Jiat-Hwee Chang | National University of Singapore (original) (raw)

Books by Jiat-Hwee Chang

Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore is the first comprehensive documentatio... more Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore is the first comprehensive documentation of Singapore’s modern built environment. Through a series of building biographies, the book uncovers the many untold histories of the Southeast Asian city-state’s modernisation, from the rise of iconic buildings, such as the Pearl Bank Apartments, the former PUB Building and the Jurong Town Hall, to the spread of ordinary typologies like the condominium, the multi-storey car park, the podium-tower block, the flatted factory, the community centre, the standardised school building, the pedestrian overhead bridge, and the columbarium.
Co-authored by Chang Jiat Hwee and Justin Zhuang, the book’s 33 essays cover the social and architectural lives of many modernist types in Singapore—from their births to their transformations in both their social perceptions and uses over time, and finally to their eventual deaths through demolitions and redevelopments. The essays are richly illustrated with some 200 archival images and drawings as well as around 100 contemporary photos by architectural photographer Darren Soh. By examining the evolution of the once exceptional into the typical and how abstract spaces become lived places, the book traces how modernism radically transformed Singapore, made its inhabitants into modern citizens and has become part of everyday life in the city.

ISBN: 978-981-325-187-8

Synopsis (from book cover): A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture traces the origins of tropical a... more Synopsis (from book cover): A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture traces the origins of tropical architecture to nineteenth century British colonial architectural knowledge and practices. It uncovers how systematic knowledge and practices on building and environmental technologies in the tropics were linked to military technologies, medical theories and sanitary practices, and were manifested in colonial building types such as military barracks, hospitals and housing. It also explores the various ways these colonial knowledge and practices shaped post-war technoscientific research and education in climatic design and modern tropical architecture.

Drawing on the interdisciplinary scholarships on postcolonial studies, science studies, and environmental history, Jiat-Hwee Chang argues that tropical architecture was inextricably entangled with the socio-cultural constructions of tropical nature, and the politics of colonial governance and postcolonial development in the British colonial and post-colonial networks.

By bringing to light new historical materials through formidable research and tracing the history of tropical architecture beyond what is widely considered today as its "founding moment" in the mid-twentieth century, this important and original book revises our understanding of colonial built environment. It also provides a new historical framework that significantly bears upon contemporary concerns with climatic design and sustainable architecture.

This book is an essential resource for understanding tropical architecture and its various contemporary manifestations. Its in-depth discussion and path breaking insights will be invaluable to specialists, academics, students and practitioners.

Southeast Asia's Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power, 2019

What is the modern in Southeast Asia’s architecture and how do we approach its study critically? ... more What is the modern in Southeast Asia’s architecture and how do we approach its study critically? This pathbreaking multidisciplinary volume is the first critical survey of Southeast Asia’s modern architecture. It looks at the challenges of studying this complex history through the conceptual frameworks of translation, epistemology and power. Challenging Eurocentric ideas and architectural nomenclature, the authors examine the development of modern architecture in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, with a focus on selective translation and strategic appropriation of imported ideas and practices by local architects and builders. The book transforms our understandings of the region’s modern architecture by moving beyond a consideration of architecture as an aesthetic artefact and instead examining its entanglement with different dynamics of power.

“This collection opens the existing field up and will enrich specialists’ way of seeing. It shows how ‘modern architecture’ could be differently understood, challenged, transformed and owned. It capably represents a break, but not a retreat from influential architectural history and theory. The aim is to not merely moving beyond the comfortable limit of dominant architectural approach, to retrieve neglected categories, the sense of otherness, and zones of ignorance, but to show how they are constitutive parts of the discipline. The volume is enriching for it challenges without ignoring the establishment.”
– Abidin Kusno, University of British Columbia

“A provocative collection of essays that challenge both colonial epistemologies and nationalist constructs traditionally employed in analyzing modern architectures, landscapes and spatial practices of Southeast Asia; fresh ‘home scholarship’ from authors deeply engaged with the region at the same time that they critically re-construct that ‘regionality’ in terms of cross-cultural flows, knowledge production and politics; a most welcome addition to critical spatial histories of the ‘non-West’.”
– Sibel Bozdogan, Boston University

ISBN 978-981-47-2278-0 (paperback)

"This book provides a comprehensive historical and theoretical overview of modern architecture in... more "This book provides a comprehensive historical and theoretical overview of modern architecture in regions outside the “West” — Europe and North America. It brings together contributions from leading scholars in the interdisciplinary fields of architecture history, architecture theory, area studies, sociology and cultural studies. It interrogates Eurocentric views of modern architecture as autonomous and homogeneous and posits a heteronomous and heterogeneous understanding of
modern architecture. Drawing from interdisciplinary theories, this book explores the complex relations between modernism, modernity and modernization and their entanglements with colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism and development,
globalization and regionalism. Closely examining the diverse cases of architectural modernisms in China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Turkey, Brazil and South Africa, this book transcends the geographic division of labour in area studies to offer a broad
comparative survey of modernisms beyond the West. It also covers heterogeneous temporalities of modernism today, tracing the continuities and discontinuities between the past and the present, from the proto-modern to the post-modern, from the west
to the rest.

This book is an essential resource for understanding architectural modernism outside its “western” regions and mindsets. Its in-depth discussion and insights will be invaluable to specialists, academics and graduate students. It is also comprehensive
enough to be used as a textbook for undergraduate students, and general enough for practitioners and the curious general reader."

Journal Articles by Jiat-Hwee Chang

Urban Studies, 2024

This paper develops the concept of thermal governance as a way to think critically about urbaniza... more This paper develops the concept of thermal governance as a way to think critically about urbanization and the management of heat at a time of climate change. Through the urban history of Doha between the 1950s and the 1980s, this paper deploys thermal governance to rethink urbanization and airconditioning dependency in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) cities, especially in relation to the notion of petro-urbanism. The 'thermal' in the concept emphasises the spatial connections of thermal exchanges across different scales and domains. This paper uses architecture, cooling technologies and urban thermal metabolism to understand the relations between hydrocarbons and political power. It specifically explores the linkages between the circulation of hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon revenues on the one hand, and thermal privilege and violence in Doha and other GCC cities on the other hand. The notion of ‘governance’ allows the paper to move away from techno-centric and purportedly objective ways of understanding heat to comprehend how social and political power are implicated in the management of heat.

Time + Architecture , 2023

This is a Chinese translation of my chapter “The Air-Conditioning Complex: Histories and Futures ... more This is a Chinese translation of my chapter “The Air-Conditioning Complex: Histories and Futures of Hybridization in Asia.” In Environmental Histories of Architecture, edited by Kim Förster. Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1-62. Open access at https://www.librarystack.org/environmental-histories-of-architecture/.

Translation by Chen Kehao

建筑师 The Architect, 2022

Translated by Sun Zhijian 孙志健 Adapted and translated from "Atmospheric Materialities" in Building... more Translated by Sun Zhijian 孙志健
Adapted and translated from "Atmospheric Materialities" in Building-Object：Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture，edited by Charlotte Ashby and Mark Crinson. London：Bloomsbury Visual Arts，2022

Architectural Histories , 2021

Architectural historian Jiat-Hwee Chang teaches at the National University of Singapore and studi... more Architectural historian Jiat-Hwee Chang teaches at the National University of Singapore and studies climatic design and technoscientific knowledge. In this interview, he discusses the themes and places that have influenced his work-from his early experiences as a student of architecture and how they have animated his book A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature, and Technoscience, of 2016, to his current manuscript Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore, to be published in 2022. In this conversation with Anita Bakshi, Chang reflects on the translation of architectural knowledge into the personal, political, and technical spheres and brings a rich range of knowledge and experience to bear on important current questions of environmental justice, urban inequality, and climate change.

South East of Now, 2021

How did colonialism affect the production, maintenance and reproduction of spatial orders in Sout... more How did colonialism affect the production, maintenance and reproduction of spatial orders in Southeast Asia historically? The six essays in this special themed section seek to cast new light on this old question by dissecting the three interrelated aspects of colonial spatial order: representation, typology and agency. They investigate how a range of techniques of visual and spatial representation-such as cartography, photography, painting and modelmaking, in various media like newspaper, pictorial and exhibition-were used to inscribe order and project power. A number of them delve into how colonial norms and interventions in the design, planning and management of building and urban typologies that range from nipa huts to villas, kampungs to segregated cities, contributed to the ordering of colonial spaces and the spatialization of colonial classifications and hierarchies. Central to these essays are various forms of under-explored colonial spatial agencies that include colonial elite intermediaries like wealthy Chinese Kapiteins and towkays, colonial professionals like architects and public health experts, and regular colonial subjects, who variously impose, implement, appropriate, correct, subvert, resist and invert colonial spatial orders. Behind the theme of colonial spatial orders is the assumption that every political system produces its own socio-spatial structure just as every socio

South East of Now, 2021

Through the eclectic architecture of the three houses commissioned by the wealthy Singapore-based... more Through the eclectic architecture of the three houses commissioned by the wealthy Singapore-based businessman Aw Boon Haw in Singapore and Hong Kong in the 1920s and 1930s, this article explores architecture as part of the multimedia visual culture that was deployed by Aw to promote himself, as well as advertise and sell products on a vast scale for his transnational pharmaceutical and media empires to multiethnic and multicultural audiences that spanned across Southeast and East Asia in the pre-World War II era. Using cultural entrepreneurship as a framework to analyse Aw's business empires and philanthropic work, this article shows how Aw strategically mobilised artists, designers and architects like Kwan Wai Nung, Tchang Ju Chi and Ho Kwong Yew to shape the emerging modern visual field and help him accumulate social, cultural and economic capital. The article also proposes that we go beyond our preoccupation with the Anglophone world to look at the cultural influences of the Sinophone world of East and Southeast Asia in the early 20th century in order to understand how modern art and design tendencies might have circulated and translated transnationally to Singapore.

Journal of Architectural Education, 2020

Drawing on cases from the tropical and subtropical worlds (in Australia and Southeast Asia), we e... more Drawing on cases from the tropical and subtropical worlds (in Australia and Southeast Asia), we employ southern architectural examples to interrogate normative assumptions around climatic design. As the foundation for a new history of climatic design, this article seeks not only to challenge northern, temperate views of climate in the age of the Anthropocene but also to emphasize tropical zones as a significant paradigm for architects to consider. Our three case studies (i.e., early climographs, the Singapore building code, and the Malay house) delve into some of the Others of climatic design in the southern hemisphere, reassessing the legacy of Asian vernacular architecture. Together, these examples offer new interpretations on race and labor, passive cooling, building codes, and visual models used by architects to represent tropical climates. These case studies reveal that southern climatic models are not simply neutral representations and remain deeply entangled with biased assumptions around cultural identity, place, and historical contexts.

Ardeth, 2020

This essay explores the technopolitical and sociotech-nical contingencies of the transnational hi... more This essay explores the technopolitical and sociotech-nical contingencies of the transnational histories of airconditioning in urban Asia. It interrogates the mainstream technocentric and technologically-determinist understanding of air-conditioning , energy use and climate change by challenging its climatic determinism, diffusionist account of globalization, and understanding of architecture as mere energy conduit. In place of these assumptions, this essay argues that thermal comfort depends on not just climatic variables but also on social practices and cultural norms. It also understands the globalization of air-conditioning technologies as consisting not of diffusionist processes that replicate universal forms but of context-specific translations whereby "universal" forms mutate. Lastly, this essay sees architecture as having material agencies that entangle with thermal comfort and energy in complex manners.

ABE Journal, 2020

This is the editorial introduction to the first of two special issues of ABE (Architecture Beyond... more This is the editorial introduction to the first of two special issues of ABE (Architecture Beyond Europe) Journal on "The Entanglements of Architecture and Comfort beyond the Temperate World". The open access articles in the issue that engage with the histories of comfort, thermal material culture, and architecture from different parts of the world, including China, Costa Rica, Australia, and Africa are available at https://journals.openedition.org/abe/7853

This paper explores how climatic design for the tropics was socio-technically constructed at its ... more This paper explores how climatic design for the tropics was socio-technically constructed at its moment of inception in the mid-twentieth century by two of its best known proponents: George Atkinson at the Tropical Building Division, Building Research Station and Otto Koenigsberger at the Department of Tropical Studies, the Architectural Association.

I argue that undergirding Atkinson’s construction of climatic design for the tropics was a mechanistic and reductive understanding of thermal comfort based on the research done by the air-conditioning industry in the United States in the early twentieth century. Not only did the reductive understanding of thermal comfort ignore local cultural norms and social practices in maintaining comfort, it also indirectly helped to further metropolitan interests in the tropics. In the case of Koenigsberger’s construction of climatic design, I show that he was influenced by the mid-twentieth century researchers in hot-climate physiology. These researchers combined nineteenth-century colonial medical ideas of the tropics as a torrid zone with the early twentieth-century industrial physiologists’ understanding of the correlation between environmental conditions of thermal stress and low productivity. They assumed that labourers in the tropics worked under perpetual thermal stress and became easily fatigued, thus hindering the socio-economic development of the tropics.

By foregrounding the entanglements between climate and economy, comfort and development, and nature and culture, this paper follows the Anthropocene thesis that invalidates the ontological distinction between human culture and nature. In doing so, this paper also complicates the recent call for a return to climatic design and its low-energy passive means of cooling.

This paper develops the concept of thermal modernity in order to offer a more detailed understand... more This paper develops the concept of thermal modernity in order to offer a more detailed understanding of air conditioning and the historical role it has played in transforming urban and built space. An analysis oriented by the insights of Science and Technology Studies stresses how the international ascendancy of air conditioning has been contingent upon certain socio-political forces and cultural changes that occur at the local level. The productive example of Singapore—often referred to as the ‘air-conditioned’ nation—is given to reveal the entanglements between indoor comfort provision, economic development and post-colonial nation-building. At a broader level, the paper points towards the importance of understanding air conditioning's impact on the spread of international modernism in analytically expansive ways, such that we can more fully appreciate how it has acted to remodel the built environment at different scales and reconfigure indoor and outdoor relationships.

"In this paper, we trace the history of tropical architecture beyond its supposed founding moment... more "In this paper, we trace the history of tropical architecture beyond its supposed founding moment, that is, its institutionalization and naming-as-such, in the mid-twentieth century. We note that many of the planning principles, spatial configurations and environmental technologies of tropical architecture could be traced to knowledge and practices from the eighteenth century onwards, and we explore three pre-1950s moments of ‘tropical architecture’ in the British empire through building types such as the bungalow, military barrack and labourers’ housing in the tropics. Unlike the depoliticized technical discourse of tropical architecture in the mid-twentieth century, this earlier history shows that so-called tropical architecture was inextricably entangled with medical and racial discourses, biopolitics and the political economy of colonialism. We argue that tropical architecture should not be understood as an entity with a fixed essence that is overdetermined by a timeless and unchanging external tropical nature. Rather, tropical architecture should be understood as a set of shifting discourses that privilege tropical nature, especially climate, in various ways as the prime determinant of built form according to different constellations of sociocultural and technoscientific conditions. We thus see ‘tropical architecture’ not as a depoliticized entity but as a power-knowledge configuration inextricably linked to asymmetrical colonial power relations.
Keywords: tropical architecture, bungalow, military barrack, labourers’ housing, colonial biopolitics,
power-knowledge"

Journal of Architectural Education, Jan 1, 2010

Singapore Journal of …, Jan 1, 2011

ABE Journal: European Architecture Beyond Europe, No. 5, Dec 2014

This is a short piece on the use of Foucauldian analytics of power in colonial architecture and u... more This is a short piece on the use of Foucauldian analytics of power in colonial architecture and urbanism. It is the second piece published in the new debate section of ABE Journal: European Architecture beyond Europe. It is an invited response to the first piece -- a critique of the use of Foucauldian analytics of power -- by the section editor Mark Crinson. See Mark Crinson, "The Powers that be" (http://dev.abejournal.eu/index.php?id=582)

Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore is the first comprehensive documentatio... more Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore is the first comprehensive documentation of Singapore’s modern built environment. Through a series of building biographies, the book uncovers the many untold histories of the Southeast Asian city-state’s modernisation, from the rise of iconic buildings, such as the Pearl Bank Apartments, the former PUB Building and the Jurong Town Hall, to the spread of ordinary typologies like the condominium, the multi-storey car park, the podium-tower block, the flatted factory, the community centre, the standardised school building, the pedestrian overhead bridge, and the columbarium.
Co-authored by Chang Jiat Hwee and Justin Zhuang, the book’s 33 essays cover the social and architectural lives of many modernist types in Singapore—from their births to their transformations in both their social perceptions and uses over time, and finally to their eventual deaths through demolitions and redevelopments. The essays are richly illustrated with some 200 archival images and drawings as well as around 100 contemporary photos by architectural photographer Darren Soh. By examining the evolution of the once exceptional into the typical and how abstract spaces become lived places, the book traces how modernism radically transformed Singapore, made its inhabitants into modern citizens and has become part of everyday life in the city.

ISBN: 978-981-325-187-8

Synopsis (from book cover): A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture traces the origins of tropical a... more Synopsis (from book cover): A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture traces the origins of tropical architecture to nineteenth century British colonial architectural knowledge and practices. It uncovers how systematic knowledge and practices on building and environmental technologies in the tropics were linked to military technologies, medical theories and sanitary practices, and were manifested in colonial building types such as military barracks, hospitals and housing. It also explores the various ways these colonial knowledge and practices shaped post-war technoscientific research and education in climatic design and modern tropical architecture.

Drawing on the interdisciplinary scholarships on postcolonial studies, science studies, and environmental history, Jiat-Hwee Chang argues that tropical architecture was inextricably entangled with the socio-cultural constructions of tropical nature, and the politics of colonial governance and postcolonial development in the British colonial and post-colonial networks.

By bringing to light new historical materials through formidable research and tracing the history of tropical architecture beyond what is widely considered today as its "founding moment" in the mid-twentieth century, this important and original book revises our understanding of colonial built environment. It also provides a new historical framework that significantly bears upon contemporary concerns with climatic design and sustainable architecture.

This book is an essential resource for understanding tropical architecture and its various contemporary manifestations. Its in-depth discussion and path breaking insights will be invaluable to specialists, academics, students and practitioners.

Southeast Asia's Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power, 2019

What is the modern in Southeast Asia’s architecture and how do we approach its study critically? ... more What is the modern in Southeast Asia’s architecture and how do we approach its study critically? This pathbreaking multidisciplinary volume is the first critical survey of Southeast Asia’s modern architecture. It looks at the challenges of studying this complex history through the conceptual frameworks of translation, epistemology and power. Challenging Eurocentric ideas and architectural nomenclature, the authors examine the development of modern architecture in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, with a focus on selective translation and strategic appropriation of imported ideas and practices by local architects and builders. The book transforms our understandings of the region’s modern architecture by moving beyond a consideration of architecture as an aesthetic artefact and instead examining its entanglement with different dynamics of power.

“This collection opens the existing field up and will enrich specialists’ way of seeing. It shows how ‘modern architecture’ could be differently understood, challenged, transformed and owned. It capably represents a break, but not a retreat from influential architectural history and theory. The aim is to not merely moving beyond the comfortable limit of dominant architectural approach, to retrieve neglected categories, the sense of otherness, and zones of ignorance, but to show how they are constitutive parts of the discipline. The volume is enriching for it challenges without ignoring the establishment.”
– Abidin Kusno, University of British Columbia

“A provocative collection of essays that challenge both colonial epistemologies and nationalist constructs traditionally employed in analyzing modern architectures, landscapes and spatial practices of Southeast Asia; fresh ‘home scholarship’ from authors deeply engaged with the region at the same time that they critically re-construct that ‘regionality’ in terms of cross-cultural flows, knowledge production and politics; a most welcome addition to critical spatial histories of the ‘non-West’.”
– Sibel Bozdogan, Boston University

ISBN 978-981-47-2278-0 (paperback)

"This book provides a comprehensive historical and theoretical overview of modern architecture in... more "This book provides a comprehensive historical and theoretical overview of modern architecture in regions outside the “West” — Europe and North America. It brings together contributions from leading scholars in the interdisciplinary fields of architecture history, architecture theory, area studies, sociology and cultural studies. It interrogates Eurocentric views of modern architecture as autonomous and homogeneous and posits a heteronomous and heterogeneous understanding of
modern architecture. Drawing from interdisciplinary theories, this book explores the complex relations between modernism, modernity and modernization and their entanglements with colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism and development,
globalization and regionalism. Closely examining the diverse cases of architectural modernisms in China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Turkey, Brazil and South Africa, this book transcends the geographic division of labour in area studies to offer a broad
comparative survey of modernisms beyond the West. It also covers heterogeneous temporalities of modernism today, tracing the continuities and discontinuities between the past and the present, from the proto-modern to the post-modern, from the west
to the rest.

This book is an essential resource for understanding architectural modernism outside its “western” regions and mindsets. Its in-depth discussion and insights will be invaluable to specialists, academics and graduate students. It is also comprehensive
enough to be used as a textbook for undergraduate students, and general enough for practitioners and the curious general reader."

Urban Studies, 2024

This paper develops the concept of thermal governance as a way to think critically about urbaniza... more This paper develops the concept of thermal governance as a way to think critically about urbanization and the management of heat at a time of climate change. Through the urban history of Doha between the 1950s and the 1980s, this paper deploys thermal governance to rethink urbanization and airconditioning dependency in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) cities, especially in relation to the notion of petro-urbanism. The 'thermal' in the concept emphasises the spatial connections of thermal exchanges across different scales and domains. This paper uses architecture, cooling technologies and urban thermal metabolism to understand the relations between hydrocarbons and political power. It specifically explores the linkages between the circulation of hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon revenues on the one hand, and thermal privilege and violence in Doha and other GCC cities on the other hand. The notion of ‘governance’ allows the paper to move away from techno-centric and purportedly objective ways of understanding heat to comprehend how social and political power are implicated in the management of heat.

Time + Architecture , 2023

This is a Chinese translation of my chapter “The Air-Conditioning Complex: Histories and Futures ... more This is a Chinese translation of my chapter “The Air-Conditioning Complex: Histories and Futures of Hybridization in Asia.” In Environmental Histories of Architecture, edited by Kim Förster. Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1-62. Open access at https://www.librarystack.org/environmental-histories-of-architecture/.

Translation by Chen Kehao

建筑师 The Architect, 2022

Translated by Sun Zhijian 孙志健 Adapted and translated from "Atmospheric Materialities" in Building... more Translated by Sun Zhijian 孙志健
Adapted and translated from "Atmospheric Materialities" in Building-Object：Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture，edited by Charlotte Ashby and Mark Crinson. London：Bloomsbury Visual Arts，2022

Architectural Histories , 2021

Architectural historian Jiat-Hwee Chang teaches at the National University of Singapore and studi... more Architectural historian Jiat-Hwee Chang teaches at the National University of Singapore and studies climatic design and technoscientific knowledge. In this interview, he discusses the themes and places that have influenced his work-from his early experiences as a student of architecture and how they have animated his book A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature, and Technoscience, of 2016, to his current manuscript Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore, to be published in 2022. In this conversation with Anita Bakshi, Chang reflects on the translation of architectural knowledge into the personal, political, and technical spheres and brings a rich range of knowledge and experience to bear on important current questions of environmental justice, urban inequality, and climate change.

South East of Now, 2021

How did colonialism affect the production, maintenance and reproduction of spatial orders in Sout... more How did colonialism affect the production, maintenance and reproduction of spatial orders in Southeast Asia historically? The six essays in this special themed section seek to cast new light on this old question by dissecting the three interrelated aspects of colonial spatial order: representation, typology and agency. They investigate how a range of techniques of visual and spatial representation-such as cartography, photography, painting and modelmaking, in various media like newspaper, pictorial and exhibition-were used to inscribe order and project power. A number of them delve into how colonial norms and interventions in the design, planning and management of building and urban typologies that range from nipa huts to villas, kampungs to segregated cities, contributed to the ordering of colonial spaces and the spatialization of colonial classifications and hierarchies. Central to these essays are various forms of under-explored colonial spatial agencies that include colonial elite intermediaries like wealthy Chinese Kapiteins and towkays, colonial professionals like architects and public health experts, and regular colonial subjects, who variously impose, implement, appropriate, correct, subvert, resist and invert colonial spatial orders. Behind the theme of colonial spatial orders is the assumption that every political system produces its own socio-spatial structure just as every socio

South East of Now, 2021

Through the eclectic architecture of the three houses commissioned by the wealthy Singapore-based... more Through the eclectic architecture of the three houses commissioned by the wealthy Singapore-based businessman Aw Boon Haw in Singapore and Hong Kong in the 1920s and 1930s, this article explores architecture as part of the multimedia visual culture that was deployed by Aw to promote himself, as well as advertise and sell products on a vast scale for his transnational pharmaceutical and media empires to multiethnic and multicultural audiences that spanned across Southeast and East Asia in the pre-World War II era. Using cultural entrepreneurship as a framework to analyse Aw's business empires and philanthropic work, this article shows how Aw strategically mobilised artists, designers and architects like Kwan Wai Nung, Tchang Ju Chi and Ho Kwong Yew to shape the emerging modern visual field and help him accumulate social, cultural and economic capital. The article also proposes that we go beyond our preoccupation with the Anglophone world to look at the cultural influences of the Sinophone world of East and Southeast Asia in the early 20th century in order to understand how modern art and design tendencies might have circulated and translated transnationally to Singapore.

Journal of Architectural Education, 2020

Drawing on cases from the tropical and subtropical worlds (in Australia and Southeast Asia), we e... more Drawing on cases from the tropical and subtropical worlds (in Australia and Southeast Asia), we employ southern architectural examples to interrogate normative assumptions around climatic design. As the foundation for a new history of climatic design, this article seeks not only to challenge northern, temperate views of climate in the age of the Anthropocene but also to emphasize tropical zones as a significant paradigm for architects to consider. Our three case studies (i.e., early climographs, the Singapore building code, and the Malay house) delve into some of the Others of climatic design in the southern hemisphere, reassessing the legacy of Asian vernacular architecture. Together, these examples offer new interpretations on race and labor, passive cooling, building codes, and visual models used by architects to represent tropical climates. These case studies reveal that southern climatic models are not simply neutral representations and remain deeply entangled with biased assumptions around cultural identity, place, and historical contexts.

Ardeth, 2020

This essay explores the technopolitical and sociotech-nical contingencies of the transnational hi... more This essay explores the technopolitical and sociotech-nical contingencies of the transnational histories of airconditioning in urban Asia. It interrogates the mainstream technocentric and technologically-determinist understanding of air-conditioning , energy use and climate change by challenging its climatic determinism, diffusionist account of globalization, and understanding of architecture as mere energy conduit. In place of these assumptions, this essay argues that thermal comfort depends on not just climatic variables but also on social practices and cultural norms. It also understands the globalization of air-conditioning technologies as consisting not of diffusionist processes that replicate universal forms but of context-specific translations whereby "universal" forms mutate. Lastly, this essay sees architecture as having material agencies that entangle with thermal comfort and energy in complex manners.

ABE Journal, 2020

This is the editorial introduction to the first of two special issues of ABE (Architecture Beyond... more This is the editorial introduction to the first of two special issues of ABE (Architecture Beyond Europe) Journal on "The Entanglements of Architecture and Comfort beyond the Temperate World". The open access articles in the issue that engage with the histories of comfort, thermal material culture, and architecture from different parts of the world, including China, Costa Rica, Australia, and Africa are available at https://journals.openedition.org/abe/7853

This paper explores how climatic design for the tropics was socio-technically constructed at its ... more This paper explores how climatic design for the tropics was socio-technically constructed at its moment of inception in the mid-twentieth century by two of its best known proponents: George Atkinson at the Tropical Building Division, Building Research Station and Otto Koenigsberger at the Department of Tropical Studies, the Architectural Association.

I argue that undergirding Atkinson’s construction of climatic design for the tropics was a mechanistic and reductive understanding of thermal comfort based on the research done by the air-conditioning industry in the United States in the early twentieth century. Not only did the reductive understanding of thermal comfort ignore local cultural norms and social practices in maintaining comfort, it also indirectly helped to further metropolitan interests in the tropics. In the case of Koenigsberger’s construction of climatic design, I show that he was influenced by the mid-twentieth century researchers in hot-climate physiology. These researchers combined nineteenth-century colonial medical ideas of the tropics as a torrid zone with the early twentieth-century industrial physiologists’ understanding of the correlation between environmental conditions of thermal stress and low productivity. They assumed that labourers in the tropics worked under perpetual thermal stress and became easily fatigued, thus hindering the socio-economic development of the tropics.

By foregrounding the entanglements between climate and economy, comfort and development, and nature and culture, this paper follows the Anthropocene thesis that invalidates the ontological distinction between human culture and nature. In doing so, this paper also complicates the recent call for a return to climatic design and its low-energy passive means of cooling.

This paper develops the concept of thermal modernity in order to offer a more detailed understand... more This paper develops the concept of thermal modernity in order to offer a more detailed understanding of air conditioning and the historical role it has played in transforming urban and built space. An analysis oriented by the insights of Science and Technology Studies stresses how the international ascendancy of air conditioning has been contingent upon certain socio-political forces and cultural changes that occur at the local level. The productive example of Singapore—often referred to as the ‘air-conditioned’ nation—is given to reveal the entanglements between indoor comfort provision, economic development and post-colonial nation-building. At a broader level, the paper points towards the importance of understanding air conditioning's impact on the spread of international modernism in analytically expansive ways, such that we can more fully appreciate how it has acted to remodel the built environment at different scales and reconfigure indoor and outdoor relationships.

"In this paper, we trace the history of tropical architecture beyond its supposed founding moment... more "In this paper, we trace the history of tropical architecture beyond its supposed founding moment, that is, its institutionalization and naming-as-such, in the mid-twentieth century. We note that many of the planning principles, spatial configurations and environmental technologies of tropical architecture could be traced to knowledge and practices from the eighteenth century onwards, and we explore three pre-1950s moments of ‘tropical architecture’ in the British empire through building types such as the bungalow, military barrack and labourers’ housing in the tropics. Unlike the depoliticized technical discourse of tropical architecture in the mid-twentieth century, this earlier history shows that so-called tropical architecture was inextricably entangled with medical and racial discourses, biopolitics and the political economy of colonialism. We argue that tropical architecture should not be understood as an entity with a fixed essence that is overdetermined by a timeless and unchanging external tropical nature. Rather, tropical architecture should be understood as a set of shifting discourses that privilege tropical nature, especially climate, in various ways as the prime determinant of built form according to different constellations of sociocultural and technoscientific conditions. We thus see ‘tropical architecture’ not as a depoliticized entity but as a power-knowledge configuration inextricably linked to asymmetrical colonial power relations.
Keywords: tropical architecture, bungalow, military barrack, labourers’ housing, colonial biopolitics,
power-knowledge"

Journal of Architectural Education, Jan 1, 2010

Singapore Journal of …, Jan 1, 2011

ABE Journal: European Architecture Beyond Europe, No. 5, Dec 2014

This is a short piece on the use of Foucauldian analytics of power in colonial architecture and u... more This is a short piece on the use of Foucauldian analytics of power in colonial architecture and urbanism. It is the second piece published in the new debate section of ABE Journal: European Architecture beyond Europe. It is an invited response to the first piece -- a critique of the use of Foucauldian analytics of power -- by the section editor Mark Crinson. See Mark Crinson, "The Powers that be" (http://dev.abejournal.eu/index.php?id=582)

Published in docomomo International Journal 57 (2017)

Unit. Volume 2: Golden Mile Complex, 2024

Written as a foreword to Samantha Chia and Finbarr Fallon, Unit. Volume 2: Golden Mile Complex. I... more Written as a foreword to Samantha Chia and Finbarr Fallon, Unit. Volume 2: Golden Mile Complex. ISBN: 978-981-94-1108-5

An essay on OCBC Centre written for "I. M. Pei: Life is Architecture" edited by Shirley Surya and... more An essay on OCBC Centre written for "I. M. Pei: Life is Architecture" edited by Shirley Surya and Aric Chen (London and Hong Kong: Thames & Hudson and M Plus, 2024)

Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism: Leisurescapes in the Global Sunbelt, 2022

This paper explores the longer colonial and postcolonial historical trajectory of the Bali Style ... more This paper explores the longer colonial and postcolonial historical trajectory of the Bali Style to understand the cultural politics and economic imperatives behind the aesthetics. Instead of understanding the Bali Style as an architectural regionalism produced by a group of cosmopolitan designers and hoteliers from Asia and Australia, this paper argues that the Bali Style has to be seen in relation to the colonial and postcolonial development of tourism and the concomitant constructions of Balinese tradition in the aftermaths of violent events leading to political regime changes. The Bali Style could thus be understood as a means of anaesthetizing the trauma of political conflicts. This paper also shows that the Bali Style was aligned to both the national and transnational political economic forces of tourism landscape production, and it adhered to the recommendations of key global institutions like the World Bank and the Pacific Area Travel Association in promoting tourism.

In Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism: Leisurescapes in the Global Sunbelt edited by Sibel Bozdogan, Panayiota Pyla, and Petros Phokaides (New York: Routledge, 2022)

Building/Object: Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture, 2022

This essay explores the material impact of air on the built environment through the concept of th... more This essay explores the material impact of air on the built environment through the concept of thermal material culture. It examines how the introduction of air-conditioning in the public housing of Singapore affected the thermal exchanges and flows of energy between atmosphere, bodies, and a spectrum of things across different scales from the 1960s to the 2000s. In doing so, this essay seeks to contribute to the recent ‘atmospheric turn’ in the social sciences and humanities, and the architectural history scholarship on architecture, technology and the environment.

in Contested Territories of Design and Architecture, Charlotte Ashby and Mark Crinson eds (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)

Published in Cheng, Irene., Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. 2020. Race and Modern Arc... more Published in Cheng, Irene., Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. 2020. Race and Modern Architecture. A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

in Justin Zhuang ed., Mok Wei Wei: Works by W Architects (London: Thames and Hudson, 2021)

This chapter has been revised and published as Chapter 5 of my monograph A Genealogy of Tropical ... more This chapter has been revised and published as Chapter 5 of my monograph A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture. Please refer to that. Thank you.

Originally published in Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, edited by Duanfang Lu, 211-35. London: Routledge, 2010.

Journal of Architecture and Building Science (Japan), Vol. 134, No. 1724, 2019. Published by the ... more Journal of Architecture and Building Science (Japan), Vol. 134, No. 1724, 2019. Published by the Architectural Institute of Japan.

In the themed section on 'Organisational Group and Atelier Group in Asia--Reading Architects' Ecosystem of Generic Cities," co-edited by Kengo Hayashi.

The Singapore Architect, 2020

Published in issue 19 of The Singapore Architect. This essay was originally written for the dos... more Published in issue 19 of The Singapore Architect.

This essay was originally written for the dossier submitted to docomomo (documentation and conservation of Modern Movement) International by the docomomo Singapore working group in mid-2020. With the URA’s landmark announcement on 9 October 2020 that the Golden Mile Complex is being proposed for conservation, this essay takes on a different significance. We hope that the announcement marks the beginning of the conservation of more postwar modernist buildings. Seen in this light, the essay might serve as a guide on the other significant modern buildings in Singapore that we feel should be conserved.

Mind's Eye, 2020

A short piece on Covid-19, air-conditioning, and social inequality for Clark Art Institute's news... more A short piece on Covid-19, air-conditioning, and social inequality for Clark Art Institute's newsletter "Mind's Eye"

The Singapore Architect, 2019

This essays discusses the architects and architecture of modern churches -- Seventh Day Adventist... more This essays discusses the architects and architecture of modern churches -- Seventh Day Adventist Church (1934), Catholic Church of Saint Bernadette (1961), former St. Matthew’s Church (1963), and Blessed Sacrament Church (1965) -- and temple -- Chee Tong Temple (1987).

The Singapore Architect, 2019

This essay examines the houses designed and lived in by pioneer architects of Singapore, Alfred W... more This essay examines the houses designed and lived in by pioneer architects of Singapore, Alfred Wong, Victor Chew and William Lim.

Published in The Singapore Architect 03 (2016), pp. 83-92. Editor's introduction to a special s... more Published in The Singapore Architect 03 (2016), pp. 83-92.

Editor's introduction to a special section of The Singapore Architect on Curating/Collecting Architecture. Contributors to the special section includes:
1. Teo Yee Chin on curating and designing the Singapore Pavilion at the 15th Venice Biennale, 2016.
2. Setiadi Sopandi on curating the Indonesian Pavilion at the 14th Venice Biennale, 2014 and the "Tropicality Revisited" Exhibition at the German Architecture Museum.
3. Shirley Surya on building the M+ Collection, Hong Kong.
4. Ipek Tureli's essay based on her interview with Mirko Zardini, Canadian Centre for Architecture.
5. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi's interview with Barry Bergdoll, Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Published in The Singapore Architect, issue 01, 2015

Published in Singapore Architect no. 264 (2011).

Published in Singapore Architect, no. 250 (2009)

Published in Futurarc, Jul/Aug 2014

Published in Singapore Architect, no.278 (2014)

The Straits Times, 2020

Op-ed for The Straits Times

联合早报, 2020

Translated by Lim Pei Ling (林佩玲）

This workshop examines the relationship between cooling technologies, the environment, and societ... more This workshop examines the relationship between cooling technologies, the environment, and societies in Asia through interdisciplinary perspectives. Cooling technologies include, but are not limited to, those that create airflow, evaporation, endothermic reactions, and refrigeration cycles. They also include broader technological infrastructures, such as airconditioned built environments, produce cold chains, and the electricity and water networks that support them. Residents of Asia have long relied upon such technologies to regulate thermal sensations and to preserve and distribute produce. At the same time these cooling technologies have modified Asian environments across different scales, in both direct and indirect ways. In contemporary Asia, cooling technologies have become a major source of energy consumption and, so, are contributing to both local and global patterns of climate change.

The 2nd Southeast Asia Architecture Research Collaborative (SEAARC) Symposium was held in the Nat... more The 2nd Southeast Asia Architecture Research Collaborative (SEAARC) Symposium was held in the National University of Singapore from 5-7 Jan 2017. The theme - "Modernity's Other' - challenges the participants to disclose the submerged, erased or neglected aspects of architectural and urban histories. 20 papers were presented around four themes - 'Challenges of the Archive', 'Teleology fractured and abandoned', 'Architecture and Violence' and 'Types, minor types and non-types'. Each theme is an attempt to undermine the internal structures of architectural historiography as well as build bridges with adjacent disciplines that have also grappled with the challenges of postcolonial and subaltern theory. As an interdisciplinary symposium, participants were drawn from architectural history, art history, history, anthropology, urban studies and cultural studies. Carl Trocki and Abidin Kusno provided some reflections on the theme as keynote speakers. As the second in the series of symposiums organized by the SEAARC, it is part of a longer project to foreground Southeast Asia as an important intellectual nexus in architectural/urban research and bring scholars within and outside the region into dialogue with each other.

Modernity’s ‘Other’ – Disclosing Southeast Asia’s built environment across the colonial and postc... more Modernity’s ‘Other’ – Disclosing Southeast Asia’s built environment across the colonial and postcolonial worlds

A selection of the papers from this symposium has been extensively edited and published in Jiat-H... more A selection of the papers from this symposium has been extensively edited and published in Jiat-Hwee Chang and Imran bin Tajudeen eds., South East Asia's Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power (Singapore: NUS Press, 2019).

https://www.academia.edu/38187116/Historiographical_Questions_in_Southeast_Asias_Modern_Architecture

1st SEAARC (Southeast Asia Architecture Research Collaborative) Symposium
Questions in Southeast Asia’s Architecture / Southeast Asia’s Architecture in Question
Dates: 8-10 January 2015 (Thursday to Saturday)
Venue: Department of Architecture, SDE, National University of Singapore
Convenors: Chang Jiat Hwee, Imran bin Tajudeen and Lee Kah Wee

Book includes Call for Papers, programme and abstracts

Technology and Culture, 2021

Ludovic Laloux is a professor of history at Hauts-de-France Polytechnic University in Valencienne... more Ludovic Laloux is a professor of history at Hauts-de-France Polytechnic University in Valenciennes (France). His ongoing research is on the world of work and companies.

Journal of Society of Architectural Historians, 2020

Planning Perspectives, 2019

Published in Planning Perspectives, 2019