The Void Deck, Singapore's Shared Ground Floor — Epoche A2
I read a book called The Ground Floor . It is a book of photographs, with a short chapter for each picture, about the void deck: the open, empty ground floor of Singapore's HDB housing blocks. Nobody lives down there. The block stands on its pillars, and the space between them belongs to every family above. The first chapter shows a Malay wedding. The family booked the void deck of their own block, put up a tent and long tables, and welcomed two hundred guests a few metres under their own front door. The next chapter shows a Chinese funeral wake in the same kind of space: white cloth, round tables, neighbours coming down in slippers to sit for an hour. The writer says the two events sometimes happen in the same week, one block apart. The best small chapter is about the stone tables where old men play chess every afternoon, and about the sign on the pillar: "No football". An empty floor needs rules, because everybody wants it. The photographs are stronger than the words, and two chapters repeat each other. But the idea stays with you. The builders left the ground floor empty on purpose, so that a block of four hundred strangers would have one shared room.