Jieun Jun

New Forms of (un)Privacy for Living in Singapore

The ‘bang’ refers to a room for privacy, which could be said to be a kind of second bedroom, but one away from the home and family. The bang is a bedroom which isn’t yours and yet is more private. Culturally, many Koreans live with their parents into adulthood or even after marriage. When you bring home a date, your parents will inevitably judge and place all of the pressures, expectations and values of old Korean society on you and your date. The bang is a place to be ‘play’, to be alone with your date and have sex without the strings of history attached and also to be in a large group to hang out. The bang is a new typology that emerged out of the consequences of Korea’s rapid cultural shift, and out of the generation gap between parents and children that it produced. 

Singapore has a similar, often Confucianist-tinted familial ideology to that of Korea. In the heat of a campaign by the city to promote baby making, in what they have labelled the ‘All-Out Make-Out’, and because of the fact that parents are home and ready to judge, car backseats, public housing staircases and landings have become popular places for sex. Recognising the reasons for the emergence of the bang in Korea, and the same disjunction exists in Singapore where these spaces are not on offer, the project, more than simply wanting to provide them in Singapore, sees the bang as an opportunity. More than just a space away from the everyday – it might in fact be suggesting an opportunity to open up a new ‘everyday.’

The project proposes a giant home for 100 people in the city centred around two scales of ‘bangs.’ The desire for privacy is now given a form here by fusing two opposing ‘bang-ologies’, historical and hierarchical Korean-dwelling typologies and the contemporary solution, bangs. It creates a unique threshold between the two different bangs that never before existed together. The bangs are organised as a series of weaving, undulating spaces in both plans and through the section of the multistoried building creating a continuous interior collective heart of the project. This vertical landscape of ‘intimate bangs’ is composed of an aluminium structure and blue artificial leather upholstering Polypropylene plastic pellets to create a series of pockets that partly deform, taking the shape of the bodies and performed activities that inhabit them. The heart is surrounded by simple minimal bedrooms, cooking and cleaning areas and in-between the two is an ambiguous free space for the residents’ use such as planting, studying, working, dining, laundry and bathing. The large, dark, central voluptuous form of the bang becomes a figure that nurtures the intimate lives of its inhabitants and, along with the open spaces protected along its edges and at its interior, it liberates the domestic space from its typical ‘plan,’ reducing it to a simple support structure for the life of collective pleasure at the heart of the house.