Reading Walden Pond at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore

A message flashes on the wall of the world's first ArtScience Museum in the new mega-scaled Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore: "Can a building have a soul?" Shaped like a giant lotus within its own lotus pond, the building seems to float in an urban forest of glittering skyscrapers, eerily evoking Thoreau's Walden Pond. Interestingly, the Boston-based architect of the complex, Moshe Safdie, swims daily in Walden Pond, making an implausible interconnection plausible. Literally and imaginatively constructing an icon of the East from bases near Boston, both Safdie and Thoreau play with shifting scales and the effects of space/place on human transformation. From a discussion with the director of the museum to musing with a circle of Marx-A -la-Lefebvre-inspired interlocutors on urban space, I ask, can an urban construction evoke a transforming experience as potent as the experience of Nature? Can an urban building have a soul?.