Lifestyle: places, structures and how they were made

Lifestyle here is places and how they were made. A hotel built out of sand, a house grown around trees, a dam that became a destination: the interest is in the engineering or the intent behind somewhere, not in a ranked list of things to do. In Singapore that distinction is easy to draw, because the places people visit at the weekend, among them a barrage, a reservoir park and a set of cooled glasshouses, were built as infrastructure first and became destinations afterwards.

The pieces on this desk are reported the same way the science ones are. Where a structure has a designer, the designer is named; where it has a documented history, the history is linked; where a figure is quoted, be it a span, a height or a capacity, it comes from the body that built or measured the thing. Where a claim rests on one source, that source is the link rather than a paraphrase of it, so a reader can check the number instead of taking it.

Food, travel and events appear when there is something specific to say about them. A recommendation with no reporting behind it is an advertisement with the disclosure removed. The consequence is that this desk publishes rarely and unevenly: a subject waits until there is a structure, a designer or a measurement to report, rather than being scheduled to fill a slot.

Two pieces is not an oversight and it is not a promise of more. A sand hotel in Oss stands here because the engineering is documented and unusual: a structure that has to be built wet, occupied dry and demolished on schedule. A survey of dams stands here because the reporting question turned out to be the opposite of the obvious one: what makes the famous ones worth looking at is mostly the gorge, the river and the drop, none of which the engineers chose. Both survive being read years later, which is the only test this desk applies before publishing.