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Straits Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Places Of The Heart: Architect Rene Tan revels in the ups and downs of Ann Siang Hill
Architect Rene Tan is the director and co-founder of award-winning firm RT+Q Architects. ST PHOTO: JASON QUAH Places Of The Heart: Architect Rene Tan revels in the ups and downs of Ann Siang Hill Who: Architect Rene Tan, 61, is the director of home-grown multi-award-winning architectural firm RT+Q Architects, which he co-founded with fellow architect T.K. Quek in 2003. The firm picked up the Urban Redevelopment Authority's Architectural Heritage Award in 2011 for its restoration of a 1913 bungalow. In 2016, it bagged other design accolades such as the President's Design Award in Singapore and the Chicago Athenaeum award. The practice's two-decade body of work was documented in Rethinking The Tropical House (2023) by Thames & Hudson, a London-based publisher of coffee-table tomes. Mr Tan is also festival director of Singapore Archifest 2025, organised by the Singapore Institute of Architects, from June 25 to July 25. He will be championing the theme, Don't (Just) Think Like An Architect! The 'accidental architect', who initially wanted to be a pianist, decided to study music and architecture at Yale College in the US. He later obtained a master's in architecture at Princeton University. He is married to Ms Chuah Woei Woei, who works in banking, and they have a 21-year-old daughter, Lara, who is studying music and government at Harvard University. 'My 'place of the heart' in Singapore is a story of ironies, running through busy Club Street to the quieter, undulating terrain around Ann Siang Hill. There is this delightful sense of finding the right things in the wrong places. For instance, just when you expect a stretch of shophouses, you stumble upon a hidden pocket of greenery. When you think the road will go higher, it unexpectedly dips. It is in this cacophony of contradictions that I find endless inspiration. The enclave also reaffirms my personal design approach that, sometimes, the best way to envision architecture is to stop thinking like an architect. Because only by letting go of rigid expectations can we open ourselves to new, creative possibilities. As both an architect and teacher, I have always believed that architecture begins with intuition. It is shaped by the mind, but must ultimately resonate in the heart. Club Street embodies this journey perfectly. It is a space that transcends logic and reason, echoing what the late American architect Robert Venturi called ' complexity and contradiction in architecture'. There is a vibrant, almost 'messy vitality' here that reminds me of Rome's eternal spirit. Although my RT+Q Architects Chinatown office is right in the heart of the 'hood at 32 Mosque Street, I still find myself drawn to the area, which offers a rare form of urban escape. Wandering aimlessly through the back alleys of Club Street is more than just a break. It is a cathartic ritual that helps me shake off the pressures of the architecture profession, such as deadlines, client meetings and press briefings. I am usually in Club Street for lunch or a work meeting, and one of the hot spots is Italian restaurant L'Antica Pizzeria Da Michele at No. 8 , which is a short stroll from our office. It is a branch of a renowned brand founded more than 150 years ago in Naples, and where I often gather with colleagues for lively lunches. Outside of work, my wife and I love coming here after hours to unwind with friends over plates of authentic southern Italian cuisine. There is something invigorating about the noisy banter and raw energy of the place. It feeds both the appetite and the soul, making every visit a little celebration in the heart of the city. Mr Rene Tan describes himself as an "accidental architect" because he initially wanted to be a pianist. ST PHOTO: JASON QUAH I love stumbling upon the unexpected in Club Street, such as a grand mansion where you would expect rows of shophouses. Or a linear pocket park tucked away from the bustle that wordlessly beckons. While on the surface, Club Street seems decidedly built-up, its hill-town vibe and sprawling, undulating streets create a natural setting tucked within the city. It is one of the few places in Singapore where you can experience this kind of hilly, layered urban landscape. Over at Ann Siang Hill, the urban pastiche offers a different visual respite from the city's relentless pace. I love how its picturesque streets and secret back lanes showcase the best of Singapore – a harmonious blend of old and new, high and low, history and modernity. The juxtaposition of shophouses and skyscrapers, the interplay of heat and shelter, all come together in a vibrant confluence that is both energising and liberating. Ann Siang is not just a park filled with greenery, but also a place where I can immerse myself, reflect and recharge. It is where I go to 'escape' architecture, although the enclave is a rich showcase of it. This exemplifies the little ironies that are woven into the pedestrian experience of the area. Club Street and Ann Siang Hill are a constant draw because every visit reveals a new facet. Its ever-changing character seems to mirror the spirit of the city itself. ' Designer and lifestyle journalist Chantal Sajan writes on design and architecture. Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
Maroc
18-06-2025
- Business
- Maroc
China: Morocco Participates at 31st Beijing International Book Fair
The 31st edition of the Beijing International Book Fair opened on Wednesday in Beijing under the theme "Promoting the Heritage and Development of Civilizations, Encouraging Exchanges and Mutual Learning for Win-Win Cooperation." This edition brings together 1,700 publishers, authors, and cultural institutions from 80 countries, including Morocco, which is taking part through a stand initiated by the Embassy of the Kingdom in China, featuring publications from two Moroccan publishing houses. The event, running until Sunday, showcases around 220,000 Chinese and foreign books across an exhibition space of 60,000 square meters, according to the organizers. Participants are presenting their publications as part of a diverse program including forums, book launches, signing sessions, and meetings with authors. Several exhibitions are featured in this edition, notably one dedicated to British artist David Hockney in collaboration with the publishing house Thames & Hudson, a presentation of the archives of Princeton University (USA), and an exhibition commemorating the 90th anniversary of Penguin Books in partnership with the British publisher. MAP:18 June 2025
The Guardian
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley review – how immigrants reshaped postwar Britain
In the early 1940s, the publisher Collins launched a series of books called Britain in Pictures – 'bright, slim volumes', as Owen Hatherley calls them, on such quintessential national subjects as cricket, inns, 'English clocks' and 'British explorers', written by the likes of John Betjeman, Edith Sitwell and George Orwell. It's hard to imagine a more patriotic project ('a paroxysm of island backslapping', Hatherley says) except that, 'at every level except for the texts', this was 'an entirely central European endeavour'. Its mostly female staff of designers, editors, typographers and publishers was made up of recent refugees from countries that had succumbed to fascism, many of whom had to be released from internment on the Isle of Man in order to work on the books. Adprint, the company that produced and packaged Britain in Pictures, was the creation of the Viennese-born publishers Wolfgang Foges and Walter Neurath. The latter, with his wife Eva, would go on to found Thames & Hudson. This is one of many examples described in The Alienation Effect where Britain's cultural furniture was rearranged and redesigned by women and men, often under-credited and under-recognised, who had fled here in the 1930s and 40s. Some, like migrants today, landed on the coast of Kent in flimsy craft. Between them they shaped film, art, architecture, planning, publishing, broadcasting, children's literature and photography. We owe to this diaspora (in whole or in part) the Royal Festival Hall, Penguin Books and The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Hatherley also highlights less famous and metropolitan glories such as the murals in Newport civic centre – the 'Sistine Chapel of municipal socialism' – created by the Frankfurt-born Hans Feibusch and his artistic partner Phyllis Bray. Most (not all) were from the political left and the artistic avant garde, and Hatherley's aim is both to explore their trajectories and to honour and mourn the postwar attempts at building a more fair and enlightened society in which they played a significant part. There is also a simple point, relevant to the present, about the contribution that feared and despised migrants can make to their host country. New arrivals – fleeing persecution because they were Jewish, or on account of their politics, or both – reacted in various ways. Many, while grateful for their refuge, were dismayed by the bad weather, overcooked food, cultural conservatism and lifeless streets of 1930s Britain, the 'identical little houses built quickly out of dirt', as one put it. Nor was their welcome warm. Graham Greene attacked, in the Spectator, the numbers of migrants in the film industry. The Daily Mail railed against the 'outrage' of how 'stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country'. A brigadier from Eastbourne suggested they be forced to wear identifying armbands. Calls to lock up 'dangerous aliens' led to their internment in sometimes atrocious conditions. Some, like the architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, responded by moving on quite quickly to the greater opportunities of the United States. Others embraced British culture and became its eloquent champions: the Dresden academic Nikolaus Pevsner, for example, would lovingly catalogue architectural treasures in his county-by-county Buildings of England series and write a book celebrating The Englishness of English Art. The cinematographer Walter Lassally, who came on the Kindertransport, would eventually move from gritty portrayals of working-class life such as A Taste of Honey to filming the imperial-age nostalgia of Merchant Ivory films in the 1980s. Some tried to keep alive their social and artistic radicalism and re-grow it on sometimes unpromising British soil. It is these types that Hatherley likes best. The artist Naum Gabo is, he says, 'the sort of modernist I find easiest to like – futuristic, unsentimental, abstract, pure, uncompromised, a real link from the October revolution and Weimar Berlin to London (and St Ives)'. He also admires the photographer Edith Tudor-Hart, born Suschitzky, who combined her documentation of Welsh coalmines and London slums with work for the communist-aligned National Unemployed Workers' Movement and (it is believed) the KGB's forerunner the NKVD. He makes space to write about Bertolt Brecht, even though the Marxist playwright never settled in Britain, and borrows from him the book's title. Perhaps the most emblematic of these European-made British icons was Picture Post, a magazine that the Hungarian leftwing journalist Stefan Lorant, previously imprisoned by the Gestapo, helped to found. Here, powerful photographs by the likes of the Hamburg-born Bill Brandt documented contrasts of privilege and poverty, or else portrayed ordinary people living their lives. They shot Eton, Oxford, northern back streets, village fetes, seaside frolics and funfairs, and helped create a climate of opinion that contributed to Labour's landslide election victory in 1945. Now they are familiar images of the good old days with which Nigel Farage might feel comfortable. Possibly you already had some knowledge of the works of these migrants, but The Alienation Effect reveals their sheer breadth and depth. Hatherley, whose background is in writing about architecture, moves with confidence through the fields of film, typography and art. The book is thick with information, sometimes resembling the gazetteers or guides he has previously written. It's an occasionally chewy read, but it's more often acute, informative, passionate and witty, a sometimes moving tribute to achievement in the face of diversity, and an essential antidote to crude theories of national identity. The Alienation Effect by Owen Hatherley is published by Allen Lane (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
