Everyone knows the feeling. It comes to you when you’re left with a fifteen-minute wedge between classes and expected to teleport to the other side of Kent Ridge. Or, when you’re still humiliatingly lost in the labyrinthine bowels of the FASS building weeks into the semester. It’s a frustrating awareness of the distance between Points A and B, and the winding route in-between that swallows up time and stamina. For all its lush foliage and shiny buildings, some design choices in NUS just feel more confounding than others. Experiencing the ins and outs of other campuses while on exchange might further shore up these feelings. In moments where all sense of direction has gone to the wolves and the weather is too hot to justify the Odyssey it takes to reach a lecture, one wonders what logic went into planning where places go in NUS. (Who condemned you to climb all these stairs and why the sadism?) Although most of these criticisms are volleyed in emotionally charged (and fatigued) moments, they are still questions worth asking inquisitively. Not because the answers reveal the shortcomings of architectural design but because they have more to say about you—the student navigating the space.
It comes as no surprise to most that campus life is largely depoliticised. What might be more surprising is how depoliticisation is built into the brick-and-mortar of the Kent Ridge campus, and is the reason behind much of our daily grievances navigating it. The notion that space influences users is by no means unheard of (a concept widely explored in many classes across a myriad of disciplines) but applying it to the very vicinity we live and study in might border on existential. Yet, this is the undertaking of Kent Ridge: An Untold Story, a book published in 2019 that follows the natural and urban history of the titular region (a source that came to me by way of a Reddit thread, to which I owe the inspiration of this article).
Within it, there are juicy nuggets of information detailing the design choices made by the University of Singapore Development Unit (USDU) tasked with constructing the Kent Ridge campus in the 1970s.
Have you ever gotten into arguments with another RC/hall-dwelling friend about who should be the one that travels to the other? The USDU might chime in to add that hostels were deliberately built at the peripheries of campus rather than in a cluster, “so that the campus could be construed, at times, as rather quiet, devoid of students and lacking buzz.” Hence, the distance between each RCs/hall and the silos that each of them seems to exist atomically in is by no means an accident. Regarding the serpentine pathways that crest and fall on the undulating landscape they were built on (anyone who has gotten lost in the FASS building can attest to it feeling like a real-life game of Snakes and Ladders), the USDU was assiduous in adhering to a linear structure across its buildings to prevent congregation. Quadrangles were a big no-no.
Just to satisfy the question of who you can blame when stuck in those moments of thwarted commute around campus, one possible scapegoat for your frustrations is the then Minister of Science and Technology, Mr. Toh Chin Chye. Mr. Toh often advised the USDU in long, dreary meetings that they “dreaded”. In a comedically confessional anecdote from the book, Mr. Toh once called the USDU a “bunch of nincompoops” for designing an open space in the Yusof Ishak House. Insults and workspace spats aside, the design of the Kent Ridge campus was founded upon real anxieties of the time. These calculated decisions were made against a sociopolitical climate of student power in Southeast Asia, where students were more than just literati with their noses stuck in books, but activists who took to the streets. At their very core, these design choices are a reflection of those that inhabit them—some food for thought to munch on to help pass the time on your next cramped shuttle bus ride. Whether we relate to it or not, our present circumstances are echoes of a bygone generation of students.
However, there is one blatant exception to the early designs of the USDU—UTown. With the sprawling UTown Green hugged by a crescent of F&B outlets perfect for congregating, this layout seems like exactly the type of plan that would send Mr. Toh into a tirade. Never before was there a central nexus on campus. In a Straits Times article dated April 2012 titled “NUS UTown revolutionises campus life”, UTown is lauded for “marrying academia with social life,” seemingly a complete reversal from decades of design strategy. Today, it is impossible to imagine UTown not being the heart of Kent Ridge, the pulsating chamber that the lifeblood of student life passes through before rejuvenating the wider compound. On one hand, this can be read as an attempt to keep up with the times as a world-class university and a commitment to improving student life. On the other hand, this concession might also clue us into the changing perceptions and dynamics of students today.
If one thing is for certain, the physical environment of our campus is not set in stone. Just as waves of student activism in the 1970s shaped its construction, contemporary currents continue to propose new opportunities and challenges. Perhaps a victim of the success of its aesthetic appeal, UTown has recently been swamped by buses of tourists, a human wave powerful enough that it has urged NUS to set up a new visitor centre. While the tourist surge presents itself in our quotidian as mostly an inconvenience, there is a historical silver lining to be seen amidst the sun visors and phone tripods: the spatial history and placemaking of our campus continue to be shaped by human agency, be it the desire to fight for change, the everyday want of unwinding with friends or the wish for bettering the future of one’s children by enrolling them in a prestigious institution. At the very least, know that it’s not (entirely) your fault for running late and getting lost around campus.