Brutalism — Last Look: Golden Mile Complex

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Last Look: Golden Mile Complex By Marc Nair, 25 April 2023

The last mile is less than golden, but not everything is broken.

Last Look: Golden Mile Complex

By Marc Nair, 25 April 2023

The last mile is less than golden, but not everything is broken.

When I visit Golden Mile on a sweltering Wednesday afternoon in mid April to recce for a photo poetry walk, it feels like the final heaves of a dying star, a bear shot and downed but not dead. There are still signs of life, but the few shops that remain are definitely on the way out.

There are still holdouts: grungy mookata joints, the odd massage parlour and a small coterie of Chang beer aunties who resist an easy disappearance into an anonymous building somewhere far away. These embody the core of Golden Mile Complex, fragments of its bawdy and blessed reputation. But the majority of its denizens have decamped, ‘we have moved to’ signs pasted like epitaphs over rolled-down shutters.

Now the building is quieter we can see its bones, the long pipes discoloured and dirt caked as they rib the floors and remind us of its Brutalist origins. Without the cacophony of a dozen afternoon drunks dancing on the mezzanine floors, a dank smell of unwashed dishes, discarded tom yam and the sweat from a thousand and one nights rise up in the less frequented passages.

In the afternoon, the interior is still beautiful in a bald, textured way, but it is rendered even more poignant through a combination of emptiness and the stale remnants of its tenants. The lower floors were almost always too crowded, too swilling with tourists and Thais searching for a taste of home. Now that everything is winding down, a thin shaft of golden sunlight lights up certain details and opens up the rest of the floors to wandering photographers, who step out onto the open blue floors on the 10th storey with a sense of wonder.

The vertical pillars, golden-yellow and defiant, remain, a striking contrast to skyscrapers of HDB blocks and condominiums that have sprung up over the last decade across Beach Road.

The swimming pool, long since emptied and locked up, tempts like an accidentally edgy skatepark, where the stakes are death for those who flip over the edge.

Above, the residential units yawn empty but tiny plants still push through open gutters, clawing upwards to the light, reminding us that Golden Mile Complex will always fight to find a way to remain. These small reminders tell the end of stories and leave no hint of beginnings to come.

A sense of loss permeates Little Thailand, an un-becoming, a recognition that this country will not suffer an accumulation of memory in its architecture. Once it becomes inefficient and not expedient to larger forces that calculate the yield on the land, buildings are torn down, rebuilt, repurposed; lost.

In Golden Mile Complex, a few businesses will close for good. Others will move to less than ideal locations and cannot assume the continued loyalty of their clientele. And some shop owners will no longer have a reason to remain in the country. It shouldn’t be this easy to dismantle identity.

Golden Mile Complex will be handed over to developers on 1 May 2023.

Photo EssayMackerel MagazineApril 25, 2023Golden Mile Complex, Singapore, Brutalism, Architecture, Nostalgia, Progress