Any idea of nation is not, and should not be detached from the lives of its inhabitants. Your stories are therefore crucial forms of inquiry which aid the understanding of ‘Singapore’. We invite you to discover and share.
My most enduring memory of KAP was the day my family went to have supper at KAP McDonald’s. (Those were the days when the kids’ play area was still on the second storey, and I was always intrigued by the little train that went round on tracks hung near the ceiling…)
In those weeks, I discovered Singapore, I discovered architecture, but most importantly I discovered the need for ambition. It is a studio and review that I will never forget.
Construction of the new Capitol Singapore project in 2012, with a view of Capitol Theatre.
We 'britbrats' all seemed to visit there and many of us have very similar photos.
On 19th October 2010, my kids gave me a surprise present for my birthday… A book written by writer director Amir Muhammad entitled ‘120 Malay Movies'. The book is a romp through the Malay films that was made in Singapore and Malaysia. It was a good and informative book regarding 120 Malay movies that was made during P Ramlee heydays which includes all the movies made by prominent studios of Shaw Brothers' Malay Film Productions, Cathay Keris and Merdeka Studio from 1948 to 1972.
I was so sad to hear that instead of renovating KAP, it’s going to be demolished. Slowly but surely Singapore u are going to lose your charm. You have disappointed us esp those who have grown up visiting these places with our parents. And one day we would love to tell our kids "look, this was my playground" what we have now are just photos and memories.
King Albert Park remains to be my favourite go-to place when I lived in Bukit Timah during my high school years as an expat in Singapore. It was an extremely convenient place to grab McDonald’s after school and soccer games; in addition Cold Storage was bigger and had more various products than other stores.
Pic from 2009. I took this for a laugh, then recently I heard the building is going to be torn down.
Singapore Youth Festival Art & Crafts Exhibition 2004: Wings To Soar, held at the Singapore Conference Hall.
Then Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Mrs Lee attending the ground-breaking ceremony of interim upgrading programme at Tanjong Pagar Plaza
It was Halloween, so some friends and I decided to play hide-and-seek at Turf City (now The Grandstand). We thought this would be fun and we weren’t wrong.
I remember reading somewhere on one of the URA planning documentations (somewhere in the bowels of the NUS Central Library) that the original location for this station was to be at Changi Airport. There were two alignments that were studied, one above ground and one underground. The above ground alignment would have culminated in the Foster designed station, serving as an architectural icon at the center of the airport complex. However, it was decided that the vista of the Changi control tower was too iconic to be blocked by this new MRT station, and hence the underground alignment was chosen. The Foster design was also too good to be discarded, and hence it was moved to the Expo station instead.
The design of the Peninsula Plaza has always struck me as very reminiscent of the original twin towers WTC complex in New York City designed by Minuro Yamasaki, starting with the branching tridents on the facade of the base podium, to the highly articulated vertical elements on the outer facade of the tower, and the extremely narrow slit windows on the towers, the 45 degree cuts at each corner of the tower, and the accented top of the tower that is distinguished from the shaft of the tower.
The design for this complex reminded me a lot of Paul Rudolph's design for the LoMex (Lower Manhattan Expressway) that was never materialized (another one of those Robert Moses highway projects that got thwarted by Jane Jacobs). Rudolph proposed a series of sloping slabs, much like that of Golden Mile Complex, straddling an expressway that would cut through the fabric of Lower Manhattan. I wouldn't be surprised that DP architects were very influenced by these designs, given that some of the founders were studying architecture in the states in the 50's when these designs are proposed.