Abstract

The current preoccupation with architectural regionalism and green architecture has contributed to the recently renewed interest in tropical architecture. But what is tropical architecture? Instead of assuming it as a “natural” – asocial, apolitical and ahistorical – entity as the anodyne phrase suggests, this lecture explores the formations and transformations of tropical architecture historically.

This lecture traces the origins of tropical architecture to eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries British colonial architectural knowledge and practices. It attends to how systematic knowledge and practices on environmental technologies in the tropics such as ventilation and sun-shading were linked to military technologies, medical theories, cultural assumptions, and sanitary practices, and were manifested in building types such as military barracks, hospitals and housing. This study also documents how these knowledge and practices were subsequently transformed into technoscientific discourse of climatic design and tropical building science, and institutionalized as modern tropical architecture in the mid-twentieth century, which became the hegemonic norm for architectural development in the tropical belt.

Drawing on the interdisciplinary scholarships on postcolonial studies, science studies, and environmental history, I argue that tropical architecture was inextricably entangled with the socio-historical constructions of tropical nature and the politics of colonial governance and postcolonial development. Although this lecture draws its main case studies from Singapore, it situates these case studies in relation to the production, circulation and reception of the knowledge and practices of tropical architecture across different time-spaces in the larger British colonial networks, from Britain to British India, from the West Indies to the West Africa.

Bio

Chang Jiat Hwee is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He obtained his PhD in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley in 2009. His interdisciplinary research on (post)colonial architectural history and theory, and the socio-technical aspects of sustainability in the built environment have been published as various book chapters and journal articles. He is currently working on a book titled A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonialism, Ecology and Nature (to be published by Archi-text series, Routledge). He is the co-editor of Non West Modernist Past (2011) and a special issue of Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography on “tropical spatialities”(2011). He is also the author of two monographs on contemporary architecture in Singapore: Sculpting Spaces in the Tropics (2012), No Boundaries (2010).

Activity within the research groups Cities, Cultures, and Architecture (CCArq) and Democracy, Citizenship and Law (DECIDe)