by Fr. aeronaut François Blanchard (1753-1809) from para- “defense against” (from L. parare “prepare”) + chute “a fall”

From Georges Perec’s “Parachute Jump”:
“For as long as we hadn’t been told to get our equipment on, we weren’t afraid because we weren’t yet sure we’d be jumping. From the moment you begin to get your equipment on, you are sure of jumping. Then, you begin to check to see your parachute is all there. You check the fastenings, you check the… You get your equipment on, you check the length of the harness, you fasten the harness, at that moment, you have the parachute behind your back and in front of you. The parachute weighs fifteen kilograms, it is a very heavy and extremely hard thing to carry, one is really… condemned, one is really… minimised! Anyway, it is terrible: you can’t carry it, can’t walk with it. You’re forced to put up with it.”

“…at that moment everyone begins to move forward. And as you move forward, you gradually lose your awareness of yourself. The only thing left is your determination, the determination to get this inertia over with, all this heaviness, all the difficulty there is in having a 15-kilo parachute on your back and on your stomach…. And the moment comes when you find yourself facing into the void… There’s nothing in front of you. And you have to throw yourself out…. The fact is, a moment comes when you’re in the presence of… its not even that you’re in the presence of a danger, its that you have at all costs to put your trust in something.”

The Falling Man

On the famous Falling Man photograph taken on 9-11: “For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands.”

I’m sure it has been noted many times that in the 9-11 incident which claimed thousands of lives, it was only the few people who jumped from the buildings who remained as the only visible and singularly identifiable human casualties that day, as compared to the thousands of unseen fatalities that day.

Bachelard writes that nuance bespeaks the colour of shelter. A poet’s word is suitable here, because it is that which really moves the spirit – not detail. “For the real houses of memory, the houses to which we return in dreams, the houses which are rich in unalterable Oneirism, do not readily lend themselves to description. To describe them would be like showing them to visitors. We can perhaps tell everything about the present, but about the past! – The first, the oneirically definitive house, must retain its shadows (…) All we communicate to others is an orientation wards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively. What is secret never has total objectivity. In this respect, we orient Oneirism but we do not accomplish it.” (13)

Should I just grow old here?
Deal with the fear?
Stay in my hole?
Do as I’m told?

When I lived in Singapore, I listened to this song and felt that I had to leave.
When I lived outside Singapore, I listened to this song and felt that I wanted to return.

Some examples of Non-places in Singapore:

•    Supermarkets
•    Shopping Malls
•    Train stations
•    Convenience Stores
•    Observation decks
•    Airports
•    HDB corridors
•    Stairwells
•    Carparks
•    Void decks
•    Food courts

This is a mirrored copy of “The Door in the Wall” by HG Wells.

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story.

He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off from every-day realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. “He was mystifying!” I said, and then: “How well he did it!. . . . . It isn’t quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well.”

Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest, present, convey–I hardly know which word to use–experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.

Well, I don’t resort to that explanation now. I have got over my intervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip the truth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only thought he saw, whether he himself was the possessor of an inestimable privilege, or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to guess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my doubts forever, throw no light on that. That much the reader must judge for himself.

I forget now what chance comment or criticism of mine moved so reticent a man to confide in me. He was, I think, defending himself against an imputation of slackness and unreliability I had made in relation to a great public movement in which he had disappointed me. But he plunged suddenly. “I have” he said, “a preoccupation–”

“I know,” he went on, after a pause that he devoted to the study of his cigar ash, “I have been negligent. The fact is–it isn’t a case of ghosts or apparitions–but–it’s an odd thing to tell of, Redmond–I am haunted. I am haunted by something–that rather takes the light out of things, that fills me with longings . . . . .”

He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes us when we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful things. “You were at Saint Athelstan’s all through,” he said, and for a moment that seemed to me quite irrelevant. “Well”–and he paused. Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him.

Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written visibly in his face. I have a photograph in which that look of detachment has been caught and intensified. It reminds me of what a woman once said of him–a woman who had loved him greatly. “Suddenly,” she said, “the interest goes out of him. He forgets you. He doesn’t care a rap for you–under his very nose . . . . .”

Yet the interest was not always out of him, and when he was holding his attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an extremely successful man. His career, indeed, is set with successes. He left me behind him long ago; he soared up over my head, and cut a figure in the world that I couldn’t cut–anyhow. He was still a year short of forty, and they say now that he would have been in office and very probably in the new Cabinet if he had lived. At school he always beat me without effort–as it were by nature. We were at school together at Saint Athelstan’s College in West Kensington for almost all our school time. He came into the school as my co-equal, but he left far above me, in a blaze of scholarships and brilliant performance. Yet I think I made a fair average running. And it was at school I heard first of the Door in the Wall–that I was to hear of a second time only a month before his death.

To him at least the Door in the Wall was a real door leading through a real wall to immortal realities. Of that I am now quite assured.

And it came into his life early, when he was a little fellow between five and six. I remember how, as he sat making his confession to me with a slow gravity, he reasoned and reckoned the date of it. “There was,” he said, “a crimson Virginia creeper in it–all one bright uniform crimson in a clear amber sunshine against a white wall. That came into the impression somehow, though I don’t clearly remember how, and there were horse-chestnut leaves upon the clean pavement outside the green door. They were blotched yellow and green, you know, not brown nor dirty, so that they must have been new fallen. I take it that means October. I look out for horse-chestnut leaves every year, and I ought to know.

“If I’m right in that, I was about five years and four months old.”

He was, he said, rather a precocious little boy–he learned to talk at an abnormally early age, and he was so sane and “old-fashioned,” as people say, that he was permitted an amount of initiative that most children scarcely attain by seven or eight. His mother died when he was born, and he was under the less vigilant and authoritative care of a nursery governess. His father was a stern, preoccupied lawyer, who gave him little attention, and expected great things of him. For all his brightness he found life a little grey and dull I think. And one day he wandered.

He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get away, nor the course he took among the West Kensington roads. All that had faded among the incurable blurs of memory. But the white wall and the green door stood out quite distinctly.

As his memory of that remote childish experience ran, he did at the very first sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction, a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in.

And at the same time he had the clearest conviction that either it was unwise or it was wrong of him–he could not tell which–to yield to this attraction. He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the very beginning–unless memory has played him the queerest trick–that the door was unfastened, and that he could go in as he chose.

I seem to see the figure of that little boy, drawn and repelled. And it was very clear in his mind, too, though why it should be so was never explained, that his father would be very angry if he went through that door.

Wallace described all these moments of hesitation to me with the utmost particularity. He went right past the door, and then, with his hands in his pockets, and making an infantile attempt to whistle, strolled right along beyond the end of the wall. There he recalls a number of mean, dirty shops, and particularly that of a plumber and decorator, with a dusty disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead ball taps, pattern books of wall paper, and tins of enamel. He stood pretending to examine these things, and coveting, passionately desiring the green door.

Then, he said, he had a gust of emotion. He made a run for it, lest hesitation should grip him again, he went plump with outstretched hand through the green door and let it slam behind him. And so, in a trice, he came into the garden that has haunted all his life.

It was very difficult for Wallace to give me his full sense of that garden into which he came.

There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave one a sense of lightness and good happening and well being; there was something in the sight of it that made all its colour clean and perfect and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely glad–as only in rare moments and when one is young and joyful one can be glad in this world. And everything was beautiful there . . . . .

Wallace mused before he went on telling me. “You see,” he said, with the doubtful inflection of a man who pauses at incredible things, “there were two great panthers there . . . Yes, spotted panthers. And I was not afraid. There was a long wide path with marble-edged flower borders on either side, and these two huge velvety beasts were playing there with a ball. One looked up and came towards me, a little curious as it seemed. It came right up to me, rubbed its soft round ear very gently against the small hand I held out and purred. It was, I tell you, an enchanted garden. I know. And the size? Oh! it stretched far and wide, this way and that. I believe there were hills far away. Heaven knows where West Kensington had suddenly got to. And somehow it was just like coming home.

“You know, in the very moment the door swung to behind me, I forgot the road with its fallen chestnut leaves, its cabs and tradesmen’s carts, I forgot the sort of gravitational pull back to the discipline and obedience of home, I forgot all hesitations and fear, forgot discretion, forgot all the intimate realities of this life. I became in a moment a very glad and wonder-happy little boy–in another world. It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating and mellower light, with a faint clear gladness in its air, and wisps of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky. And before me ran this long wide path, invitingly, with weedless beds on either side, rich with untended flowers, and these two great panthers. I put my little hands fearlessly on their soft fur, and caressed their round ears and the sensitive corners under their ears, and played with them, and it was as though they welcomed me home. There was a keen sense of home-coming in my mind, and when presently a tall, fair girl appeared in the pathway and came to meet me, smiling, and said ‘Well?’ to me, and lifted me, and kissed me, and put me down, and led me by the hand, there was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked. There were broad steps, I remember, that came into view between spikes of delphinium, and up these we went to a great avenue between very old and shady dark trees. All down this avenue, you know, between the red chapped stems, were marble seats of honour and statuary, and very tame and friendly white doves . . . . .

“And along this avenue my girl-friend led me, looking down–I recall the pleasant lines, the finely-modelled chin of her sweet kind face–asking me questions in a soft, agreeable voice, and telling me things, pleasant things I know, though what they were I was never able to recall . . . And presently a little Capuchin monkey, very clean, with a fur of ruddy brown and kindly hazel eyes, came down a tree to us and ran beside me, looking up at me and grinning, and presently leapt to my shoulder. So we went on our way in great happiness . . . .”

He paused.

“Go on,” I said.

“I remember little things. We passed an old man musing among laurels, I remember, and a place gay with paroquets, and came through a broad shaded colonnade to a spacious cool palace, full of pleasant fountains, full of beautiful things, full of the quality and promise of heart’s desire. And there were many things and many people, some that still seem to stand out clearly and some that are a little vague, but all these people were beautiful and kind. In some way–I don’t know how–it was conveyed to me that they all were kind to me, glad to have me there, and filling me with gladness by their gestures, by the touch of their hands, by the welcome and love in their eyes. Yes–”

He mused for awhile. “Playmates I found there. That was very much to me, because I was a lonely little boy. They played delightful games in a grass-covered court where there was a sun-dial set about with flowers. And as one played one loved . . . .

“But–it’s odd–there’s a gap in my memory. I don’t remember the games we played. I never remembered. Afterwards, as a child, I spent long hours trying, even with tears, to recall the form of that happiness. I wanted to play it all over again–in my nursery –by myself. No! All I remember is the happiness and two dear playfellows who were most with me . . . . Then presently came a sombre dark woman, with a grave, pale face and dreamy eyes, a sombre woman wearing a soft long robe of pale purple, who carried a book and beckoned and took me aside with her into a gallery above a hall–though my playmates were loth to have me go, and ceased their game and stood watching as I was carried away. ‘Come back to us!’ they cried. ‘Come back to us soon!’ I looked up at her face, but she heeded them not at all. Her face was very gentle and grave. She took me to a seat in the gallery, and I stood beside her, ready to look at her book as she opened it upon her knee. The pages fell open. She pointed, and I looked, marvelling, for in the living pages of that book I saw myself; it was a story about myself, and in it were all the things that had happened to me since ever I was born . . . .

“It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were not pictures, you understand, but realities.”

Wallace paused gravely–looked at me doubtfully.

“Go on,” I said. “I understand.”

“They were realities–yes, they must have been; people moved and things came and went in them; my dear mother, whom I had near forgotten; then my father, stern and upright, the servants, the nursery, all the familiar things of home. Then the front door and the busy streets, with traffic to and fro: I looked and marvelled, and looked half doubtfully again into the woman’s face and turned the pages over, skipping this and that, to see more of this book, and more, and so at last I came to myself hovering and hesitating outside the green door in the long white wall, and felt again the conflict and the fear.

“‘And next?’ I cried, and would have turned on, but the cool hand of the grave woman delayed me.

“‘Next?’ I insisted, and struggled gently with her hand, pulling up her fingers with all my childish strength, and as she yielded and the page came over she bent down upon me like a shadow and kissed my brow.

“But the page did not show the enchanted garden, nor the panthers, nor the girl who had led me by the hand, nor the playfellows who had been so loth to let me go. It showed a long grey street in West Kensington, on that chill hour of afternoon before the lamps are lit, and I was there, a wretched little figure, weeping aloud, for all that I could do to restrain myself, and I was weeping because I could not return to my dear play-fellows who had called after me, ‘Come back to us! Come back to us soon!’ I was there. This was no page in a book, but harsh reality; that enchanted place and the restraining hand of the grave mother at whose knee I stood had gone–whither have they gone?”

He halted again, and remained for a time, staring into the fire.

“Oh! the wretchedness of that return!” he murmured.

“Well?” I said after a minute or so.

“Poor little wretch I was–brought back to this grey world again! As I realised the fulness of what had happened to me, I gave way to quite ungovernable grief. And the shame and humiliation of that public weeping and my disgraceful homecoming remain with me still. I see again the benevolent-looking old gentleman in gold spectacles who stopped and spoke to me–prodding me first with his umbrella. ‘Poor little chap,’ said he; ‘and are you lost then?’–and me a London boy of five and more! And he must needs bring in a kindly young policeman and make a crowd of me, and so march me home. Sobbing, conspicuous and frightened, I came from the enchanted garden to the steps of my father’s house.

“That is as well as I can remember my vision of that garden–the garden that haunts me still. Of course, I can convey nothing of that indescribable quality of translucent unreality, that difference from the common things of experience that hung about it all; but that–that is what happened. If it was a dream, I am sure it was a day-time and altogether extraordinary dream . . . . . . H’m!–naturally there followed a terrible questioning, by my aunt, my father, the nurse, the governess–everyone . . . . . .

“I tried to tell them, and my father gave me my first thrashing for telling lies. When afterwards I tried to tell my aunt, she punished me again for my wicked persistence. Then, as I said, everyone was forbidden to listen to me, to hear a word about it. Even my fairy tale books were taken away from me for a time–because I was ‘too imaginative.’ Eh? Yes, they did that! My father belonged to the old school . . . . . And my story was driven back upon myself. I whispered it to my pillow–my pillow that was often damp and salt to my whispering lips with childish tears. And I added always to my official and less fervent prayers this one heartfelt request: ‘Please God I may dream of the garden. Oh! take me back to my garden! Take me back to my garden!’

“I dreamt often of the garden. I may have added to it, I may have changed it; I do not know . . . . . All this you understand is an attempt to reconstruct from fragmentary memories a very early experience. Between that and the other consecutive memories of my boyhood there is a gulf. A time came when it seemed impossible I should ever speak of that wonder glimpse again.”

I asked an obvious question.

“No,” he said. “I don’t remember that I ever attempted to find my way back to the garden in those early years. This seems odd to me now, but I think that very probably a closer watch was kept on my movements after this misadventure to prevent my going astray. No, it wasn’t until you knew me that I tried for the garden again. And I believe there was a period –incredible as it seems now–when I forgot the garden altogether–when I was about eight or nine it may have been. Do you remember me as a kid at Saint Athelstan’s?”

“Rather!”

“I didn’t show any signs did I in those days of having a secret dream?”

He looked up with a sudden smile.

“Did you ever play North-West Passage with me? . . . . . No, of course you didn’t come my way!”

“It was the sort of game,” he went on, “that every imaginative child plays all day. The idea was the discovery of a North-West Passage to school. The way to school was plain enough; the game consisted in finding some way that wasn’t plain, starting off ten minutes early in some almost hopeless direction, and working one’s way round through unaccustomed streets to my goal. And one day I got entangled among some rather low-class streets on the other side of Campden Hill, and I began to think that for once the game would be against me and that I should get to school late. I tried rather desperately a street that seemed a cul de sac, and found a passage at the end. I hurried through that with renewed hope. ‘I shall do it yet,’ I said, and passed a row of frowsy little shops that were inexplicably familiar to me, and behold! there was my long white wall and the green door that led to the enchanted garden!

“The thing whacked upon me suddenly. Then, after all, that garden, that wonderful garden, wasn’t a dream!” . . . .

He paused.

“I suppose my second experience with the green door marks the world of difference there is between the busy life of a schoolboy and the infinite leisure of a child. Anyhow, this second time I didn’t for a moment think of going in straight away. You see . . . For one thing my mind was full of the idea of getting to school in time–set on not breaking my record for punctuality. I must surely have felt SOME little desire at least to try the door–yes, I must have felt that . . . . . But I seem to remember the attraction of the door mainly as another obstacle to my overmastering determination to get to school. I was immediately interested by this discovery I had made, of course–I went on with my mind full of it–but I went on. It didn’t check me. I ran past tugging out my watch, found I had ten minutes still to spare, and then I was going downhill into familiar surroundings. I got to school, breathless, it is true, and wet with perspiration, but in time. I can remember hanging up my coat and hat . . . Went right by it and left it behind me. Odd, eh?”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “Of course, I didn’t know then that it wouldn’t always be there. School boys have limited imaginations. I suppose I thought it was an awfully jolly thing to have it there, to know my way back to it, but there was the school tugging at me. I expect I was a good deal distraught and inattentive that morning, recalling what I could of the beautiful strange people I should presently see again. Oddly enough I had no doubt in my mind that they would be glad to see me . . . Yes, I must have thought of the garden that morning just as a jolly sort of place to which one might resort in the interludes of a strenuous scholastic career.

“I didn’t go that day at all. The next day was a half holiday, and that may have weighed with me. Perhaps, too, my state of inattention brought down impositions upon me and docked the margin of time necessary for the detour. I don’t know. What I do know is that in the meantime the enchanted garden was so much upon my mind that I could not keep it to myself.

“I told–What was his name?–a ferrety-looking youngster we used to call Squiff.”

“Young Hopkins,” said I.

“Hopkins it was. I did not like telling him, I had a feeling that in some way it was against the rules to tell him, but I did. He was walking part of the way home with me; he was talkative, and if we had not talked about the enchanted garden we should have talked of something else, and it was intolerable to me to think about any other subject. So I blabbed.

“Well, he told my secret. The next day in the play interval I found myself surrounded by half a dozen bigger boys, half teasing and wholly curious to hear more of the enchanted garden. There was that big Fawcett–you remember him?–and Carnaby and Morley Reynolds. You weren’t there by any chance? No, I think I should have remembered if you were . . . . .

“A boy is a creature of odd feelings. I was, I really believe, in spite of my secret self-disgust, a little flattered to have the attention of these big fellows. I remember particularly a moment of pleasure caused by the praise of Crawshaw–you remember Crawshaw major, the son of Crawshaw the composer?–who said it was the best lie he had ever heard. But at the same time there was a really painful undertow of shame at telling what I felt was indeed a sacred secret. That beast Fawcett made a joke about the girl in green–.”

Wallace’s voice sank with the keen memory of that shame. “I pretended not to hear,” he said. “Well, then Carnaby suddenly called me a young liar and disputed with me when I said the thing was true. I said I knew where to find the green door, could lead them all there in ten minutes. Carnaby became outrageously virtuous, and said I’d have to–and bear out my words or suffer. Did you ever have Carnaby twist your arm? Then perhaps you’ll understand how it went with me. I swore my story was true. There was nobody in the school then to save a chap from Carnaby though Crawshaw put in a word or so. Carnaby had got his game. I grew excited and red-eared, and a little frightened, I behaved altogether like a silly little chap, and the outcome of it all was that instead of starting alone for my enchanted garden, I led the way presently–cheeks flushed, ears hot, eyes smarting, and my soul one burning misery and shame–for a party of six mocking, curious and threatening school-fellows.

“We never found the white wall and the green door . . .”

“You mean?–”

“I mean I couldn’t find it. I would have found it if I could.

“And afterwards when I could go alone I couldn’t find it. I never found it. I seem now to have been always looking for it through my school-boy days, but I’ve never come upon it again.”

“Did the fellows–make it disagreeable?”

“Beastly . . . . . Carnaby held a council over me for wanton lying. I remember how I sneaked home and upstairs to hide the marks of my blubbering. But when I cried myself to sleep at last it wasn’t for Carnaby, but for the garden, for the beautiful afternoon I had hoped for, for the sweet friendly women and the waiting playfellows and the game I had hoped to learn again, that beautiful forgotten game . . . . .

“I believed firmly that if I had not told– . . . . . I had bad times after that–crying at night and woolgathering by day. For two terms I slackened and had bad reports. Do you remember? Of course you would! It was you–your beating me in mathematics that brought me back to the grind again.”

For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire. Then he said: “I never saw it again until I was seventeen.

“It leapt upon me for the third time–as I was driving to Paddington on my way to Oxford and a scholarship. I had just one momentary glimpse. I was leaning over the apron of my hansom smoking a cigarette, and no doubt thinking myself no end of a man of the world, and suddenly there was the door, the wall, the dear sense of unforgettable and still attainable things.

“We clattered by–I too taken by surprise to stop my cab until we were well past and round a corner. Then I had a queer moment, a double and divergent movement of my will: I tapped the little door in the roof of the cab, and brought my arm down to pull out my watch. ‘Yes, sir!’ said the cabman, smartly. ‘Er– well–it’s nothing,’ I cried. ‘My mistake! We haven’t much time! Go on!’ and he went on . . .

“I got my scholarship. And the night after I was told of that I sat over my fire in my little upper room, my study, in my father’s house, with his praise–his rare praise–and his sound counsels ringing in my ears, and I smoked my favourite pipe–the formidable bulldog of adolescence–and thought of that door in the long white wall. ‘If I had stopped,’ I thought, ‘I should have missed my scholarship, I should have missed Oxford–muddled all the fine career before me! I begin to see things better!’ I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then this career of mine was a thing that merited sacrifice.

“Those dear friends and that clear atmosphere seemed very sweet to me, very fine, but remote. My grip was fixing now upon the world. I saw another door opening–the door of my career.”

He stared again into the fire. Its red lights picked out a stubborn strength in his face for just one flickering moment, and then it vanished again.

“Well”, he said and sighed, “I have served that career. I have done–much work, much hard work. But I have dreamt of the enchanted garden a thousand dreams, and seen its door, or at least glimpsed its door, four times since then. Yes–four times. For a while this world was so bright and interesting, seemed so full of meaning and opportunity that the half-effaced charm of the garden was by comparison gentle and remote. Who wants to pat panthers on the way to dinner with pretty women and distinguished men? I came down to London from Oxford, a man of bold promise that I have done something to redeem. Something–and yet there have been disappointments . . . . .

“Twice I have been in love–I will not dwell on that–but once, as I went to someone who, I know, doubted whether I dared to come, I took a short cut at a venture through an unfrequented road near Earl’s Court, and so happened on a white wall and a familiar green door. ‘Odd!’ said I to myself, ‘but I thought this place was on Campden Hill. It’s the place I never could find somehow–like counting Stonehenge–the place of that queer day dream of mine.’ And I went by it intent upon my purpose. It had no appeal to me that afternoon.

“I had just a moment’s impulse to try the door, three steps aside were needed at the most–though I was sure enough in my heart that it would open to me–and then I thought that doing so might delay me on the way to that appointment in which I thought my honour was involved. Afterwards I was sorry for my punctuality–I might at least have peeped in I thought, and waved a hand to those panthers, but I knew enough by this time not to seek again belatedly that which is not found by seeking. Yes, that time made me very sorry . . . . .

“Years of hard work after that and never a sight of the door. It’s only recently it has come back to me. With it there has come a sense as though some thin tarnish had spread itself over my world. I began to think of it as a sorrowful and bitter thing that I should never see that door again. Perhaps I was suffering a little from overwork–perhaps it was what I’ve heard spoken of as the feeling of forty. I don’t know. But certainly the keen brightness that makes effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just at a time with all these new political developments –when I ought to be working. Odd, isn’t it? But I do begin to find life toilsome, its rewards, as I come near them, cheap. I began a little while ago to want the garden quite badly. Yes–and I’ve seen it three times.”

“The garden?”

“No–the door! And I haven’t gone in!”

He leaned over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his voice as he spoke. “Thrice I have had my chance–thrice! If ever that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will stay . . . . . I swore it and when the time came– I didn’t go.

“Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to enter. Three times in the last year.

“The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the Tenants’ Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a majority of three. You remember? No one on our side–perhaps very few on the opposite side–expected the end that night. Then the debate collapsed like eggshells. I and Hotchkiss were dining with his cousin at Brentford, we were both unpaired, and we were called up by telephone, and set off at once in his cousin’s motor. We got in barely in time, and on the way we passed my wall and door–livid in the moonlight, blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it, but unmistakable. ‘My God!’ cried I. ‘What?’said Hotchkiss. ‘Nothing!’ I answered, and the moment passed.

“‘I’ve made a great sacrifice,’ I told the whip as I got in. ‘They all have,’ he said, and hurried by.

“I do not see how I could have done otherwise then. And the next occasion was as I rushed to my father’s bedside to bid that stern old man farewell. Then, too, the claims of life were imperative. But the third time was different; it happened a week ago. It fills me with hot remorse to recall it. I was with Gurker and Ralphs–it’s no secret now you know that I’ve had my talk with Gurker. We had been dining at Frobisher’s, and the talk had become intimate between us. The question of my place in the reconstructed ministry lay always just over the boundary of the discussion. Yes –yes. That’s all settled. It needn’t be talked about yet, but there’s no reason to keep a secret from you . . . . . Yes–thanks! thanks! But let me tell you my story.

“Then, on that night things were very much in the air. My position was a very delicate one. I was keenly anxious to get some definite word from Gurker, but was hampered by Ralphs’ presence. I was using the best power of my brain to keep that light and careless talk not too obviously directed to the point that concerns me. I had to. Ralphs’ behaviour since has more than justified my caution . . . . . Ralphs, I knew, would leave us beyond the Kensington High Street, and then I could surprise Gurker by a sudden frankness. One has sometimes to resort to these little devices. . . . . And then it was that in the margin of my field of vision I became aware once more of the white wall, the green door before us down the road.

“We passed it talking. I passed it. I can still see the shadow of Gurker’s marked profile, his opera hat tilted forward over his prominent nose, the many folds of his neck wrap going before my shadow and Ralphs’ as we sauntered past.

“I passed within twenty inches of the door. ‘If I say good-night to them, and go in,’ I asked myself, ‘what will happen?’ And I was all a-tingle for that word with Gurker.

“I could not answer that question in the tangle of my other problems. ‘They will think me mad,’ I thought. ‘And suppose I vanish now!–Amazing disappearance of a prominent politician!’ That weighed with me. A thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me in that crisis.”

Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking slowly; “Here I am!” he said.

“Here I am!” he repeated, “and my chance has gone from me. Three times in one year the door has been offered me–the door that goes into peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man on earth can know. And I have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone–”

“How do you know?”

“I know. I know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to the tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came. You say, I have success–this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have it.” He had a walnut in his big hand. “If that was my success,” he said, and crushed it, and held it out for me to see.

“Let me tell you something, Redmond. This loss is destroying me. For two months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work at all, except the most necessary and urgent duties. My soul is full of inappeasable regrets. At nights–when it is less likely I shall be recognised–I go out. I wander. Yes. I wonder what people would think of that if they knew. A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that most vital of all departments, wandering alone–grieving–sometimes near audibly lamenting–for a door, for a garden!”

I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire that had come into his eyes. I see him very vividly to-night. I sit recalling his words, his tones, and last evening’s Westminster Gazette still lies on my sofa, containing the notice of his death. At lunch to-day the club was busy with him and the strange riddle of his fate.

They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation near East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been made in connection with an extension of the railway southward. It is protected from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high road, in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of some of the workmen who live in that direction. The doorway was left unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through it he made his way . . . . .

My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.

It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night–he has frequently walked home during the past Session–and so it is I figure his dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up, intent. And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened door awaken some memory?

Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?

I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You may think me superstitious if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I am more than half convinced that he had in truth, an abnormal gift, and a sense, something–I know not what–that in the guise of wall and door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the imagination.

We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and death. But did he see like that?

From The Clientele’s “Losing Haringey“:

In those days, there was a kind of fever that pushed me out of the front door, into the pale, exhaust-fumed park by Broadwater Farm or the grubby road that eventually leads to Enfield: turkish supermarket after chicken restaurant after spare car part shop. Everything in my life felt like it was coming to a mysterious close: I could hardly walk to the end of a street without feeling there was no way to go except back. The dates I’d had that summer had come to nothing, my job was a dead end and the rent cheque was killing me a little more each month. It seemed unlikely that anything could hold much longer. The only question left to ask was what would happen after everything familiar collapsed, but for now the summer stretched between me and that moment.

It was ferociously hot, and the air quality became so bad that by the evening the noise of nearby trains stuttered in in fits and starts, distorted through the shifting air. As I lay in the cool of my room, I could hear my neighbours discussing the world cup and opening beers in their gardens. On the other side, someone was singing an Arabic prayer through the thin wall. I had no money for the pub so I decided to go for a walk.

I found myself wandering aimlessly to the west, past the terrace of chip and kebab shops and laundrettes near the tube station. I crossed the street, and headed into virgin territory – I had never been this way before. Gravel-dashed houses alternated with square 60s offices, and the wide pavements undulated with cracks and litter. I walked and walked, because there was nothing else for me to do, and by degrees the light began to fade.

The mouth of an avenue led me to the verge of a long, greasy A-road that rose up in the far distance, with symmetrical terraces falling steeply down then up again from a distant railway station. There were four benches to my right, interspersed with those strange bushes that grow in the area, whose blossoms are so pale yellow they seem translucent, almost spectral; and suddenly tired, I sat down. I held my head in my hands, feeling like shit, but a sudden breeze escaped from the terraces and for a moment I lost my thoughts in its unexpected coolness. I looked up and I realised I was sitting in a photograph.

I remembered clearly: this photograph was taken by my mother in 1982, outside our front garden in Hampshire. It was slightly underexposed. I was still sitting on the bench, but the colours and the planes of the road and horizon had become the photo. If I looked hard, I could see the lines of the window ledge in the original photograph were now composed by a tree branch and the silhouetted edge of a grass verge. The sheen of the flash on the window was replicated by bonfire smoke drifting infinitesimally slowly from behind a fence. My sister’s face had been dimly visible behind the window, and –yes- there were pale stars far off to the west that traced out the lines of a toddler’s eyes and mouth.

When I look back at this there’s nothing to grasp, no starting point. I was inside an underexposed photo from 1982 but I was also sitting on a bench in Haringey.

Strongest of all was the feeling of 1982-ness: dizzy, illogical, as if none of the intervening disasters and wrong turns had happened yet. I felt guilty, and inconsolably sad. I felt the instinctive tug back – to school, the memory of shopping malls, cooking, driving in my mother’s car. All gone, gone forever.

I just sat there for a while. I was so tired that I didn’t bother trying to work out what was going on. I was happy just to sit in the photo while it lasted, which wasn’t for long anyway: the light faded, the wind caught the smoke, the stars dimmed under the glare of the streetlamps. I got up and walked away from the squat little benches and an oncoming gang of kids.

A bus was rumbling to my rescue down the hill, with a great big “via Alexandra Palace” on its front, and I realised I did want a drink after all.”

The crisis of urbanism is worsening. The construction of neighbourhoods, old and new, is obviously at variance with established modes of behaviour, and all the more so with the new ways of life we seek. As a result, we are surrounded by a dull and sterile environment.

In old neighbourhoods, the streets have degenerated into highways, and leisure is commercialised and adulterated by tourism. Social relations there become impossible. Newly built neighborhoods have only two themes, which govern everything: traffic circulation and household comfort. The are the meager expressions of bourgeois happiness and lack any concern for play.

In response to the need to construct whole towns rapidly, cemeteries in reinforced concrete are being built where great masses of the population are condemned to die of boredom. For what is the use of the most astonishing technical inventions that the world now finds at its disposal if the conditions for deriving benefit from them are lacking, they contribute nothing to leisure, and the imagination defaults?

We require adventure. Not finding it any longer on earth, there are those who want to look for it on the moon. We opt first to create situations here, new situations. We intend to break the laws that prevent the development of meaningful activities in life and culture. We find ourselves at the dawn of a new era, and we are already trying to outline the image of a happier life and a unitary urbanism – urbanism made to please.

Our domain is thus the urban network, the natural expression of a collective creativity capable of understanding the creative forces being released with the decline of a culture based on individualism. To our way of thinking, the traditional arts will not longer be able to play a role in the creation of the new evinroment in which we want to live.

We are in the process of inventing new techniques; we are examining the possibilities offered by existing cities, and making models and plans for future ones. We are aware of the need to take advantage of all the new technologies, and we know that the future constructions we envisage will have to be flexible enough to respond to the dynamic conception of life, creating our surroundings in direct relation to constantly changing modes of behaviour.

Our concept of urbanism is thus a social one. We are opposed to the concept of a garden city (ville verte, a “green town”), where spaced and isolated skyscrapers must necessarily reduce direct relations among people and their common action. For close relations between surroundings and behaviour to be produced, agglomeration (conurbation) is indispensable. Those who think that the rapidity with which we move around and the possibility of telecommunications are going to dissolve the common life of agglomerations have little idea of humanity’s true needs. Instead of the idea of a garden city, which most modern architects have adopted, we set up the image of the covered city, where the layout of thoroughfares and isolated buildings has given way to a continuous spatial construction, elevated above the ground, and which will include groups of dwellings as well as public spaces (permitting modifications of purpose depending on the needs of the moment). Since all traffic, in the functional sense, will pass underneath or on overhead terraces, streets can be done away with. The great number of different traversable spaces of which the city is composed form a vast and complex social space. Far from a return to nature-the notion of living in a park, as solitary aristocrats once did-we see in such immense constructions the possibility of overcoming nature and regulating at will the atmosphere, lighting, and sounds in these various spaces.

Do we mean by this a new functionalism that will put increased emphasis on the idealised utiliarian life? Let us not forget that once the functions are established, they are followed by play. For some time now, architecture has become a game of spacea nd environment. The garden city lacks environments. We on the contrary, want to take advantage of them more consciously; we want them to correspond to our needs.

The future cities we envisage will offer an unusual variety of sensations in this realm, and unforeseen games will come possible through the inventive use of material conditions, such as air-conditioning and the control of sound and lighting. Urban planners are already studying how to harmonise the cacophony that reigns in present-day cities. Before long they should find there a new arena for creation, as with many other problems that will emerge. Space travel, which has been predicted, may influence this development, since bases established on other planets will immediately raise the problem of sheltered cities, which may provide the model for our study of future urbanism.

Above all, however, the decreased amount of work necessary for production due to extensive automation will create a need for leisure, for different behaviour and a change in its nature, which will necessarily lead to a new conception of the collective habitat having the maximum of social space, contrary to the concept of a garden city (ville verte), where social space is reduced to a minimum. The city of the future must be conceived as a continuous construction on pillars, or else as an extended system of different constructions, in which premises for living, pleasure, etc., are suspended, as well as those designed for production and distribution, leaving the ground free for circulation and public meetings. The use of ultralight and insulating materials now being tried experimentally, will allow for light construction and broadly spaced supports. In this way it will be possible to build a multi-layered city: underground, ground level, stories, terraces, of an expanse that may vary from a neighbourhood to a metropolis. Note that in such a city the built surface will be 100 percent and the free surface 200 percent (parterre and terraces), whereas in traditional cities the figures are approximately 80 percent and 20 percent; in the garden city this ratio can at most be reversed. The terraces form an outdoor terrain that extends over the whole surface of the city and can be used for sports, as landing pads for planes and helicopters, and for vegetation. They will be accessible everywhere by stairways and elevators. The different levels will be divided into neighbouring and communicating spaces, climate-controlled, which will make it possible to create an infinite variety of environments, facilitating the casual movement of the inhabitants and their frequent encounters. The environments will be regularly and consciously changed, with the help of all technological means, by teams by specialised creators, who will thus be professional situationists.

A study in depth of the means of creating environments (ambiances) and their psychological influence is one of the tasks we are presently undertaking. Studies involving the technical achievement of supporting structures and their aesthetics are the specific task of artist-architects and engineers. The contribution of the latter, above all, is an urgent necessity if we are to make progress in the preparatory work we are undertaking.

If the project we have just set forth in a few broad outlines risks being considered a fanciful dream, we insist on the fact that it is feasible from the technical standpoint, desirable from the human standpoint, and that from the social standpoint it will be indispensable. The growing dissatisfaction that grips all of humanity will reach a point where we will all be driven to carry out projects for which we possess the means, and that will contribute to the realisation of a richer and more rewarding life.