Productive Nostalgia

The thesis explores productive nostalgia as a developmental approach, balancing contemporary relevance with historical authenticity beyond pastiche. Through an assemblage of drawings, photographs, and texts, it reconstructs the ephemeral presence of Singapore’s near-erased Thieves Market. Investigating its cycles of displacement and re-emergence, the research employs collage and mapping as a design tool, creating a layered reading of the lost market. This approach challenges conventional site analysis, proposing architectural representation as both a documentation and a generative tool.

Tracing the Infrastructural Voids Through historical and architectural ethnographic studies, the process has revealed that between the repeated disappearance and re-emergence of the Sungei Road Thieves Market (second-hand goods market), a network of infrastructure and programs contributed to its constant revival. To renew the ecology of the market, a combination of sites is derived from existing ecological remnants of the former market and overlayed with present infrastructural voids to renew the ecology of the market on an urban scale. The renewed network consists of a distributed set of sanitary, water, storage, rain refuge infrastructures, and resource supply places such as the adaptive reuse of the former Stamford primary school as the donation drive by the Salvation Army. Extending Invitation The network of infrastructures taps on the existing transportation and gathering nodes to draw the crowds towards the market, guiding crowds from the adjacent nodes towards the canal where the main market stretch is located. Borrowing Banality Learning from the former Sungei Road Thieves Market vendors, the design of infrastructures adopts the same opportunistic attitude; ‘stealing’ (sharing) or borrowing the underused and everyday objects in the city. Doubling Function The infrastructures adopt an alternative form of planning in which spaces serve dual functions at different times of the day and even remain ‘incognito’ when unused. The graphical representation of the drawings drew inspiration from the format of a forensic evidence board, reminding readers of the investigative techniques that formulated the thesis.