Singapore - The Unfeasible Order of Things
2021-ongoing
"One cannot make architecture without studying the conditions of life in the city"
Architecture of the City, Aldo Rossi.
"No se sabe apenas nada de él, salvo que ya ha salido pero todavía no ha llegado, que antes o después de su tránsito era o será padre de familia, ama de casa, oficinista, obrero sindicado, funcionario, amante o panadero..., pero que ahora, en tránsito, es pura potencia, un enigma que desasosiega."
El Animal Público, Manuel Delgado
"Hardly anything is known about him, except that he has already left but has not yet arrived, that before or after his transit he was or will be a father of a family, a housewife, a clerk, a unionised worker, a civil servant, a lover or a baker. .., but now, in transit, it is pure potential, a disquieting enigma."
The Public Animal, Manuel Delgado
In 2015 I photographed Jakarta, a city of thirty million people managing, mostly without assistance, the daily gap between a city that was planned and a city that actually exists. Jakartans improvise. They patch, reroute, appropriate, and reinvent because the alternative is paralysis. The gap between intention and reality there is so wide that bridging it has become a form of collective creativity.
Singapore is the other end of that spectrum. Here the plan largely works. The infrastructure functions, the institutions hold, the city does what it was designed to do with a consistency that remains genuinely remarkable. The gap between the designed city and the lived city has been closed, not completely, not permanently, but more thoroughly than almost anywhere else on earth.
Which is precisely what makes the exceptions visible.
The Unfeasible Order of Things is a project about those exceptions the small, ordinary, human moments where Singapore's design and Singapore's inhabitants fail to coincide. Not failures of governance or collapses of infrastructure, but the quieter friction that occurs when people, who are not variables, move through a city built on the assumption that they are. A shortcut that shouldn't work but does. A repair that became permanent. A person mid-transit, not yet arrived, not yet categorised, what Delgado calls pure potential, the disquieting remainder that no system fully accounts for.
Rossi argued that architecture cannot be conceived without studying how life is actually lived. The implication is that the two will never be identical, that the study is necessary precisely because life and design diverge. Singapore understands this intellectually. Its planning apparatus is sophisticated, adaptive, and continuously revised. And still the divergence persists, because the divergence is not a problem to be solved. It is evidence that the city is inhabited.
The order here is unfeasible not because the ambition is wrong but because cities are made of people rather than plans, and people remain, stubbornly, more interesting than the categories built to contain them. These photographs are taken at the point where that stubbornness shows.
