Adding value without demolition, rebuilding: Regenerating Singapore's modernist icons

SINGAPORE'S modernist megastructures show heroic scale and muscular form, yet their vulnerability is painfully apparent in the actual and attempted collective sale of Pearl Bank Apartments, People's Park Complex and Golden Mile Complex.

These were all built during the earliest phases of the government's Sale of Sites Programme, an important mechanism behind Singapore's uniquely successful urban renewal. People's Park Complex and Golden Mile Complex were part of the first sale in 1967, while Pearl Bank Apartments was part of the third sale in 1969, conceived by planners and architects at the time as a bold, new mode of city living.

Barely 50 years on, we are now looking at the likely demise and permanent erasure o…