The 3 Downtown Landscape Blights

Sunday Times, today, featured 3 newly completed buildings right in the middle of our historic area. An area with many memories for us - the red-bricked-walled National Library, Cathay Cinema and the long-ago demolished row of shophouses that sold used books.

And in the middle of it, there was this long stretch of green that extended from Cathay at one end to the church at the other. It was ringed by old giant trees that spread their leafy branches over games of football in the field opposite the old SJI. This green patch in the city provided a relief from all the tall buildings sprouting around it. And it served as some kind of identity landmark with SJI, CHIJ, the church, Cathay, Museum and YMCA arranged on its fringes.

Now the green stretch is gone - uprooted and deturfed. Taken over by the new SMU campus buildings - the new structures are a mix of modernistic glass and steel but totally faceless. No character. whatsoever. Why they wanted to build a university campus comprising disjointed buildings here when there were so many sites outside the city and where they could have everyone housed under one roof. Now it is a case of several roofs.

Equally nondescript is the NAFA site at Bencoolen Street resembling some kind of warehouse buildings from the outside. A shame, in my opinion. And there was great hope pinned on the new National Library. But, now it seems that we are going to have a artifact more suited for the Mars landscape. The about 7-story structure which has a glass-walled flying saucer transfixed to its roof has no obvious form and structure, no head or tail and no clear front and back. It rises like a junk scrap-yard mass of steel and glass succeeding in dwarfing and being out-of-sync with the neighbouring less imposing shophouses.

There goes the neighbourhood, the history and our memories.