Old National Library Building

The Old National Library Building was a historic library building at Stamford Road in the Museum Planning Area of Singapore. Originally completed in 1960, the library building was a national icon for many Singaporeans. Despite a huge groundswell of public dissent, the library was closed on 31 March 2004, and was demolished in July that year to make way for the construction of the Fort Canning Tunnel to ease road traffic to the city. The controversy surrounding the building's demise has been credited for sparking greater awareness of local cultural roots and an unprecedented wave in favour of heritage conservation among Singaporeans.
The library was located at 91 Stamford Road, nearby Fort Canning Hill in Singapore's Museum Planning Area. It was formerly occupied by the St John Ambulance Headquarters and British Council Hall which were demolished to make way for the library. The total floor area of the library was about 101,500 square feet (9,430 m).
The library was designed by architects from the Public Works Department, with consultation from L. M. Harrod, the librarian for Raffles Library. It was made up of a reinforced concrete structure with brick walls, of which the exterior was painted red and used select bricks with cement pointings. Its red-brick exterior was supposed to be reminiscent of British architecture in the early 1950s. Upon its opening, the building received criticism for its appearance, with architect William Lim Siew Wai stating that the building should appear as a monument of Singapore. Another architect, Ong Eng Han, said that it was "a jumble of architectural sections which have been lumped together to form a haphazard whole."
The building was two-storeys tall, excluding the basement, and was T-shaped. The basement was used as a storage room, a workshop to repair mobile libraries, an area to catalogue and process books, and the air-conditioning plant, which served the offices, lecture hall, and mezzanine. The first floor had the exhibition hall, libraries for adults and children, a Braille library for the blind, an activities room for children which held puppet shows, a lecture hall, and work departments. The lecture hall had space for around 200 people, and could be hired out for lectures, films, or other meeting purposes. It was comprised of a stage and projector with its own entrance separate to the building so that it could be accessed even when the library was closed. The mezzanine had offices and training rooms for library staff.
The second floor had the reference library, a study area, a microfilm reading room, a conference room, and a reading room, which was typically used by secondary school students for studying. The conference room could seat about 50 people and, much like the lecture hall, was hired out for local use. Furthermore, a five-storey building was built to help store books and archive government documents, serving as the library's stack. It was designed in such a way that it could be expanded exponentially to help store future items. Although the stacks were not directly accessible to the public, a book lift was incorporated for readers. The five-storey building, alongside the offices, lecture hall, and mezzanine, was among the few areas to receive air-conditioning.
In the centre of the building was a small open air courtyard which was occupied by a fountain and cafe, known as the Coffee Club Xpress cafe. The courtyard was mainly used as a recreational area, holding multiple events there weekly. These weekly programmes, which were launched in June 1998, were hosted to both bring non-readers to the library and serve as an area for people to express themselves. Known as Xpressions @ the Courtyard, it featured presentations on feng shui, business, Cantonese opera, Indian dance, music, film-making, and poetry, which typically brought around 115 people per session.
One of the earliest libraries in Singapore was established at the Singapore Free School (now known as Raffles Institution) in 1837. The school's library was small, being expanded in 1844 by residents into the Singapore Library. The Singapore Library used subscriptions as its main source of income, inevitably facing frequent financial difficulties. In 1874, the Singapore Library would merge to form the Raffles Library, in return that the government would take over their debt and that the founders be given lifetime access to the new library.
Despite being called a public library, the Raffles Library was subscription-based and only had 349 members in 1899. In addition, its users were mainly Europeans and was stated to have been "generally less than welcoming" towards non-Europeans. Although there was a free reading room where non-members could request books, it was also used sparingly, only receiving 4,000 visitors in 1878 or about 1.7% of Singapore's population at the time. The library also contained mostly English-language books, a language which only a minority of the Singaporean population could read.
The earliest suggestion of a change to the Raffles Library's policies was in 1940, when library director Frederick Chasen wrote a letter to the library's committee suggesting that they "do something for the mass of Singapore's people". However, Chasen did acknowledge that the "poorer class [would] be practically dead weight financially" and would "swamp the more fastidious element among the subscribers." Following World War II, the library would luckily be left unaffected, but anti-colonial and pro-independence sentiments grew amongst Singaporeans. This lead to Singapore being granted slight internal governance in the 1950s.
As the Colony of Singapore's politics changed, other aspects such as education also changed. In 1953, Chinese community leader and philanthropist Lee Kong Chian offered S$375,000 towards the creation of a free public library in Singapore, on the conditions that vernacular languages were promoted and encouraged to the public. The British government was quick to accept the offer, contributing S$625,000 to make up the S$1 million to be spent on the construction of the library.
The construction of the library officially began in September 1954; it was supposed to begin earlier in the year, but priority was instead given on the construction of the Teacher's Training College. The chosen site for the library was at the foot of Fort Canning Hill along Stamford Road, and required demolishing the St John Ambulance Headquarters and the British Council Hall to make way for the new library. Raffles Library's librarian L. M. Harrod consulted with a Singaporean architect for the building's design. It was to be a two-storey building, excluding the basement, and would be T-shaped, the first floor having three wings.
In 1955, the plans were updated to include space for a travelling library, workshops, a Braille library, offices, and air-conditioning in certain rooms. The building's frame would be made of reinforced concrete but feature a red-brick exterior, along with using fluorescent lighting. L. Bintley, acting Chief Architect of the Public Works Department, suggested that the new library design would be able to hold up to 100,000 books on the open shelves with a further 380,000 in storage rooms. However, this new design would cost S$2 million, leading to its construction being delayed during the 1956 Budget. In 1956, the Ministry of Education stated that the library would be named the Raffles National Library, after the original Raffles Library.
Construction would restart in 1957, with Lee laying the foundation stone of the building in August of that year. The library, which was expected to take two years to build, had an increased cost of S$2.5 million with the addition of a five-storey storage building that would hold books and documents of both the library and the government. A bill was also passed at the Legislative Assembly that made the library's use free for all. In 1959, Minister for Culture S. Rajaratnam stated that the library's book collection would be reorganised and expanded to include more non-English language books. Malay-language books were imported from Indonesia while children's books were translated to the four main languages of Singapore.
The library was officially opened on 12 November 1960 by Yang di-Pertuan Negara Yusof Ishak, at which it was well-received. Around 3,000 people visited the library daily, an increase from the 1,000 received by the Raffles Library. The library had 150,000 books, of which 14,000 were Chinese books, 3,300 were Malay and Indonesian books, and 3,700 were Tamil books. There was also an additional 177 Braille books and 4,000 volumes of music. The books were transferred from Raffles Library to the new library using lorries as part of the first phase of Operation Pinta; the second phase required the staff to arrange them onto the shelves. In November 1960, Raffles was dropped from Raffles National Library and Raffles National Museum, being known as the National Library and National Museum, respectively. Hedwig Anuar was appointed the first Singaporean director of the National Library in April 1960 and served until June 1961.
In the early years of the National Library, it suffered from a lack of proper staff. Harrod wrote in his final report that the library needed at least eleven full-time, professionally trained staff to manage it; at that time, there was only one full-time employee, himself, and one part-time employee. Furthermore, until 1957, the library staff could not write Chinese characters nor properly catalogue the books. This eventually came to the attention of the Singaporean government who, with funds from the Colombo Plan, appointed two foreign experts – John Cole and Priscilla Taylor – to help manage the library. Cole and Taylor were appointed the director and associate director of the National Library, respectively.
Cole, much like Harrod, agreed that the main issue was the lack of qualified staff. In response, the government started giving scholarships to employees at the library to study overseas in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. This helped in bringing the number of trained staff up to sixteen by 1963. However, the library would continue to struggle with an increased workload as the number of users grew exponentially, even with the number of staff increasing alongside it. In a 1965 board meeting, with thirty-six staff working at the library, "the capacity of the staff was [...] being strained to its limits". By 1968, the issue would resolve itself as the library staff and users reached a "rough equilibrium".
In 1964, the library was expanded to include a Southeast Asia Room, which included archives, journals, newspapers, and photographs relating to Southeast Asia. This collection, known as the Ya Yin Kwan collection and comprising around 10,000 items, was donated to the library by Malaysian businessman Tan Yeok Seng and officially opened by Rajaratnam.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, the Library became a popular destination for studying and hanging out for young people from well-known neighbouring schools such as Raffles Institution, Raffles Girls' School, St Joseph's Institution, and Tao Nan School that had their early beginnings in this area. The landmark Balustrade or front porch and steps leading up to the Library became an intimate public space where one could sit and read, wait, chat or simply watch the world go by.
A Civic and Cultural District Master Plan Exhibition was held in April 1988 by the Ministry of National Development to garner public feedback to develop the central area into a historical, cultural, and retail zone. The 1988 Master Plan was aimed to revitalise Singapore's civic and cultural hub, citing the location of key cultural institutions such as the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, the National Museum, as well as the National Library within the district.
On 28 May, Minister of National Development S. Dhanabalan chaired a dialogue attended predominantly by invited professionals such as planners, architects, and property consultants to review the Master Plan exhibited a month earlier. During the professional dialogue, the Urban Redevelopment Authority's (URA) many micro-planning proposals were reviewed, including the proposed demolition of the National Library to create a "clear view of Fort Canning Hill from Bras Basah Park". No conclusive statement on the building's fate was made in the press report or in URA's publication, Skyline Vol. 35/88 (Jul/Aug 1988).
On 23 March 1989, the MND revealed plans in Parliament to build a new National Library and four new branches in Yishun, Tampines, Hougang and Woodlands. This announcement generated extensive discussion in the ensuing months on the potential of a new National Library. On 17 March 1990, the Ministry of Community Development confirmed in Parliament that the new National Library would be sited at the former Raffles Girls' School site in Queen Street. A library consultant was appointed the following month to advise on the planning of the new building.
The 1992 Civic District Master Plan public exhibition was held from 22 to 26 February by the URA. An important revision was the mentioning of the one-way Fort Canning Tunnel, entering the hill at the existing National Library and emerging at Penang Road to be built by the year 2000. The URA explained that the 380m long tunnel would help smooth the major traffic intersection in front of Cathay Building and direct heavy traffic away from the Marina to Orchard areas, thus giving the museum precinct a peaceful and quiet ambience.
Work on the tunnel was expected to start after the National Library is relocated to Victoria Street by 1996. In the extensive press reports in 1992, neither the demolition of the National Library building nor the reasons for changing the site of the new National Library to Victoria Street were given.
In the subsequent 1997 Master Plan for the area, plans for the Fort Canning Tunnel remained unchanged and it was not explicitly stated in the report that the National Library building would be demolished. In April 1997, the Library was closed for a S$2.6 million upgrading and renovation programme to meet the needs of the IT age. It was planned to reopen on 1 Oct, with its facilities upgraded, with new computers, and its collection updated with 80,000 volumes added. Actual renovations took nine months and the library was officially reopened on 16 January 1998.
On 8 December 1998, a letter by Kelvin Wang to the Straits Times Forum page triggered a string of events that would bring the normally passive Singaporeans to display rare sparks of civic activism. Wang brought to the public attention that there was a possibility that the National Library would be demolished, after a recent announcement by the newly formed Singapore Management University (SMU) that its new city campus would be sited in the Bras Basah area including the National Library's present site. Wang wrote:
In response, the SMU assured the public that they could play a part in deciding the fate of the red-bricked building housing the National Library, as it had not decided what to do with the building. On 13 March 1999, SMU organised a public symposium at the Singapore Art Museum (former St Joseph's Institution) to gather feedback for its campus masterplan. Overwhelming turnout and passionate debate amongst the audience marked this highly publicised event, which lasted over 4 hours. This was the first occasion where URA made public their definitive decision to demolish the National Library building as "it was not of great architectural merit and should not be conserved."
From March to April 1999, there arose a huge groundswell of public dissent in the media over the National Library building's fate, as well as the drastic physical alterations of its environs. A number of featured columns by journalists touched on gradually disappearing heritage landmarks, as well as shared memories of Singaporeans.
On 24 January 2000, after SMU chaired a technical workshop to obtain feedback on three alternative proposals, a well-known architect named Tay Kheng Soon held a press conference at The Substation to unveil his unofficial SMU masterplan. URA was invited to the presentation but did not show up. His proposal entailed re-routing the tunnel to save the National Library building. A week later, Tay wrote to the Prime Minister's Office regarding his proposal which was referred to the MND. Many members of the public wrote in publicly either in support of Tay's plans or argue for heritage conservation in general. A few articles and letters highlighted that the adamant official response to public dissent ran counter to the spirit of the Government's S21 Vision, which expressed a desire to foster civic participation and active citizenry.
On 7 March 2000, the Minister for National Development, Mah Bow Tan, announced in Parliament that the National Library building would have to go. According to Mah, the authorities had assessed Tay's plans but concluded that the URA's plan was a better proposal for preserving the Civic District's ambience and being more people-friendly.
The old National Library was eventually torn down in July 2004. Today, all that remains of the building at its original site are two red-bricked entrance pillars standing near the Fort Canning Tunnel. The controversy surrounding the building's demise has been credited for sparking greater awareness of local cultural roots and an unprecedented wave in favour of heritage conservation among Singaporeans.
During the demolition of the old National Library, the two red-brick entrance pillars and fence were left behind as a remembrance. In 2019, SMU started construction of a five-storey addition, Tahir Foundation Connexion, to the SMU city campus and the pillars and fence were temporarily removed from its location. The pillars and fence were restored to their original location and integrated into the campus the following year.