THE BROWN CO-OP: NEGOTIATING THE ABSENCE PRESENCE OF BUKIT BROWN

Abstract

The thesis is about a duality, in which economic progress is “haunted” by the past it displaced. It investigates through architecture the phenom- ena of “haunting,” the activation of memory and formation of identity. Informing this investiga- tion are Freud’s psychoanalytic theories on the uncanny, the repressed, the pleasure principle; Anthony Vidler’s anthology on the architectural uncanny. In 2011, the state announced plans to redevelop the cemetery into a residential estate — a deci- sion that is contested by civil society groups, who see the site as one rich in biodiversity and histories of Singapore’s pre-independent nation builders. Anchored to the development of Bukit Brown Cemetery, the thesis seeks to recast this contestation beyond the polemics of progress and conservation, revealing that it also express- es an existential anxiety over national identity and individual’s connection to the past. Premised on the inevitable ‘need to develop,’ the thesis is positioned in a future where the cemetery ground has been razed, exhumed, and that its ancestral spirits has been ‘exorcised’ — paving a new land ready for development. Lo- cated at the edge of a park, this thesis seeks to reconnect the otherwise tabula rasa estate with memories of Bukit Brown by teasing out re- sidual traces of its cultural significance through a community-managed cooperation that profits from the earth from Bukit Brown itself. The sepulchral ground of Bukit Brown — the pregnant earth, which housed the bodies of Sin- gapore’s unsung pioneers, is in itself a kind of monument. Yet, for every housing development that takes place on Bukit Brown, quantities of earth have to be excavated and displaced to a dumpsite. The Brown Coop, however, proposes to take back the displaced earth so as to ex- tract from it: clay, sand and granite rocks. These raw materials will be used to produce mortar, bricks and pottery for the physical development of the coop. A dragon kiln and an industrial will sit within this site breathing new forms to the earth. Once every four months, a festival will be held to awaken the dragon kiln where timber is burned to stoke the furnace and people come together. Like Bukit Brown Cemetery where ground car- ries important Feng Shui values, notions of ground is renegotiated and new relationships are borne at the Brown Coop. The Brown Coop is a celebration of ground as source/origins with clay as the heart of the development, clay as a conduit of memory. The project is a critique of Singapore’s incessant need to develop, erasing the memory housed within the cemetery, yet as Freud pointed out, memory is never truly erased, merely sup- pressed, and like the memory of a place, trac- es of the suppressed can be teased out—what ought to have remained hidden could come to light.