Singapore is an Asian city-state in which the contradictions of becoming modern are seemingly resolved by state-directed technological or technocratic means. Its post-colonial urbanism represents a radical statist modernity that seems to be part of a now-lost world of liberal and Enlightenment confidence and that has been achieved in an illiberal political environment open to globalization. It is necessary to understand what it means when the West’ becomes part of a self-administered and not neo-colonialist process of modernization, one in which cultural translation has effectively taken place. This statist modernization, though, is not one necessarily fully embraced by the city-state’s population. There are now assertions of the importance of’culture (only recently considered by the government to be a resource useful for economic development) which, in the case of recent fums that try to reflect local identity, demand both a ‘Westernization’ and an ‘Asianization’ of depth, rather than of surfaces, to gain what might be described as other experiences of the present’ apart from the dominant economism. The globalized ‘condition’ is a multi-layered one. In Singapore—modernization in its pure form—the forces of modernity are enlisted against the demands of modernism. . . . [It] has adopted only the mechanistic, rationalistic program and developed it to an unprecedented perfection in a climate of streamlined ‘smoothness’ generated by shedding modernism’s artistic, irrational, uncontrollable, subversive ambitions—revolution without agony. Rem Koolhaas (1995) (1)