What if you could dream up any building you like? What would it be? How would constructing it change our lives?
A shopping mall self-destructs, and a single mother vanishes. A tree house for orphans and old folks is torn apart by an act of mercy. The Singapore Flyer is reinvented as a political prison. In this collection of nine tales, Clara Chow examines an alternative Singaporean landscape—one that exists only on paper—and the people we might be in it. A former newspaper correspondent, she interviews nine architects about chimeric structures and sets short stories in them. A hybrid of journalism and fiction, Dream Storeys documents the voices of urban visionaries, while taking their ideas into inventive, evocative new territories.
“An inventive combination of non-fiction and fiction, with expertly crafted and unpredictable short stories. The exquisite and precise details in Clara Chow’s stories bring to life the fantastical structures dreamt of by her interviewees.”
-Dave Chua, author of Gone Case
“By mirroring real-life architectural dreams with a fictional narrative, Clara Chow has produced an intriguing and original literary structure. Her somewhat dystopian world is a discomforting vision of a future where people struggle to adapt to societies very different from today, yet are still guided by a deep sense of their own humanity and their connection to each other.”
-Meira Chand, author of A Different Sky