Toward a Spatial History of Emergency: Notes from Singapore

I want to trace a relationship, as yet little examined, between architecture and the condition of emergency. I’ll do so mainly from Singapore, where the nexus seems particularly compelling. It does not occur here uniquely, however, nor did it arise here originally. This essay will thus work its way back toward the city-state from distant but related places. My concerns are chiefly historical, because emergency bespeaks an event, and events are the peculiar province of history. Emergency cuts across process and design – or the design process – and shifts readily between the “natural” and the “man-made”, the political and the personal, conditions subject to description and those which approach the sublime. It suggests the possibility of deception through the manipulation of speed. In these and other senses it seems very much a keyword for the modern condition.