RE-IMAGINING SPACES IN A PANDEMIC RESPONSE : THE SCHOOL INFIRMARY AND THE STADIUM CREMATORIUM

Abstract

The thesis envisions a pandemic scenario for Singapore and proposes a systematic crisis preparedness and response plan for the population. National assessments estimate that 1.3 million people will be infected, amongst which 6,000 will die. The thesis focuses on these consequences as such: how can we deal with the burgeoning umbers of the sick, and of the dead. When the existing medical establishments and crematoria would have reached their maximum capacities, how will the surge or ‘excess’ needs be absorbed and (re)distributed?

Jurong, a typical residential estate is selected for study and shall be a model prototype to be replicated throughout Singapore. While national guidelines would dictate that schools and stadia in residential estates be temporarily shut down during the pandemic, the thesis attempts to re-appropriate these communal spaces for pandemic use. The architectural imagination is conceived from the re-reading, re-imagination and re-interpretation of these spaces where new and different set of rules and functions will take place.

The spatial, architectural, social and symbolic attributes are re-formulated when the school converts from its normative use to a pandemic infirmary that handles the sick population. Suspected and confirmed cases will be subject to ‘communal isolation’ where the open grounds of the school premises are turned into temporary quarantine and isolation camps. These open grounds invite a landscape of new architectural devices and spatial attributes that will complement and complete the other pandemic functions appropriated within the school buildings. The corollary is a landscape that would express a kind of post-humanistic condition and perhaps a biopolitical attempt to control the entire population. The event, in space and time arises a symbolic expression of ‘self-help’, social responsibility and a people’s initiative to battle the pestilence in unity.

The stadium manages the disposal of bodies of those who do not survive at the school isolation camps. The grounds open up for 15-min interval wakes and houses a temporary crematorium. A new ideology of death is perpetuated. Nationalistic intentions from the contextual and symbolic notions of the stadium dictate that only cremation is permitted across all religious and cultural backgrounds. And under pandemic circumstances, cremation is by far the most efficient and quickest way of body disposal (and virus eradication). The new intervention of a ‘glass tunnel’ of telescopic mechanism, incorporating a high-tech dolly conveyor mechanism facilitates the cremation process. Like the spatial consequences in the school, the result in the stadium is a re-imagination and manipulation of spatial and symbolic attributes such as circulation, symmetry and experience. The modern intervention and its technologies invite ambivalence as it is caught between ritual efficiency and necessity, and the people’s perception of respect for the dead through ‘mechanical’ treatment of the bodies.