Jiat-Hwee Chang is an architectural historian, theorist and critic whose writings on the various aspects of colonial and postcolonial architectural history, socio-technical dimensions of sustainable architecture, and design culture in Asia have been widely published. His latest book is A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (Architext 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: The Lien Villas Collective (2010).
Abstract
Permeability, Mobility and Mutability: Three “Movements” in the Colonial Built Heritage of Southeast Asia
Many urban societies in Southeast Asia were and still are multicultural or plural societies. The process of designating and conserving representative historic buildings as built heritage in these cosmopolitan societies presents challenges that are different from those in culturally much more homogeneous societies elsewhere. Instead of selecting historic buildings that represent bounded, stable and “pure” cultural identity, some heritage scholars argue that colonial buildings best exemplify the multicultural heritage of these societies as they are hybrid cultural artifacts that foreground the permeability of boundaries between cultural categories. Furthermore, many of these colonial buildings are also mobile transnational typologies that crossed geographical boundaries. Similar colonial buildings could be found in other localities with shared colonial heritage. I ground the above discussion of cultural permeability and geographical mobility using the cases of British colonial bungalows and barracks in multicultural and cosmopolitan Singapore. In doing so, I also question the oversights and problems of such conceptual frameworks, particularly some common assumptions regarding cultural hybridity and mobility in built heritage. Lastly, I explore how these colonial buildings have transformed despite, or perhaps because of, heritage conservation. I am particularly interested in the mutations, both socio-cultural and socio-technical, that have happened to these buildings precisely because of the prescriptions of the regime of heritage conservation in Singapore.