A nation that never was

'Yet the effect of his wholesale elimination of the past, not in one life but in many, was that Koolhaas's ideal of a "Multi-Ethnic" city was a place like Singapore, a "city without qualities," as he puts it, created out of nothing but an abstract marriage of Confucius and Victoria; a "virtual city," as he writes, in which nothing is random and authenticity itself is a fraudulent notion. Singapore, for Koolhaas, was pure fascimile - almost an architectural blueprint, in fact - in which the red-light district was moved to make room for a theme-park re-creation of sin, and the famous old transvestite bars on Bugis Street were rehabilitated to serve as tourist traps featuring "female female impersonators."

This was all very well, except that cities. no less people, rebel against being nothing, and Singapore - a British boarding school with Chinese prefects - had the disconcerting habit of boasting of its British legal system and then, when challenged, talking about its "Asian values."'

- Pico Iyer on The Global Soul