WHEN the Beverly Mai condo in Tomlinson Road was put up for collective sale recently, only a few architects and history buffs realised that Singapore was at risk of losing a small part of its heritage.
The 32-year-old building about to be razed to the ground is in fact Singapore's first condominium.
And if its demise is any indication, there is concern now that the island's obsession with such sales could wipe out a whole era of the country's iconic buildings.
Said Singapore Heritage Society president Kevin Tan: 'At this rate, you will end up with either very old buildings or very new buildings.'
At the heart of the problem is the enormous disparity between the price of land and the price of construction.
Said architect William Lim: 'Because land prices are so much higher, the building has no value. It is irrelevant whether it has any architectural merit; the intrinsic value is in the land.'
Add to that the attractiveness of selling en bloc for residents and you have what he calls the 'aggressive destruction of Singapore's memories'.
He points to the likes of the old National Library and Marco Polo Hotel as signs that the country's architectural heritage is under a very real threat.
Dr Tan agreed: 'What will happen is you will see buildings from the 1930s, 1940s up till maybe the 1960s, and then you have a big gap.'
For now, the Beverly Mai and another condo - Futura in Leonie Hill Road - are in most imminent danger.
The former has already been sold to Hotel Properties Limited (HPL), while the latter has been put up for collective sale.
With a plot ratio of 2.8 on the 7,230 sq m Beverly Mai site, HPL, which did not respond to multiple calls from The Sunday Times, can effectively double the number of units there to 106.
And though the layman may see nothing worth saving in the likes of old condominiums, architects say they have genuine historical worth.
When completed in 1974, Beverly Mai was Singapore's first condominium, the first to incorporate shared facilities like swimming pools, the first to build maisonettes and the first to build apartment units with no party walls.
The Futura - completed two years later - had a distinctive curved facade and was the first to incorporate lifts that open directly into the apartments.
Both condos were recently featured in the Urban Redevelopment Authority's (URA) exhibition on Singaporean architecture called Singapore 1:1 City.
Architect Lim Huck Chin, 42, felt so strongly about the impending destruction that he wrote to The Straits Times Forum page expounding Beverly Mai's merits. He said: 'Beverly Mai set a standard at that time. It saddens me that people don't see beyond the million-dollar transactions.' No one feels the likely loss of these buildings more than Mr Timothy Seow, who designed them both.
'It's heartbreaking,' he told The Sunday Times. 'If the building had been a failure, it's a different thing. It's a real shame.' While acknowledging the merits of the building, a URA spokesman said: 'Architectural merit is but one criterion when evaluating whether buildings are to be conserved. We need to balance that with economics, changing lifestyles and expectations, needs of the building owners and other factors.'
He pointed out that the authority has gazetted some 6,500 buildings for conservation, including dozens of shophouses in Chinatown and Little India, and the Jurong Town Hall building.
Architects accept that they face an uphill battle in trying to save the likes of Beverly Mai. To declare any residential building a conservation site would effectively lower its price on the market.
Said architect Mok Wei Wei: 'The two or three best examples of any era need to be conserved but it would be unfair if the owners of the property bear the brunt of the cost.'
He suggested that policies should be reviewed to see if there is any way to balance the needs of conservation with economic imperatives.
Complex as the issue is, architects agree that something needs to be done, sooner rather than later. 'We've got to start somewhere,' said 30-year-old architect Lee Cheng Wee. 'What better time than now and with Beverly Mai.'
jeremyau@sph.com.sg
'We've got to start somewhere. What better time than now and with Beverly Mai.'
- ARCHITECT LEE CHENG WEE, 30, on conserving landmark buildings
