Last weekend I finally had the time to explore Emerald Hill, a historic neighborhood of residential shophouses just off of Orchard Road. Although the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has not historically been known for conserving buildings, over the last decade they have made great strides to approach architectural conservation is a different manner. The shophouse typology makes up the majority of the over 6,500 conserved buildings in Singapore. Shophouses vary in form from the earliest built around 1840, to Chinese Baroque, to the later Art Deco designs of the 1960s. As a whole though shophouses are narrow small terraced houses, traditionally with businesses below and living space above. Today although the conversation guidelines about the structure of the buildings is quite strict the regulations about paint colors is surprisingly lose. This has resulted in quite a variety of exteriors from completely white, to pastels, to bold tones and I even recently saw a completely black shophouse with a finish of glitter.
Personally I love to see the variety of forms and uses that these low rise buildings take in Singapore where the rest of the urban landscape is dominated by high rise towers and sprawling malls that lack the character of shophouses. Below is a series of my photos of shophouses across Singapore.
Shophouses in Chinatown:
Photo Credits: Melissa Reese.
To see the inside of a shopehouse read this New York Times article about a renovated shophouse.
grid turns 200 years old! Hippodamus of Miletus, the ancient Greek urban planner, viewed the urban grid as a manifestation of “the rationality of civilized life.” Urban historian Edward K. Spann believes unlike no other city in the world, “was the triumph of the grid as decisive as in America’s greatest city.” How has New York City’s grid shaped your urban experience?
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A petition to save Chandigarh, Le Corbusier’s modernist city in India, from being sold off bit-by-bit “With the knowledge of—and in some cases, it is asserted, the complicity of—local ministries, furniture, light fixtures, and architectural drawings have been auctioned off in the international antiquities market. The news the city’s iconic Corbusier-designed manhole covers were fetching upward of US $20,000 at auction in Europe and the United States raised alarms in international modernist preservation and Indian heritage circles. International Herald Tribune design critic 
Kaohsiung Public Transit Push “In 2006, Kaohsiung City recorded a paltry 4.3 percent share for public transportation usage. In the years since, the Kaohsiung City government launched an ambitious plan to increase ridership in Taiwan’s second largest urban area…. Once a culture of public transportation ridership is firmly established, the government will begin to implement policies to discourage specific private transportation options.” Read more from 
