Come Here, Sit

The rapidly ageing population of Singapore and cultural reliance on nuclear families to support elders presents a crisis of a lack of purpose and community, with many isolated elders feeling that they are ‘waiting to die’. Our current systems view the elderly primarily as recipients of help, creating a care system that is a symptomatic response that is socially unsustainable. There is therefore a need for agency and purpose to be rehabilitated in our elders, allowing them to contribute meaningfully and build their own communities independently to support them in their later years.

The dining table is the place where ideas of family are formed and reformed, and can be observed to determine the social health of a family. Hawker centres – which are open food courts with many affordable cooked food stores - by both urban design and organic cultural growth are the dining tables of the Singaporean neighbourhood, and are also a common place where the elderly spend their time. A space syntax observation study was conducted over several weeks at Redhill Food Centre, revealing a deeper relationship between the elderly and the space of the hawker centre. Whether it is the elderly who sits down for a quick meal, uses the place as a living room, gathering with their family and reading their newspapers throughout the day or those who seem to silently linger in the passing crowds, the chair was observed as a common unit of power unwittingly wielded to transform the otherwise rigid, regimented space of the hawker centre. Thus, in a context where elderly often are told to reduce their agency in lieu of their waning health, the project understands the chair as a socially specific object through which power can be given to them. Thus the project builds a framework of structural, social and emotional power surrounding the chair as an object by making it connectable, painted by the community, and to have adaptable internal space. Together with careful insertions of a Storytelling Space where the many painted chairs can be stored to become a community tapestry and Firestarter Spaces where the chairs can be freely arranged, the chair becomes the common language through which the elderly can express themselves in the space of the hawker centre more fully, communicate and engage with the community more personally, and be anchored to a stronger community identity.