DEATH BY VERTICALITY : EXAMINING VERTICALITY AS A SOURCE OF DEATH OF THE CITY

Abstract

Death refers to the permanent cessation of all vital functions – the end of life.1 While cities thrive with abundance of energy through complex systems of organization leading to the creation of civilizations, the death of the city signifies the end of the vitality that exists through the proliferation of interactions between people and place. With the injection of architects and planners, they feed the city with ‘medical prescriptions’ through urban design and architecture to prevent death of the city, with the likes Corbusier’s Radiant City, which attempted to rationalize and separate zones of activities in the city, as a resolution to congestion, pollution and the end of the city caused by the Industrial Revolution. Traditionally cities have existed horizontally, with the combination of walkable mixed use development, which allow the inculcation of social interaction, leading to the agglomeration of relationships that would enable the organization of trade, knowledge and culture within the city. The concept of verticality in the city was enabled through the means of technology producing elevators and aviation. This has given architectural typologies of commercial towers, high rise residential, and shopping multiplexes. The expansion of cities has been moving from horizontal to vertical plane. With the means of verticality through technology, cities are intensified and multiplied both skywards and earthwards. Verticality has been embraced as the emblem of urbanization, process, efficiency and sanitation. As Singapore has evolved from a horizontal city (pre-independence), to a vertical city as a national ideology, the paper hypothesize that the present conditions of verticality of space within Singapore may be pointing towards the slow and eventual death of the city. This dissertation is divided into three sections in which probes into the horizontal planning of the ‘Fabric City’, the evolution of horizontal to transformation of the vertical ‘City of Objects’ of Singapore, and various phenomenon of verticality within Singapore, in order to understand these conditions as symptoms of death and degeneration of the city.