New directions for the dense city: Moshe Safdie in Singapore
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1965, Singapore declared its independence and initiated a process of modernisation aiming to erase any evidence of its colonial past. Thedevelopmentalist orientation of Singapore, as Rem Koolhaas defined it, together with the formula “displace, destroy, replace,” became the theoretical instruments used to implement the urban vision for the future city. Singapore has thus become the contemporary urban laboratory of the Asia Pacific Region and due to its limited area for construction, turned into an experimental epicentre in the field of dense dwelling. A protagonist of this experimentation has been the Israeli/Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, designer of the Integrated resort casino Marina Bay Sands (2010), an exemplary feature of Singapore’s drive for development. This paper focuses on Safdie’s theoretical work, casting light on the ideological shift from his early modern residential project Habitat‘67, built during the Expo in Montreal (Canada) in 1967, to the contemporary residential complex Sky Habitat, completed in 2015 in Singapore. While Habitat’67 represented the manifesto of Safdie’s social utopia, envisaging itself as a prototypical residential component of the future city, Sky Habitat is a private gated community, which targets an upper-class market. And yet, Safdie’s two projects, distant in time and social ideals, display comparable strategies, as the use of similar architectural solutions and the permanence of urban modern utopian principles. These strategies underpin two other projects designed recently by Safdie in China: the Golden Dream Bay in Qinhuangdao (2016) and Chongqing Chaotianmen (design phase), which propose further elaboration of Sky Habitat’s urban principles. This paper will investigate how utopian urban strategies elaborated during the Modern period and advanced and tested in the 1960s and 1970s, have become material of experimentation for new forms of living in the congested 21st century city, evolving the concept of urban density in “the city that could be”.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".