CLIENT
Gen XYZ, with the Bras Basah Complex Merchants’ Association
SCALE
22 × 8 m — 176 m² across three bays
LOCATION
Bras Basah Complex, Singapore
DURATION
11 Weeks
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CLIENT
Gen XYZ, with the Bras Basah Complex Merchants’ Association
LOCATION
Bras Basah Complex, Singapore
YEAR
2024
FORMAT
Exterior mural, hand-painted, weather-rated acrylic
SCALE
22 × 8 m — 176 m² across three bays
Gen XYZ
A 22-metre façade that lets a 1970s trading complex speak in the language of the people still working inside it.
Six weeks, one scissor lift, a three-bay grid chalked out at 1:1 from a scaled elevation.
Colour was mixed on site to match the terrazzo and mosaic already on the building — nothing straight from a tin. Painting ran 6am to 11am to stay ahead of the heat, which put the work in front of tenants opening up each morning; several ended up choosing where their own trade appeared on the wall.
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Creation
Three weeks of shop visits, eleven recorded conversations, and an afternoon photographing every hand-painted sign still hanging in the building.
Two things repeated: the lettering — decades of shop signs painted by the same two sign-writers — and the objects: rulers, thread, guillotines, paper stacks. Those became the vocabulary. The chosen concept used the sign-writers’ letterforms at architectural scale, so the wall reads as the building’s own handwriting rather than mine.
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Research
Gen XYZ had taken over the ground-floor retail of a 1970s trading complex and wanted the façade to signal that the building was alive again. The brief that arrived asked for “something bold and Instagrammable”.
What the site actually had was 40 years of stationery, framing and bookbinding trades — and tenants who had watched three rounds of rejuvenation happen to them rather than with them. I proposed the opposite of a landmark: a façade made out of what was already inside.
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