Dependencia con la potencia ´ optica P 0

In 1987, the Singapore Tourism Promotion Board invited architectural firms to study ways in which the Convent buildings could be restored.6 The Board suggested that ideas should respect the architecture and former use of the buildings; the buildings could provide quality entertainment such as music and dance performances for audiences of ‗refined taste‘; the upper floors of buildings could be leased to the performing arts for day-time operations; and the ground floor and open spaces could be operated commercially for quality dining and entertainment. Already we see here the beginnings of ideas of ‗refined taste‘ and ‗quality dining‘ that will be later expressed in the tender document. Significantly, the study excluded the 1950s secondary school buildings. These were scheduled for demolition so that a MRT Operations Control Centre could be built in their place – the buildings were directly above the intersection of the North-South MRT line and the future East-West line.7 It remains significant, however, that it was the 1950s buildings that were demolished, rather than the early colonial buildings. The much later controversy over the demolition in 2004 of the 1960 National Library building suggests that colonial buildings were generally privileged over the post-colonial, another indication of Singapore‘s embrace of its colonial past.

Forty-eight firms had responded to the STPB study, but it was not until May 1990 that an announcement was made about how the government planned to proceed.8 The remaining site – that not used by the MRT – would be put out to tender to the commercial sector. Up until then, it had been understood that the government would be responsible for restoration of the site, so the announcement of the commercial tender caused further unease among former

4

http://www.lta.gov.sg/content/ltaweb/en/about-lta/our-history/1980s.html, accessed 5 March 2014.

5 _{Lily Kong, Low Soon Ai, and Jacqueline Yip, Convent Chronicles: History of a Pioneer Mission School for}

Girls in Singapore (Singapore: Armour Publishing, 1994), 173.

6 _{Lily Kong, Conserving the Past, Creating the Future: Urban Heritage in Singapore (Singapore: Urban}

Redevelopment Authority, 2011), 200-201.

7

Kong, Conserving the Past, Creating the Future, 201.

151 students and others emotionally attached to the Convent site. They were concerned that the tender announcement would mean that profit-making would be put ahead of conservation concerns. The Old Girls‘ Association, by then established for seven years, collected 16,000 signatures on a petition presented to the Minister for Social Development, urging that plans for the chapel be in keeping with its original use.9

Geographer and Old Girl, Lily Kong, has noted that the sense of loss and displacement for those who had attended the Convent schools was heightened by the more general changes that had already taken place around the Convent site: three of the four sides of the site were surrounded by newish modern buildings, and Victoria Street itself had become a two-way street. Kong was nostalgic for the ‗old haunts that Town Convent students were used to‘ – the bookshops nearby, the coconut drink stall, the coffee shop and ice-cream and snack-bar – but they had gone, leaving ‗a Town Convent standing forlornly in unfamiliar territory, empty of students and nuns‘.10 _{This reminds us that a building stands in a spatial context, and that the}

attachment to place is more complex than just to a specific building; it is to a building in a particular context, some of which is temporal, and the surroundings to the building may be just as significant to the importance of the place.

Despite such opposition to the plan, the URA‘s position was that the government could not finance all restoration projects in Singapore, particularly if there was no identified government use for the buildings. But involving the private sector would make such projects economically viable.11 As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, the push to develop the ‗modern‘ city meant that there was a continuous tension between heritage conservation and economic development, which was uneasily reconciled by a focus on the maximisation of financial returns. Architect William Lim, a participant at a public forum in 2000, recalled that when the issue of the Convent‘s redevelopment was first announced, a joint approach was made to government by the ‗Old Girls‘, the Singapore Heritage Society and the La Salle Fine Arts College to relocate the music school to the Convent site with money raised by a public campaign.12 He recounted that the government said the group could submit a tender and ‗see

9 _{Kong, Low & Yip, Convent Chronicles, 175.}

10 _{Kong, Conserving the Past, Creating the Future, 203.} 11 _{Kong, Low & Yip, Convent Chronicles, 175-176.} 12

Kwok Kian Woon, Ho Weng Hin, and Tan Kar Lin, Between Forgetting and Remembering: Memories and the National Library (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 2000), 133-34.

152 if you could get the highest bid‘. Mr Lim concluded: ‗So I think we really got to understand the force of the idea, of what really mattered.‘ In other words, proposals from community groups had to compete in the commercial marketplace.

The government was exhibiting its colonial legacy of prioritising economic development and, in the tender process that followed, an ordered bureaucracy of rules and decision-making. Anthropologist Matthew Hull has examined the colonial legacy of bureaucracy in Pakistan in what he called the ‗government of paper‘13 _{He argued that there was a carry-over of}

personnel and ethos after independence, and that although documents and procedures may have changed over time, many bureaucratic practices from the colonial period remained.14 It is not reasonable to make a direct comparison between the sometimes antiquated practices of Pakistan and those of Singapore – yet Singapore also was following, albeit in a different way, bureaucratic processes that developed out of the British colonial tradition. Indeed, the colonial government in Singapore used a tender process to sell land, as in its mid-1950s attempt to sell land along the newly constructed Shenton Way.15 The advertising of a tender is now considered best practice in business in the West, allowing a degree of bureaucratic procedure and transparency. In this latter aspect, it fits with the Singapore government‘s stated strategy of attracting international corporations by being seen as open and free of corruption.16 It opted for a tender process, whereby businesses or organisations could submit a written bid detailing their plans for the use of the CHIJ site and the amount of money they would pay for the site, with a committee determining the successful bid.

The tender was launched by the URA in May 1990 and closed on 8 November 1990. The proposed development was specified as being ‗for the preservation/conservation and adaptive reuse of existing buildings as well as new developments‘. In response to public concerns about commercialisation, the URA announced that it had introduced several safeguards: there would be no high-rise construction; the permissable gross floor areas above and below ground were specified; and the chapel was to be used only for cultural, religious or other

13

Matthew Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley, Calif. & London: University of California Press, 2012).

14 _{Hull, Government of Paper, 6.}

15 _{Ole Johan Dale, Urban Planning in Singapore: The Transformation of a City (New York: Oxford University}

Press, 1999), 143.

16

Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story 1965 – 2000 (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), see Chapter 12, ―Keeping the Government Clean‖.

153 ‗sensitive‘ purposes, with the remaining buildings used for cultural, arts and recreational activities, including restaurants and shops.17 The criteria for selection of the winning tender would, in addition to price and other technical compliance measures, be based on ‗planning and architectural merit‘. This included ‗appropriate and sensitive restoration of the existing buildings‘, with landscape design and the use of the open quadrangle enhancing the character of the buildings. Proposed uses of the chapel and other buildings ‗should enhance the image of the Civic District‘.

Significantly, the developer had the option of including the chapel in the tender or excluding it. Perhaps this option was given because it was considered that the chapel might not be commercially viable or might not fit with a developer‘s vision of potential use. There were also options with the dormitory: the tenderer could retain it and ‗build a new extension abutting it‘, or alternatively could demolish it and rebuild it ‗in character with its original design incorporating a new extension‘. The latter option – demolish and rebuild – is reminiscent of the ‗demolish it to save it‘ approach to heritage conservation, where a replica stands in place of the authentic – why have the original if a replica is so much better? In contrast, the chapel and Caldwell House were declared to be National Monuments on 26 October 1990.18 Whether intentional or not, as well as protecting the buildings, this helped to raise the status of the site as a site of colonial and national importance and thus best suited to ‗sensitive‘ and ‗refined‘ uses. Restoration of the site was expected to cost about Singapore $30 million and it was ‗expected that the successful bidder would complete the project in five years or less.19 In a city in ‗perpetual transformation‘, the length of time allowed suggests that it was considered a time-consuming and difficult conservation project.