lUCAS JODOGNE

Garden/City

A Photographic Project

First proposed at the turn of the 20th century, the Garden City concept was largely associated with Ebenezer Howard‚s social ideals to ameliorate the ills of European industrial cities. Spatially, the idea translated into new urban and residential forms for utopian communities by bringing rural and urban worlds together in an envisioned synthesis of man and nature. The inscriptions of such landscapes took the form of residential homes amidst manicured vegetal settings like parks, farms, and pastures.

Half a century later, this idea was trans-planted around the world together with other developments in modernist architecture and planning, notably in rapidly developing and urbanizing cities after World War II. The tenets of logical, rationalized built forms were now intertwined with selective aspects of local vegetation in climatic zones and cultures foreign to the West.
Singapore, an island-city-state lying just one degree north of the Equator, accepted such a challenge of transforming a colonial enterprise city to a new independent state with industrialization and modernization, and with the creation of its own form of the Garden City and earning the accolades of being clean and green.

The intersections, conflicts and disjuncture between the „Garden” and the „City” in equatorial Singapore are the focus of this exciting new project by renowned photographer Lucas Jodogne. His previous projects „The Bodiless Dragon” and „Urban Arboretum” provided glimpses of such phenomena in Southeast Asia‚s successful „Garden City”, now intensified as the city plans new strategies for further development and a larger population in relation to its greener inhabitants. In a climatic region where ambient heat and humidity allow vegetation to seemingly erupt at the blink of an eye, where landscapes encroach faster than shadows and obey their own laws, such intriguing situations permit us to participate in the tantalizing strangleholds of will and wilfulness, and of desire and design. Jodogne‚s images lead us to the front rows of the arena as key witnesses of these engagements between nature and its other, and to share in their moments of mutual sublimation.

Lai Chee Kien
Architect and lecturer at NUS singapore
3 Jan 2005