Back to Nature

Simple, but perfect for your urban lifestyle.

Renovation old Chinese house with modern taste

We can find Chinese shophouses  all over Singapore. Since more of the half of Singaporeans are Chinese from long, long time ago. Shophouses were originally utilised as places of business downstairs and residences upstairs. Now, most of residence are separated with business area.

While many old shophouses were demolished during a period of urban renewal, now their value has been recognised. Conservation and gentrification is the name of game.

The shophouses  can be renovated according to modern style. Even the paintwork can match the colours. The details can be depicted in old photographs. While there are restrictions, such as the façade should be left like origin, there is also a lot of leeway behind the front door. 

Once the interiors of the old owners is stripped away, the shophouses can be transformed to suit modernist sensibility. Like some shophouses we visited last time in Singapore. The home bears a little evidence of its past, except its façade.

  

Respecting tradition while also embracing contemporary style and luxury was the key factor in the renovation of the an 85-year-old Chinese-style shophouses that evoked warm memories of the childhoods.

Ship joinery Principles

Ship joinery principles are the principles that everything must have multiple purposes to save space.

Low, double-sided storage units can be filled with books  become room dividers separating the bedroom/bathroom and kitchen/living areas.

Buy at action and find pieces on your travels. Pieces from your collection that doesn't fit the apartment or houses may have gone to other houses.  

Live in the house for some years with your old furniture before choosing new pieces. Live with the elements you like and experience the space. Later you can make specific choices of furniture and lighting.  

Down to Earth House

Since the mid 70's many scientists, from biologists to engineers to physicists try to discover different ways of improving climate control within a building, minimizing the need need for artificial heating and cooling.

People can use high tech solutions have been developed - such as a glass that reacts to temperature, going from transparent to translucent as the days heats up.

We can learn also from old times. Like Italian town of Siena in Italy. Its narrow streets provided shade to pedestrians. A Renaissance house with its layering of shutters keeping the warmth in and heat out. Cooling process takes three or four times more energy than heating. 

Now more and more solar residential buildings for the city Rome and solar schools for hot countries (currently being planned). 

Subculture's relationships with mainstream culture

It may be difficult to identify certain subcultures because their style (particularly clothing and music) may be adopted by mass culture for commercial purposes.

Businesses often seek to capitalize on the subversive allure of subcultures in search of Cool, which remains valuable in the selling of any product. This process of cultural appropriation may often result in the death or evolution of the subculture, as its members adopt new styles that appear alien to mainstream society. This process provides a constant stream of styles which may be commercially adopted.

Music-based subcultures are particularly vulnerable to this process, and so what may be considered a subculture at one stage in its history—such as jazz, goth, punk, hip hop and rave cultures—may represent mainstream taste within a short period of time. Some subcultures reject or modify the importance of style, stressing membership through the adoption of an ideology which may be much more resistant to commercial exploitation.

The punk subculture's distinctive (and initially shocking) style of clothing was adopted by mass-market fashion companies once the subculture became a media interest. Dick Hebdige argues that the punk subculture shares the same "radical aesthetic practices" as Dada and surrealism.

Identifying Urban Culture

Subcultures can be distinctive because of the age, ethnicity, class, location, and/or gender of the members. The qualities that determine a subculture as distinct may be linguistic, aesthetic, religious, political, sexual, geographical, or a combination of factors.

According to Dick Hebdige, members of a subculture often signal their membership through a distinctive and symbolic use of style, which includes fashions, mannerisms, and argot. They also live out particular relations to places; Ken Gelder talks about "subcultural geographies" along these lines.

The study of subcultures often consists of the study of symbolism attached to clothing, music and other visible affectations by members of subcultures, and also the ways in which these same symbols are interpreted by members of the dominant culture. Subcultures have been chronicled by others for a long time, documented, analysed, classified, rationalised, monitored, scrutinised. In some cases, subcultures have been legislated against, their activities regulated or curtailed.

Subcultures can exist at all levels of organizations, highlighting the fact that there are multiple cultures or value combinations usually evident in any one organization that can complement but also compete with the overall organisational culture.^[

Definition of Urban Culture

Before we show what is urban lifestyle, we shold know firstly the definition of urban itself. I got this definition from WIkipedia.

In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture (whether distinct or hidden) which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong, for example, if a particular subculture is characterized by a systematic opposition to the dominant culture, it may be described as a counterculture.

As early as 1950, David Riesman distinguished between a majority, "which passively accepted commercially provided styles and meanings, and a 'subculture' which actively sought a minority style ... and interpreted it in accordance with subversive values".

In his 1979 book Subculture the Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige argued that a subculture is a subversion to normalcy. He wrote that subcultures can be perceived as negative due to their nature of criticism to the dominant societal standard. Hebdige argued that subcultures bring together like-minded individuals who feel neglected by societal standards and allow them to develop a sense of identity.

In 1995, Sarah Thornton, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, described "subcultural capital" as the cultural knowledge and commodities acquired by members of a subculture, raising their status and helping differentiate themselves from members of other groups.

In 2007, Ken Gelder proposed to distinguish subcultures from countercultures based on the level of immersion in society. Gelder further proposed six key ways in which subcultures can be identified:

1. through their often negative relations to work (as 'idle', 'parasitic', at play or at leisure, etc.);
2. through their negative or ambivalent relation to class (since subcultures are not 'class-conscious' and don't conform to traditional class definitions);
3. through their association with territory (the 'street', the 'hood, the club, etc.), rather than property;
4. through their movement out of the home and into non-domestic forms of belonging (i.e. social groups other than the family);
5. through their stylistic ties to excess and exaggeration (with some exceptions);
6. through their refusal of the banalities of ordinary life and massification.