Over the past week, I completed my first phase of onsite sketches. It was tiring, to say the least – sitting for long hours under the blistering Singapore sun, being occasionally bitten by mosquitos and getting slightly anxious from the curious stares of passersby. Yet my eyes remained glued to my sketchbook, pencils and charcoals in hand on my darkened fingers as I blinked away the beads of sweat that escaped the hold of my eyebrows.
Before visiting these sites, I felt a sense of intimidation not only from the high task of capturing an invisible historical landscape but also from the sheer monumentality of some of the sites. As much as the first impression exercises serve to help pinpoint architectural features of interest, nothing prepares you for the physical encounter of such buildings. Sitting at the foot of the Ministry of National Development (MND) building, I felt my short stature of 151 centimetres at so much greater an immediacy than my daily struggle to reach the overhead railings on the bus.
Nevertheless, the sheer largeness of the architectural sites allowed for continual exploration of the buildings – there is always something left to be seen. I sat on the steps of the MND building, realising the geometrical repetition of its windows and tiles lined perfectly with the square patterned sidewalk when drawing the building’s facade. The intersecting lines with each ninety-degree angle seemed to echo the clean appearance of the ministry’s logo.
Yishun Stadium was no easier at rendering – the pillarless stadium held up by cantilevers had an astounding appearance that was rather confounding to the mind. I struggled to understand the physics behind its lifted appearance, but thankfully Professor Barton’s introduction to tension and compression in architecture coupled with my drawing companion’s onsite explanation of the cantilever structure led me to better understand the stadium’s mechanics. With that I took to sketching the cantilevers from all angles, capturing tension through its pull from the back of the roof and compression through the beams that pushed the roof up.
At Mandai Crematorium, I was struck by the quiet but powerful presence of the building, its serene environment whispering a few songs as the caskets drove through its funeral halls, friend and family of the bereaved walking up and down the slopes of winding paths as they make their way to a final farewell. Perhaps this conclusive end of the sequential funerary rites was echoed through the seriality of the building’s appearance, the four roofs lining one another in a horizontal repetition. I found myself drawing the diagonal roofs in serrated succession, their geometric properties echoed by the rectangular body of the building’s structure.
Bishan was an adventure attempting to draw, having to ascend to the highest building I could find in the vicinity to acquire a bird’s eye view of the space. I felt entirely overwhelmed by the scale of the landscape that was before my eyes – how was I supposed to render all the buildings before me? As I drew my way through the space, I came to realise the complexities surrounding the planning of space, and how difficult it is trying to determine how to divide an area of land to optimise the connections of different spaces and functions to one another. I started to turn my attention to the shapes of land within the neighbourhood of Bishan, reducing the area to the numerous plots of land and the direction of the flow of traffic. I attempted to find ways to draw such a wondrous landscape at a more feasible scale within my few hours in the space, as I perched my sketchbook against the ledge of the balcony at the high-rise building, my drawing sessions sometimes interrupted by the barking of the dog living on the 44th floor.
Sketching the swimming pools at Bukit Merah Swimming Complex and Katong Swimming Complex was a slight struggle – I found myself frustrated by being unable to render the ebb and flow of the pools, but this will soon be resolved when entering the next stage of painting.
The drawing phase was an insightful warm-up in on-site sketching; the medium of pencil allowed me to make quick sketches of the space, capturing the direction of my eyes as they took in the sites. Professor Barton’s advice of transiting to using the pen to draw helped me to commit to my strokes, allowing me to have more confidence as I drew out the shapes of the buildings. These sketching sessions allowed me to familiarise myself with the sites by identifying features to draw with closer attention while taking a survey of the space from a bigger picture lens. The studies from these visits were the stepping stone to the next phase, where I will transition to painting the sites in watercolour.