All that remains of the old National Library are two entrance pillars facing Stamford Road. One cannot help but notice their silent and rather eerie solitude, misplaced at the foot of Fort Canning Hill. Perhaps a last hasty attempt to leave something behind as memory, the pillars are nothing more than a remnant, their dignity assaulted by a stop-sign haphazardly attached to each of them. In its hey-day, they were a gateway into a free public library, a space once heralded by former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew during its grand opening as a "milestone in our rising standards of life.”1 At the end of its lifespan by 2004, deemed as “not of great architectural merit and should not be conserved," it was deleted to make way for the Fort Canning Tunnel. 2 Today, the entrance pillars stand guard as a gateway, not into the functional democratic space of before but into a non-functional emptiness, into anti-space...
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