ANXIETY'S BALM : AN UNINTENDED MANIFESTO FOR HAW PAR VILLA

Abstract

In over 70 years of its history, Singapore’s Haw Par Villa has been accumulating designs by planners, architects and artisans, commissioned by both private and state clients. They have created an assortment of architectural mutants both realised and imagined. The designs reveal surprising coherence in the subversion and reprocessing of ‘high’ culture for the manufacture of fantastic mass culture. This dissertation investigates the phenomena by studying the forms of Haw Par Villa via semiology, with reference to the personalities and the changing social, political and economic circumstances that were involved in its architecture. It is proposed that the exuberant design efforts in the world of Haw Par Villa reveal latent and evolving anxieties of cultural identity in its diasporic creators and audience. With reference to Rem Koolhaas’ concept of a retroactive manifesto in Delirious New York, a ‘manifesto’ of Haw Par Villa was never intentional. Instead various political agenda too radical to be openly contemplated were coded through declarations of philanthropy, goodwill and tourism. The semiological approach reveals coherence in the way Haw Par Villa appears as a factory for man-made cultural experiences. These collective experiences act as balm to soothe insecurities of identity, reinforcing the political dominance of its creators.