Areas must not lose their charm else it may possibly lead to a home that looks and feels boring. The shophouses on Syed Alwi Street span many eras and architectural kinds and are some of the finest that I’ve seen on this space. The shophouses of recent Singapore are basically unchanged in these functions, serving as retail stores, eating places, workplaces and training areas. In the present day, shophouses continue to outline Singapore’s adaptation to alter. Traditionally, many shophouses would have been plastered an off-white colour.
By the 1930s, world recession and prevailing artistic tendencies had induced a swing in direction of more sober Artwork Deco and modernist buildings, with simpler, geometrical facades typically topped by a central flagpole. The Baba Home is representative of the visible curiosity that a properly restored shophouse can provide to our city landscape, and on the similar time, remind us how these shophouses are representative of Singapore’s distinctive cultures and aesthetic tastes.
Shophouses of the Early Style had been mostly easy double-storey buildings with one or two rectangular home windows on the upper flooring and timber-framed doors that had louvers or shutters for air flow. At Arab Road, as an example, as many as 35 shophouses form a block that is 135m lengthy and 8m deep. The various types of Singapore’s shophouses are a showcase of our evolving structure.
Such homes would lay the foundations for the various styles that will develop within the years to return. Most of the early colleges have been also started at shophouses. Since then, a few of the best conservation efforts which were implemented are the colonial period shophouse at 9 Neil Highway and the Baba Home” at 157 Neil Highway, considered one of Singapore’s remaining original Straits-Chinese houses.
The shophouses themselves are attention-grabbing however it’s the unique backdrop of the Sultan Mosque (Masjid Sultan) that really makes it special. The architecture of those shophouses was designed such that in many circumstances solely a wall separated one residence from the opposite. As the name suggests, shophouses were originally a mixture of shop and residential, with the previous occupying the ground floor of a two- or three-storey constructing; eventually many came to be built purely as townhouses, but the unique name caught.