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Wanderlust : A History of Walking :
The Grandstand is a commercial lifestyle hub, tucked away in a large expanse of sparsely occupied land off Bukit Timah Road. It takes its name after the two buildings it occupies, which upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be the eponymous grandstands, facing the race course of the old turf club.
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When it was opened in 1933, the Grandstand at Bukit Timah was declared ‘a truly impressive sight’. Although it has been extensively upgraded over the past fifty years, the basic structure remains unaltered.
The buildings and grounds were home to the Singapore Turf Club, relocated from its old Farrer Park premises in 1933. The Turf Club has built up enviable support from a large and loyal staff, a fact confirmed by the number of employees who have spent their entire working life at the Club. They enjoyed a good range of social and recreational activities on the premises. More than 3500 people, most of them dependent on racing, lived in the vicinity.
After serving a short-lived sentence as a hospital and military car park during the Japanese occupation, the grounds were returned to the STC and racing resumed in 1947 after a two year restoration. After opening its doors to the public in 1960, the North Grandstand was consequently built in 1981 to accommodate the growing number of race-goers.
When the STC moved to its new premises in Kranji in 1999, the land came under the jurisdiction of the Singapore Land Authority, which released it on a 10 year lease to a private master tenant, reopening the buildings as the Turf City mall, before being revamped in 2012 as The Grandstand.
Perhaps in a bid to outlive its current three year lease, the rejuvenation of current buildings as The Grandstand sees a thorough adaptive reuse of the two buildings, converting the architectural forms of spectatorship into one of activity and interaction, producing a unique set of spaces from the hybridity. If successful, the building may have a fighting chance to survive the residential redevelopment planned for the land it sits on.
References
Singapore Turf Club, Fifty years at Bukit Timah: 1933-1983, 1983
A grandstand is a large and normally permanent structure for seating spectators, most often at a racetrack. This includes both auto racing and horse racing. The grandstand is in essence like a single section of a stadium, but differs from a stadium in that it does not wrap all or most of the way around. Grandstands may have basic bench seating, but usually have individual chairs like a stadium. Grandstands are also usually covered with a roof, but are open on the front. They are often multi-tiered.
Grandstands are found at places like Epsom Downs Racecourse and Atlanta Motor Speedway. They may also be found at fairgrounds, circuses, and outdoor arenas used for rodeos.
In the United States, smaller stands are called bleachers, and are usually far more basic and typically single-tiered (hence the difference from a “grand stand”). Early baseball games were often staged at fairgrounds, and the term “grandstand” came along when standalone baseball parks began to be built. A covered bleacher may be called a “pavilion”, also to distinguish from the main “grandstand”.
AloJapan.com