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Some buildings manage to live a few lives. Not that one boring office is replaced by another one moving in. The Parisians, for example, converted a railway station into a famous art gallery. In the Soviet Union we witnessed that one could choose a different way and turn centuries-old churches into vegetable storages.

Probably because there is not much of antiquity in Singapore, the republic has chosen the first way. The General Post Office became Fullerton Hotel, the most expensive one in town. The ground floors of the most of the shophouses are no longer shops, but are re-designed into luxurious living rooms. The medical hall in China Town used to be a disco, a restaurant, while the old warehouses along Singapore River serve as shops, cafes, and theatres.

Why do we feel special in such revamped places? What kind of air and mood does one experience, walking in the sudden quietness among simple barracks of the former military camp at Dempsey Road, where today sweating ang-mohs are roaming in teak jungles, hitching on the angles of tables and shelves? What flying ghosts are being watched by the watchtower of the old airport occupied by People's Association nowadays? Who are we, children playing in an abandoned house that was once forbidden? Sitting with a cup of kopi among paintings and calligraphic scrolls in the most real former Police Headquarters, probably, may be as attractive as making unplanned love in the kitchen.

Visiting a place where other people used to live, to adjust the place to their bodies, their habits and regimen, you always feel like you have been admitted to another life, to a parallel world, where you become different as well. The same happens, when you try, say, marine uniform. You need not to turn into a marine or a sailor completely, just allow the sea to splash into your soul, leaving part of you as it is - then you can live two lives at once.

With clothes, everything is clear. Fashion and style render them their charming qualities. In fashion and style everything is not real, but as if it would be real. Style always is "as if". If something looks perfectly natural, it already cannot be stylish. Therefore style needs to be not only natural, but also to maintain its artificiality - a distance with its original, but keeping this distance short.

The same happens with the old Singaporean buildings that have changed their destiny. The history of modern Singapore is short; there is little historicity here, and besides in tropics it is hard to keep the feeling of seasons and time. Singapore is deprived of natural resources - and it is short of the resource of the past. Therefore here they pay superfluous, exaggerated attention to it. You hardly find anywhere else so many books printed on good paper and spruce little museums stuffed with multimedia dedicated to smallest details of everyday life: food, cloths, life style of just a few decades ago. Thus, Singapore keeps a short, but dressed distance with its recent past, which means that the city unconsciously, without of aesthetic considerations, repeats the pattern of style: as if the past.

The feeling its old unpretentious houses evoke in us is exactly enjoying the stylishness of the recent and familiar, but also that of a clearly distant time. Who enters them, lives two lives at once.

P. S. Majestic Theatre, one of the most elegant buildings of the old Singapore, was staying locked for many years. At the end of all it was renovated and re-opened - as a shopping mall. Of course, it is not a vegetable storage, but still it's a pity.

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