ICONICITY: SINGAPORE & ITS INESSENTIAL DEMOLITIONS

Abstract

After the success of the ‘Bilbao effect’ in 1997, city authorities and developers have started to prioritise what Leslie Sklair (2010) terms iconicity, defined by buildings with a “unique selling point” expressed through their façades, in order to re-image cities. This changes the evaluation of buildings, causing a disruption in the conventional building hierarchy once dominated by monuments. Demolition, as an outcome solely based on low iconic valuation, is problematic as 1) the ambiguity of iconicity (Jencks, 2006) creates highly subjective assessments of the iconic value of a building, generating disputes amongst different parties, and 2) iconic buildings inevitably (or so we claim now) fail to achieve their primary function of sustaining interest, due to the perpetual emergence of newer, and more attractive iconic buildings, creating a vicious cycle. The paper hypothesizes that buildings that are not (or no longer) deemed as iconic by influential parties, such as the state and its planning authorities, will face demolition despite high practical and monumental valuation, and disagreement from users. The hypothesis shall be tested through the case study of the Former National Stadium, a national icon familiar to Singaporeans which was demolished in 2011, to be replaced by the grandiose Singapore Sports Hub in 2014. The study shall be conducted using a proposed framework for evaluation of the three main values of a building – practical use, iconic value, monumental status. The framework is deduced from literature on the negative effects of iconic architecture (Jones, 2011) and it shall enable the planning authorities to decide with a more comprehensive list of considerations and make transparent the decision-making process for demolition.