Eunice M. F. Seng (PhD, Columbia; MArch, Princeton; BAAS, NUS) is Associate Professor and Chair of the Departmental Research Postgraduate Committee (PhD Program Director) in Architecture at the University of Hong Kong; and Founding Principal of SKEW Collaborative. She is founding member of Docomomo HK, member of Asia Urban Lab, Singapore, and co-director of the Singapore Institute of Architects Archifest 2017. Her work explores interdisciplinary intersections, transnational connections, and agency in architecture, housing, domesticity, gender, labor, and public space.
Finding visual imagery of women workers is discovering a society’s attitudes on gender, equity, a... more Finding visual imagery of women workers is discovering a society’s attitudes on gender, equity, and the environment, its understanding of civic responsibilities, and aspirations of citizenship, which continues to reproduce the development discourse in the present. Their tenacious presence in the artworks asserts women’s agency amid modernity’s changing forms of work.
https://www.nationalgallery.sg/magazine/tough-job-fieldnotes-on-working-women-in-development-and-the-environment
In conversation with Sarah Whiting and Ho Puay Peng, 2023
Within two months of WHO declaring the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 30, 2020, articles o... more Within two months of WHO declaring the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 30, 2020, articles on architectural and urban design practice and education, planning, building construction, technology, and sustainability, speculated on how the coronavirus pandemic could change the built environment. By summer 2020, the "post-pandemic" was the most frequently used descriptor in architectural events and publications. As Covid-19 raged on, producing variants from Delta to Omicron to Deltacron, the pandemic made the inequalities and injustices in different places, including campuses, workplaces, and homes, ever more glaring. For architectural students, the pandemic has meant canceling studio travel, field trips, the end of access to libraries and fabrication labs, presenting in reviews via video, and no commencement celebrations. In Inhabiting the Negative Space, artist and writer Jenny Odell ruminates how periods of inactivity can be reimagined as fertile spaces for design predicated less on relentless production and more on a deeper, careful look at what is demanding our time and attention and how we might use this "strange moment" to respond (Odell, Whiting, 2021). In her foreword, Whiting expresses that Odell’s talk drew each person attending the event inward to identify “our individual roles in defining our attitudes, our roles, and our possibilities” (Whiting, 2021). How do we meaningfully discuss competency in a world overturned by a pandemic and systemic exclusion? In conversation with Seng, Whiting and Ho deliberate on the challenges and changing expectations on competency in architectural education and practice amid the latency of the historical moment.
Special Issue on Cosmopolitanism’s Others: Forgotten Histories of Transnational Architectural Pra... more Special Issue on Cosmopolitanism’s Others: Forgotten Histories of Transnational Architectural Practice
Mapping the interconnections of industrial labor mobilization, legacies of colonial patriarchy, a... more Mapping the interconnections of industrial labor mobilization, legacies of colonial patriarchy, and migration enables the construction of an archive of women engaged in architectural work in post–Second World War Hong Kong.
Many female architects, landscape architects, and planners have contributed to Singapore’s built ... more Many female architects, landscape architects, and planners have contributed to Singapore’s built environment. In recent decades, female architects and planners are taking up leadership roles in all sectors, public and private, and on multiple levels. Moreover, many women participated in architectural practice against various odds and challenges, pushing boundaries and innovation through visible or less visible ways. It is crucial to turn our attention to the transitional decades in the twentieth century to meaningfully situate the contributions of the architects in consideration of the historical realities of women in architectural production. Against the backdrop of economic and urban development, these women engaged in conceptualising, designing, planning, constructing, teaching, writing, and managing the modern buildings, spaces, practices, and events in the city. Given contemporary realities of diversity and inclusion in the profession, an expanded understanding of women's roles in shaping Singapore’s built environment and a reappraisal of past and present criteria and methods used to assess architecture is timely.
Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 2021
In October 2016 the United Nations held its third Habitat conference, in Quito, Ecuador, with the... more In October 2016 the United Nations held its third Habitat conference, in Quito, Ecuador, with the intent to promote a “New Urban Agenda.” Habitat III: Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, took place forty years after the first Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, in Vancouver in 1976. Between 1976 and 2016, with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., the world formally emerged from the Cold War, and along with it the reformulation of the First, Second and Third Worlds. The subsequent breakdown of state control in some areas formerly ruled by Communist governments produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. But in Central and Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War ushered in an era of economic growth and an increase in the number of liberal democracies. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan and Syria, new forms of independence brought state failure. It is now evident how the globalization of the Cold War era created the foundations for most of today’s key international conflicts. Yet at Habitat III, in 2016, it was acknowledged that one-third of the world’s population still suffered from inadequate living conditions, making the imperative of Habitat 1976 ever urgent. In response to the recent release of the digital archive of all three U.N. Habitat conferences, this article reexamines the global conversations on human settlements at the first Habitat. By attending to the genealogies of ideas, definitions, geographies and identities, it revisits the moment when architects were in alignment with proponents of a comprehensive governmental approach to issues of human settlement. Crucially, it contends that the ideas behind Habitat offer a microcosm of the overlapping dualities produced in the dominant discourses of architectural modernism, ones that continue to be reproduced today.
A forum that brought together women architects from the government, private sector and academia t... more A forum that brought together women architects from the government, private sector and academia to reflect, respond and speculate upon the impact of the pandemic and how architects practise, participate in community building and care for the city and the social life of its spaces.
This paper traces the entangled narratives of housing construction and tree planting in Singapore... more This paper traces the entangled narratives of housing construction and tree planting in Singapore to reexamine the garden city schema of national development as a strategy for regional networking and international identification. It posits that from the late 1950s, the technology, material culture and architectural expressions of concrete was inseparable from those of greening. Public discourse on nationhood and modernity took its most explicit and visible forms in new concrete buildings and newly transplanted trees. This two-prong urban development set the republic apart from other industrializing cities in Asia and Southeast Asia. From the onset, the state dictated the harsh outlines of the brutalist forms – the dominant architectural aesthetic emphasizing structural clarity that was accepted by virtually all architects in Singapore - to be mitigated by lush foliage. Nowhere else in the world has the garden city idea been so extensively co-opted by a state for citizenry stake-holding – to build “homes for the people” –where it took on the roles of developer-producer and consumer as nation building enterprise. How are the strategies of maintenance transforming into those of re-envisioning and speculation? This paper examines the development of two post-World War Two urban dwelling types – the garden suburb estate of single-family houses and the high-rise housing estate– to consider the shaping of domesticity and the entanglements with nation building built upon the continual invention and maintenance of Singapore the garden city.
This essay examines the building of the Southeast Asian luxury hotel during the 1960s and 1970s a... more This essay examines the building of the Southeast Asian luxury hotel during the 1960s and 1970s as instrumental to the reshaping and consolidation of the global image of modernity for the region. While the war against slums and homelessness was being fought in the new towns, with public and private housing estates and blocks of flats for the working and middle classes, the branding of the modern Asian city was taking place at the waterfront and in the main thoroughfares of these cities. Not only did the luxury hotel present a stark contrast to the crowded, slum-filled imagery of these developing industrialising cities, its proponents— governments, developers and architects—sought to use it to replace ‘Third World’ impressions with ‘First World’ experiences. Driven by economic pragmatism, the proliferation of the slab-tower and podium building, and its interchangeable use as hotel and residential flats in the Southeast Asian city, witnessed a period of regional networking, investments, brand building, knowledge expertise transfers and the rise of a mobile class of international travellers. This essay argues that in response to Cold War political and economic contingencies, these temporary spaces of domesticity and consumption were part of an incipient complex of regional cultural identification in which architecture was paramount. It challenges the reading of the hotel interior as simply an orientalised space of consumption for foreign tourists and, instead, posits that it was complicit in the production of the citizenry as participants in these new public spaces of the emerging economies of Hong Kong and Singapore. Focussing on how such hotels were presented and described in newspapers and specialist trade journals, the essay seeks an alternative way to understand modern domesticity in these cities beyond the centre-periphery schema of one-way transfers of knowledge and expertise.
Building Agency emphasizes the facilitating and building up (v.) of agency and citizen participat... more Building Agency emphasizes the facilitating and building up (v.) of agency and citizen participation through architecture. It foregrounds the agency of buildings (n.) as important materials and spaces of urban life. It insists on the empowerment of people as active agents in the making of our built environment.
Architecture, in terms of building, is typically understood as a container of space and activities, as receptacles of memories and aspirations. It has been presented as a monument to an idea or an ideal, a symbol for a collective. The highly mediatized events, sociopolitical and economic shifts of the last decade have reinforced yet challenged these long-held notions of architecture and inadvertently impacted the practice and the education of the architect. Alongside increasing specialization of expertise and digitization of scopes of work, the collaborative nature of architectural practice have come to the fore. New multi-disciplinary practices have emerged, predicated on the energies of collaboration and networking in which architectural knowledge and design is crucial but not necessarily central. In advanced societies, architects, urban designers and planners grapple with the escalating cries of the people–often through interests groups and activists–for more engaging, meaningful and inclusive public spaces, while responding to state regulation on urban vigilance.
More than ever, architectural biennials, exhibitions and festivals have emphasized the city engagement with its citizenry. Who are the stakeholders of the architecture of building? How can stake-holding be more equitable in terms of the acknowledgements of intellectual and labor production? How can architecture be an agent for empowerment and dissemination without compromising on aesthetic and value? In conception, process, execution and sustainability, what is the agency and potential agencies of architecture? This festival is a platform to create a network of multiple stakeholders of the built environment–including government institutions, academies, architects, clients and patrons, NGOs, think tanks, individuals and user groups–to engage in meaningful conversations and creative co-production.
Studies in History and Theory of Architecture, 2017
Arising from the intensive urban development of mid-twentieth century Hong Kong, the composite bu... more Arising from the intensive urban development of mid-twentieth century Hong Kong, the composite building, defined as one with domestic and non-domestic functions, embodies the historical tensions between city and home, public and private, producer and consumer, colonial and Chinese, real and ideal, masculine and feminine realms. Between 1959 and 1979, over 1,500 composite buildings above fifteen stories were built throughout the city. Intended to accommodate the emerging industrialized middle class population, the largest composite buildings housed over ten thousand inhabitants within an agglomeration of shops, factories, temples, clinics, crèches, dormitories, hostels, flats, and other spaces. Their architecture and planning demonstrate how developers, planners, architects and builders projected the notions of a consumerist society.
Yet a closer analysis of the multifarious programs, spatial adaptations and contestations within, reveals the human caprice that drives and defines the city. How did these tensions and everyday acts of resistance shape the spaces in the composite buildings and in turn, define and redefine the city? In examining the brief social history of a commonplace building in Hong Kong, this paper unpacks the tropes of the modern Asian metropolis to seek an alternative framework to understand the precarious limits between the urban and the domestic.
*For an expanded version of this essay, please refer to Ch4 - "Composites: The City in a Building," and Chp5 - "Narratives: Composite Building Studies," In Resistant City (WSP, 2020), 95-134.
Almost 20% of the year’s thesis projects at the University of Hong Kong are proposals on dwelling... more Almost 20% of the year’s thesis projects at the University of Hong Kong are proposals on dwelling. This gradual rise in projects responding to the housing question over the last five years indicates a growing awareness amongst architectural students of the extent to which architecture and the dwelling impact the urbanism of our cities; and perhaps even the realisation that contemporary housing exigencies call for a rethinking that can only begin from within the academy.
hom-e-scapes is a reticulation of anthropological landscapes arising from probes within the domes... more hom-e-scapes is a reticulation of anthropological landscapes arising from probes within the domestic and from psycho-mechanisms (embodied in the notion of escape) triggered off by actual (physical) habitation.
"Why are the spaces of Disneyland and Singapore, despite their totalizing tendencies, duplicable,... more "Why are the spaces of Disneyland and Singapore, despite their totalizing tendencies, duplicable, or even desirable? In trying to answer this question, this article begins by identifying six shared
utopian projects of Disney and Singapore — Island, Garden City, Housing, Leisure, Travel, and Technology — and the collective for whom they were constructed. Then, by seeking out six other spaces which emerged during the realization of these Cold War utopias, it aims to uncover alternative agencies and forms of power which undermine and reconfigure the original projects.
Through this analysis, the article demonstrates that despite the academic and ironic parallels between Disneyland and Singapore as totalizing spaces of consumption, Singapore remains a place whose inhabitants must practice everyday life. This work in progress therefore attempts to evaluate the island state beyond the totalitarian frame — as a sustainable place
imbued with political discourse, grappling with issues that confront all postindustrial cities."
Finding visual imagery of women workers is discovering a society’s attitudes on gender, equity, a... more Finding visual imagery of women workers is discovering a society’s attitudes on gender, equity, and the environment, its understanding of civic responsibilities, and aspirations of citizenship, which continues to reproduce the development discourse in the present. Their tenacious presence in the artworks asserts women’s agency amid modernity’s changing forms of work.
https://www.nationalgallery.sg/magazine/tough-job-fieldnotes-on-working-women-in-development-and-the-environment
In conversation with Sarah Whiting and Ho Puay Peng, 2023
Within two months of WHO declaring the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 30, 2020, articles o... more Within two months of WHO declaring the Covid-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 30, 2020, articles on architectural and urban design practice and education, planning, building construction, technology, and sustainability, speculated on how the coronavirus pandemic could change the built environment. By summer 2020, the "post-pandemic" was the most frequently used descriptor in architectural events and publications. As Covid-19 raged on, producing variants from Delta to Omicron to Deltacron, the pandemic made the inequalities and injustices in different places, including campuses, workplaces, and homes, ever more glaring. For architectural students, the pandemic has meant canceling studio travel, field trips, the end of access to libraries and fabrication labs, presenting in reviews via video, and no commencement celebrations. In Inhabiting the Negative Space, artist and writer Jenny Odell ruminates how periods of inactivity can be reimagined as fertile spaces for design predicated less on relentless production and more on a deeper, careful look at what is demanding our time and attention and how we might use this "strange moment" to respond (Odell, Whiting, 2021). In her foreword, Whiting expresses that Odell’s talk drew each person attending the event inward to identify “our individual roles in defining our attitudes, our roles, and our possibilities” (Whiting, 2021). How do we meaningfully discuss competency in a world overturned by a pandemic and systemic exclusion? In conversation with Seng, Whiting and Ho deliberate on the challenges and changing expectations on competency in architectural education and practice amid the latency of the historical moment.
Special Issue on Cosmopolitanism’s Others: Forgotten Histories of Transnational Architectural Pra... more Special Issue on Cosmopolitanism’s Others: Forgotten Histories of Transnational Architectural Practice
Mapping the interconnections of industrial labor mobilization, legacies of colonial patriarchy, a... more Mapping the interconnections of industrial labor mobilization, legacies of colonial patriarchy, and migration enables the construction of an archive of women engaged in architectural work in post–Second World War Hong Kong.
Many female architects, landscape architects, and planners have contributed to Singapore’s built ... more Many female architects, landscape architects, and planners have contributed to Singapore’s built environment. In recent decades, female architects and planners are taking up leadership roles in all sectors, public and private, and on multiple levels. Moreover, many women participated in architectural practice against various odds and challenges, pushing boundaries and innovation through visible or less visible ways. It is crucial to turn our attention to the transitional decades in the twentieth century to meaningfully situate the contributions of the architects in consideration of the historical realities of women in architectural production. Against the backdrop of economic and urban development, these women engaged in conceptualising, designing, planning, constructing, teaching, writing, and managing the modern buildings, spaces, practices, and events in the city. Given contemporary realities of diversity and inclusion in the profession, an expanded understanding of women's roles in shaping Singapore’s built environment and a reappraisal of past and present criteria and methods used to assess architecture is timely.
Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 2021
In October 2016 the United Nations held its third Habitat conference, in Quito, Ecuador, with the... more In October 2016 the United Nations held its third Habitat conference, in Quito, Ecuador, with the intent to promote a “New Urban Agenda.” Habitat III: Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, took place forty years after the first Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, in Vancouver in 1976. Between 1976 and 2016, with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., the world formally emerged from the Cold War, and along with it the reformulation of the First, Second and Third Worlds. The subsequent breakdown of state control in some areas formerly ruled by Communist governments produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia. But in Central and Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War ushered in an era of economic growth and an increase in the number of liberal democracies. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan and Syria, new forms of independence brought state failure. It is now evident how the globalization of the Cold War era created the foundations for most of today’s key international conflicts. Yet at Habitat III, in 2016, it was acknowledged that one-third of the world’s population still suffered from inadequate living conditions, making the imperative of Habitat 1976 ever urgent. In response to the recent release of the digital archive of all three U.N. Habitat conferences, this article reexamines the global conversations on human settlements at the first Habitat. By attending to the genealogies of ideas, definitions, geographies and identities, it revisits the moment when architects were in alignment with proponents of a comprehensive governmental approach to issues of human settlement. Crucially, it contends that the ideas behind Habitat offer a microcosm of the overlapping dualities produced in the dominant discourses of architectural modernism, ones that continue to be reproduced today.
A forum that brought together women architects from the government, private sector and academia t... more A forum that brought together women architects from the government, private sector and academia to reflect, respond and speculate upon the impact of the pandemic and how architects practise, participate in community building and care for the city and the social life of its spaces.
This paper traces the entangled narratives of housing construction and tree planting in Singapore... more This paper traces the entangled narratives of housing construction and tree planting in Singapore to reexamine the garden city schema of national development as a strategy for regional networking and international identification. It posits that from the late 1950s, the technology, material culture and architectural expressions of concrete was inseparable from those of greening. Public discourse on nationhood and modernity took its most explicit and visible forms in new concrete buildings and newly transplanted trees. This two-prong urban development set the republic apart from other industrializing cities in Asia and Southeast Asia. From the onset, the state dictated the harsh outlines of the brutalist forms – the dominant architectural aesthetic emphasizing structural clarity that was accepted by virtually all architects in Singapore - to be mitigated by lush foliage. Nowhere else in the world has the garden city idea been so extensively co-opted by a state for citizenry stake-holding – to build “homes for the people” –where it took on the roles of developer-producer and consumer as nation building enterprise. How are the strategies of maintenance transforming into those of re-envisioning and speculation? This paper examines the development of two post-World War Two urban dwelling types – the garden suburb estate of single-family houses and the high-rise housing estate– to consider the shaping of domesticity and the entanglements with nation building built upon the continual invention and maintenance of Singapore the garden city.
This essay examines the building of the Southeast Asian luxury hotel during the 1960s and 1970s a... more This essay examines the building of the Southeast Asian luxury hotel during the 1960s and 1970s as instrumental to the reshaping and consolidation of the global image of modernity for the region. While the war against slums and homelessness was being fought in the new towns, with public and private housing estates and blocks of flats for the working and middle classes, the branding of the modern Asian city was taking place at the waterfront and in the main thoroughfares of these cities. Not only did the luxury hotel present a stark contrast to the crowded, slum-filled imagery of these developing industrialising cities, its proponents— governments, developers and architects—sought to use it to replace ‘Third World’ impressions with ‘First World’ experiences. Driven by economic pragmatism, the proliferation of the slab-tower and podium building, and its interchangeable use as hotel and residential flats in the Southeast Asian city, witnessed a period of regional networking, investments, brand building, knowledge expertise transfers and the rise of a mobile class of international travellers. This essay argues that in response to Cold War political and economic contingencies, these temporary spaces of domesticity and consumption were part of an incipient complex of regional cultural identification in which architecture was paramount. It challenges the reading of the hotel interior as simply an orientalised space of consumption for foreign tourists and, instead, posits that it was complicit in the production of the citizenry as participants in these new public spaces of the emerging economies of Hong Kong and Singapore. Focussing on how such hotels were presented and described in newspapers and specialist trade journals, the essay seeks an alternative way to understand modern domesticity in these cities beyond the centre-periphery schema of one-way transfers of knowledge and expertise.
Building Agency emphasizes the facilitating and building up (v.) of agency and citizen participat... more Building Agency emphasizes the facilitating and building up (v.) of agency and citizen participation through architecture. It foregrounds the agency of buildings (n.) as important materials and spaces of urban life. It insists on the empowerment of people as active agents in the making of our built environment.
Architecture, in terms of building, is typically understood as a container of space and activities, as receptacles of memories and aspirations. It has been presented as a monument to an idea or an ideal, a symbol for a collective. The highly mediatized events, sociopolitical and economic shifts of the last decade have reinforced yet challenged these long-held notions of architecture and inadvertently impacted the practice and the education of the architect. Alongside increasing specialization of expertise and digitization of scopes of work, the collaborative nature of architectural practice have come to the fore. New multi-disciplinary practices have emerged, predicated on the energies of collaboration and networking in which architectural knowledge and design is crucial but not necessarily central. In advanced societies, architects, urban designers and planners grapple with the escalating cries of the people–often through interests groups and activists–for more engaging, meaningful and inclusive public spaces, while responding to state regulation on urban vigilance.
More than ever, architectural biennials, exhibitions and festivals have emphasized the city engagement with its citizenry. Who are the stakeholders of the architecture of building? How can stake-holding be more equitable in terms of the acknowledgements of intellectual and labor production? How can architecture be an agent for empowerment and dissemination without compromising on aesthetic and value? In conception, process, execution and sustainability, what is the agency and potential agencies of architecture? This festival is a platform to create a network of multiple stakeholders of the built environment–including government institutions, academies, architects, clients and patrons, NGOs, think tanks, individuals and user groups–to engage in meaningful conversations and creative co-production.
Studies in History and Theory of Architecture, 2017
Arising from the intensive urban development of mid-twentieth century Hong Kong, the composite bu... more Arising from the intensive urban development of mid-twentieth century Hong Kong, the composite building, defined as one with domestic and non-domestic functions, embodies the historical tensions between city and home, public and private, producer and consumer, colonial and Chinese, real and ideal, masculine and feminine realms. Between 1959 and 1979, over 1,500 composite buildings above fifteen stories were built throughout the city. Intended to accommodate the emerging industrialized middle class population, the largest composite buildings housed over ten thousand inhabitants within an agglomeration of shops, factories, temples, clinics, crèches, dormitories, hostels, flats, and other spaces. Their architecture and planning demonstrate how developers, planners, architects and builders projected the notions of a consumerist society.
Yet a closer analysis of the multifarious programs, spatial adaptations and contestations within, reveals the human caprice that drives and defines the city. How did these tensions and everyday acts of resistance shape the spaces in the composite buildings and in turn, define and redefine the city? In examining the brief social history of a commonplace building in Hong Kong, this paper unpacks the tropes of the modern Asian metropolis to seek an alternative framework to understand the precarious limits between the urban and the domestic.
*For an expanded version of this essay, please refer to Ch4 - "Composites: The City in a Building," and Chp5 - "Narratives: Composite Building Studies," In Resistant City (WSP, 2020), 95-134.
Almost 20% of the year’s thesis projects at the University of Hong Kong are proposals on dwelling... more Almost 20% of the year’s thesis projects at the University of Hong Kong are proposals on dwelling. This gradual rise in projects responding to the housing question over the last five years indicates a growing awareness amongst architectural students of the extent to which architecture and the dwelling impact the urbanism of our cities; and perhaps even the realisation that contemporary housing exigencies call for a rethinking that can only begin from within the academy.
hom-e-scapes is a reticulation of anthropological landscapes arising from probes within the domes... more hom-e-scapes is a reticulation of anthropological landscapes arising from probes within the domestic and from psycho-mechanisms (embodied in the notion of escape) triggered off by actual (physical) habitation.
"Why are the spaces of Disneyland and Singapore, despite their totalizing tendencies, duplicable,... more "Why are the spaces of Disneyland and Singapore, despite their totalizing tendencies, duplicable, or even desirable? In trying to answer this question, this article begins by identifying six shared
utopian projects of Disney and Singapore — Island, Garden City, Housing, Leisure, Travel, and Technology — and the collective for whom they were constructed. Then, by seeking out six other spaces which emerged during the realization of these Cold War utopias, it aims to uncover alternative agencies and forms of power which undermine and reconfigure the original projects.
Through this analysis, the article demonstrates that despite the academic and ironic parallels between Disneyland and Singapore as totalizing spaces of consumption, Singapore remains a place whose inhabitants must practice everyday life. This work in progress therefore attempts to evaluate the island state beyond the totalitarian frame — as a sustainable place
imbued with political discourse, grappling with issues that confront all postindustrial cities."
Architecture.Art.Identity contains an impassioned appeal to history to secure the place for futur... more Architecture.Art.Identity contains an impassioned appeal to history to secure the place for future artistic leaders. This essay questions the relationship between history and the perpetuation of rhetoric in order to reveal the substance for a critical artistic practice in Singapore.
Edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister
Expe... more Edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister
Experiments in architectural education in the post–World War II era that challenged and transformed architectural discourse and practice.
Hong Kong Modern Architecture of the 1950s-1970s, 2022
Somewhere between the colossal facades of Hong Kong’s mid-century composite buildings and the pri... more Somewhere between the colossal facades of Hong Kong’s mid-century composite buildings and the private apartment interiors lie the annals of everyday life.
From Crisis To Crisis: Debates on why architecture criticism matters today, 2019
What are the forms and spaces of contemporary architectural criticism? How does one pursue archit... more What are the forms and spaces of contemporary architectural criticism? How does one pursue architecture, not least architectural inquiry, in this milieu? The turn towards the marginal, the ordinary, and the vernacular, which once occupied the postwar avant-garde and challenged universal modernism, have been normalized, giving way to nostalgia. What and where are the old and new sites in which discourses are produced, cultivated, and disseminated? With the emergence of global networks of commentators, there is a pressing need for an informed local inquiry.
“Improvement” defines public housing in Singapore. Prior to the release of government-built flats i... more “Improvement” defines public housing in Singapore. Prior to the release of government-built flats in the free market in the 1980s, the government-built flat was conceived as a unit within the housing estate. Besides resettled farmers, hawkers and small business operators, the majority of the residents were newly industrialized workers of multi-national corporations and civil servants employed by national institutions. Since 1960, the imperatives of the nation necessitated that the Housing Development Board (HDB), the post-Independence housing authority, develop a reflexive working methodology predicated on the notion of improvement that extends from the nation, into the housing estate, the flat unit, and onto the physiques, social selves and political becoming of the resident-citizens.
In a 2005 essay titled “Utopia or Euphoria: Six Sites of Resistance in Disneyland and Singapore,”... more In a 2005 essay titled “Utopia or Euphoria: Six Sites of Resistance in Disneyland and Singapore,” I endeavored to uncover, through a comparative analysis of Disneyland and Singapore, the liberating possibilities within the everyday lived realities of these spaces. Examining six utopian sites within Singapore as real and imagined spaces that were produced during the nationalizing process, I argued that despite their totalizing tendencies, there are recuperative spaces within that make them still desirable places to visit and to dwell in. A decade later, in light of the global exigencies that have permeated our everyday existence – the conflicts over natural resources, labor, territory and the renewed cries for democracy and social political emancipation – this essay revisits three of these six utopias and their other spaces from a diaspora position. It attempts to sketch the constellation of spaces, identities and vectors produced and reproduced by the media. Extending the notions of transnational identification and “flexible citizenship” as economic imperative into the social, political and virtual, it argues for the agency of the collectives and individuals that are not bounded by the geographical confines of home and nation.
Non West Modernist Past: On Architecture & Modernities, 2011
This chapter traces the ideological development of open space and its inextricable relationship w... more This chapter traces the ideological development of open space and its inextricable relationship with housing during the formative years of the public housing programme in Singapore. Such an intersection is especially compelling in Singapore where the twin machinery of housing and open space not only is instrumental in the social, political and economic development of the city but also in the formation of the public sphere. The argument advanced is twofold: one, that the provision and designation of open spaces is complicit with the construction of high-density housing in producing a middle-class ideal based on ideas that reach back into the colonial period; and two, (extending the critique made by the sociologist Chua Beng-Huat) that the communitarian ideology embedded in the State’s housing programme produces a compliant mass population, constituting the public body, which is continually persuaded by the rhetoric of contingency.
“Progressive Once More”: Rejuvenating Mid-Century Modern Architecture in Southeast Asia, mASEANa 2019, 2019
This paper proffers “the architectural turn” to indicate the moment in the first decade of Singap... more This paper proffers “the architectural turn” to indicate the moment in the first decade of Singapore’s independence when modern architecture was thrust into the center of contemporary debates on state spatiality. In 1973, People's Park Complex, People's Park Centre, Golden Mile Complex, UIC Building and UOB Plaza Two were completed. The SEAP Games Village opened in the heart of Toa Payoh New Town. Highrise “international-style” hotels like Hilton Hotel, Equatorial, Hotel Malaysia, Shangri-La Hotel had opened, offering new spaces of consumption for the increasingly economically empowered population in Singapore and the emerging cities in the region. Taking the year 1973 as a pivotal point to interrogate architecture’s role in the creation of state-sanctioned public space in the private developments that were appearing in the city center and commercial district, the aim here is to insist on the understanding and appraisal of mid-century modern buildings as part of an urban cultural milieu amid a specific yet dynamic geopolitical situation. It is pertinent that any study on built heritage should question not only what drives the Singaporean public’s perceptions but also the significance of an individual building to the past, present and future of the city within and beyond the national framework.
Programme and Abstracts for the Situating Domesticities Workshop, held at CREATE, NUS 7-8 Decembe... more Programme and Abstracts for the Situating Domesticities Workshop, held at CREATE, NUS 7-8 December 2017 (supported by the NUS HSS Seed Fund)
This vivid book is an inquiry into the stagnation between the development of architectural practi... more This vivid book is an inquiry into the stagnation between the development of architectural practice and the progress in urban modernization. It is about islands as territories of resistance. It is about dense places where multitudes dwell in perennial contestations with the city on every front. It is about the histories, tactics and spaces of everyday survival within the hegemonic sway of global capital and unstoppable development. It is preoccupied with making visible the culture of resistance and architecture's entanglement with it. It is about urban resilience. It is about Hong Kong, where uncertainty is status quo.
This interdisciplinary volume explores real and invented places and identities that are created in tandem with Hong Kong's urban development. Mapping contested spaces in the territory, it visualizes the energies and tenacity of the people as manifest in their daily life, social and professional networks and the urban spaces in which they inhabit. Embodying the multifaceted nature of the Asian metropolis, the book utilizes a combination of archival materials, public data sources, field observations and documentation, analytical drawings, models, and maps.
Currently China’s urban population accounts for 50% of its total population. By 2030, just over t... more Currently China’s urban population accounts for 50% of its total population. By 2030, just over twenty years from now, this will rise to almost 70%. With an estimated 300 million people due to move to her cities by 2020, China will change from a rural to an urban society. This transformation will influence the environmental and habitation patterns of almost a quarter of the nation’s population. This rapid urbanization will not only have a significant impact on material resources, the society and the environment; it will also offer new challenges to the most prominent housing laboratory in human history—with implications for the work of designers, planners and builders alike.
As a socio-political microcosm, Hong Kong has been dealing with the impact of hyper-dense urban environments since the mid-twentieth century. Over the past three decades, the city has also been an active player in the development of China’s housing sector through various public and private initiatives. This poses some pertinent questions, including a consideration of what models are at hand for China’s housing sector and whether Hong Kong is in fact the right model. What are alternative options for housing? How can architects and academics make a difference through critical review and proposition?
A double-issue guest-curated-edited by Eunice Seng, containing new articles by Shiqiao Li, Peggy ... more A double-issue guest-curated-edited by Eunice Seng, containing new articles by Shiqiao Li, Peggy Deamer, Lilian Chee and Yi-Ern Samuel Tan, Patrick Cheng-Chun Hwang, David Hutama, Marco Trisciuoglio, Caterina Quaglio, Filippo De Pieri, Aaron Cayer, Tommaso Listo, Saskia Gribling, and Carlo Olmo; interviews with Sarah Whiting, Puay Peng Ho, Alessandro Armando, Cassandra Cozza, and Caterina Padoa Schioppa; and book reviews by Hyun-Tae Jung, Alberna Yaneva, Luciana Mastrolia and Francesca Moro.
Architectural institutions are reviewing modes of learning and practice of architecture to reflect the changing professional landscape. Schools confront the ever-acute tensions between critical thinking and the market. The training of architects who will likely be working in different contexts requires new frames of reference and paradigms. What competencies should the practitioner of architecture possess to bridge technical and managerial specializations in light of competitiveness and nuances of culture? How do the practices and performances of the profession take into account the hybrids and collaborations that define the broad scope of projects? The dilemma of competency lies in the rigorous study of the conditions and processes of architecture, configuring and situating skills and capabilities.
A special issue guest-edited by Eunice Seng (HKU) and Jiat-Hwee Chang (NUS), containing new artic... more A special issue guest-edited by Eunice Seng (HKU) and Jiat-Hwee Chang (NUS), containing new articles by Diana Jean Martinez, Tzafrir Fainholtz, Rixt Woudstra and Hannah le Roux, Albert Brenchant-Aguilar, Phoebe Springstubb, Guanghui Ding and Charlie Qiuli Xue, Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, and Amanda Achmadi and Brendan Josey; with a review by Chatri Prakitnonthakan.
A special issue guest-edited by Eunice Seng (HKU) and Jiat-Hwee Chang (NUS), containing new artic... more A special issue guest-edited by Eunice Seng (HKU) and Jiat-Hwee Chang (NUS), containing new articles by Diana Jean Martinez, Tzafrir Fainholtz, Rixt Woudstra and Hannah le Roux, Albert Brenchant-Aguilar, Phoebe Springstubb, Guanghui Ding and Charlie Qiuli Xue, Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren, and Amanda Achmadi and Brendan Josey; with a review by Chatri Prakitnonthakan.
Uploads
Papers by Eunice Seng
https://www.nationalgallery.sg/magazine/tough-job-fieldnotes-on-working-women-in-development-and-the-environment
http://we-aggregate.org/piece/working-women-and-architectural-work-hong-kong-1945-1985
https://www.docomomo.sg/people-and-organisations/women-in-architecture-and-planning-in-singapore
estate– to consider the shaping of domesticity and the entanglements
with nation building built upon the continual invention and maintenance of Singapore the garden city.
Architecture, in terms of building, is typically understood as a container of space and activities, as receptacles of memories and aspirations. It has been presented as a monument to an idea or an ideal, a symbol for a collective. The highly mediatized events, sociopolitical and economic shifts of the last decade have reinforced yet challenged these long-held notions of architecture and inadvertently impacted the practice and the education of the architect. Alongside increasing specialization of expertise and digitization of scopes of work, the collaborative nature of architectural practice have come to the fore. New multi-disciplinary practices have emerged, predicated on the energies of collaboration and networking in which architectural knowledge and design is crucial but not necessarily central. In advanced societies, architects, urban designers and planners grapple with the escalating cries of the people–often through interests groups and activists–for more engaging, meaningful and inclusive public spaces, while responding to state regulation on urban vigilance.
More than ever, architectural biennials, exhibitions and festivals have emphasized the city engagement with its citizenry. Who are the stakeholders of the architecture of building? How can stake-holding be more equitable in terms of the acknowledgements of intellectual and labor production? How can architecture be an agent for empowerment and dissemination without compromising on aesthetic and value? In conception, process, execution and sustainability, what is the agency and potential agencies of architecture? This festival is a platform to create a network of multiple stakeholders of the built environment–including government institutions, academies, architects, clients and patrons, NGOs, think tanks, individuals and user groups–to engage in meaningful conversations and creative co-production.
Yet a closer analysis of the multifarious programs, spatial adaptations and contestations within, reveals the human caprice that drives and defines the city. How did these tensions and everyday acts of resistance shape the spaces in the composite buildings and in turn, define and redefine the city? In examining the brief social history of a commonplace building in Hong Kong, this paper unpacks the tropes of the modern Asian metropolis to seek an alternative framework to understand the precarious limits between the urban and the domestic.
*For an expanded version of this essay, please refer to Ch4 - "Composites: The City in a Building," and Chp5 - "Narratives: Composite Building Studies," In Resistant City (WSP, 2020), 95-134.
utopian projects of Disney and Singapore — Island, Garden City, Housing, Leisure, Travel, and Technology — and the collective for whom they were constructed. Then, by seeking out six other spaces which emerged during the realization of these Cold War utopias, it aims to uncover alternative agencies and forms of power which undermine and reconfigure the original projects.
Through this analysis, the article demonstrates that despite the academic and ironic parallels between Disneyland and Singapore as totalizing spaces of consumption, Singapore remains a place whose inhabitants must practice everyday life. This work in progress therefore attempts to evaluate the island state beyond the totalitarian frame — as a sustainable place
imbued with political discourse, grappling with issues that confront all postindustrial cities."
https://www.nationalgallery.sg/magazine/tough-job-fieldnotes-on-working-women-in-development-and-the-environment
http://we-aggregate.org/piece/working-women-and-architectural-work-hong-kong-1945-1985
https://www.docomomo.sg/people-and-organisations/women-in-architecture-and-planning-in-singapore
estate– to consider the shaping of domesticity and the entanglements
with nation building built upon the continual invention and maintenance of Singapore the garden city.
Architecture, in terms of building, is typically understood as a container of space and activities, as receptacles of memories and aspirations. It has been presented as a monument to an idea or an ideal, a symbol for a collective. The highly mediatized events, sociopolitical and economic shifts of the last decade have reinforced yet challenged these long-held notions of architecture and inadvertently impacted the practice and the education of the architect. Alongside increasing specialization of expertise and digitization of scopes of work, the collaborative nature of architectural practice have come to the fore. New multi-disciplinary practices have emerged, predicated on the energies of collaboration and networking in which architectural knowledge and design is crucial but not necessarily central. In advanced societies, architects, urban designers and planners grapple with the escalating cries of the people–often through interests groups and activists–for more engaging, meaningful and inclusive public spaces, while responding to state regulation on urban vigilance.
More than ever, architectural biennials, exhibitions and festivals have emphasized the city engagement with its citizenry. Who are the stakeholders of the architecture of building? How can stake-holding be more equitable in terms of the acknowledgements of intellectual and labor production? How can architecture be an agent for empowerment and dissemination without compromising on aesthetic and value? In conception, process, execution and sustainability, what is the agency and potential agencies of architecture? This festival is a platform to create a network of multiple stakeholders of the built environment–including government institutions, academies, architects, clients and patrons, NGOs, think tanks, individuals and user groups–to engage in meaningful conversations and creative co-production.
Yet a closer analysis of the multifarious programs, spatial adaptations and contestations within, reveals the human caprice that drives and defines the city. How did these tensions and everyday acts of resistance shape the spaces in the composite buildings and in turn, define and redefine the city? In examining the brief social history of a commonplace building in Hong Kong, this paper unpacks the tropes of the modern Asian metropolis to seek an alternative framework to understand the precarious limits between the urban and the domestic.
*For an expanded version of this essay, please refer to Ch4 - "Composites: The City in a Building," and Chp5 - "Narratives: Composite Building Studies," In Resistant City (WSP, 2020), 95-134.
utopian projects of Disney and Singapore — Island, Garden City, Housing, Leisure, Travel, and Technology — and the collective for whom they were constructed. Then, by seeking out six other spaces which emerged during the realization of these Cold War utopias, it aims to uncover alternative agencies and forms of power which undermine and reconfigure the original projects.
Through this analysis, the article demonstrates that despite the academic and ironic parallels between Disneyland and Singapore as totalizing spaces of consumption, Singapore remains a place whose inhabitants must practice everyday life. This work in progress therefore attempts to evaluate the island state beyond the totalitarian frame — as a sustainable place
imbued with political discourse, grappling with issues that confront all postindustrial cities."
Experiments in architectural education in the post–World War II era that challenged and transformed architectural discourse and practice.
https://actar.com/product/from-crisis-to-crisis/
https://actar.com/product/from-crisis-to-crisis/
This interdisciplinary volume explores real and invented places and identities that are created in tandem with Hong Kong's urban development. Mapping contested spaces in the territory, it visualizes the energies and tenacity of the people as manifest in their daily life, social and professional networks and the urban spaces in which they inhabit. Embodying the multifaceted nature of the Asian metropolis, the book utilizes a combination of archival materials, public data sources, field observations and documentation, analytical drawings, models, and maps.
https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/11394
As a socio-political microcosm, Hong Kong has been dealing with the impact of hyper-dense urban environments since the mid-twentieth century. Over the past three decades, the city has also been an active player in the development of China’s housing sector through various public and private initiatives. This poses some pertinent questions, including a consideration of what models are at hand for China’s housing sector and whether Hong Kong is in fact the right model. What are alternative options for housing? How can architects and academics make a difference through critical review and proposition?
Architectural institutions are reviewing modes of learning and practice of architecture to reflect the changing professional landscape. Schools confront the ever-acute tensions between critical thinking and the market. The training of architects who will likely be working in different contexts requires new frames of reference and paradigms. What competencies should the practitioner of architecture possess to bridge technical and managerial specializations in light of competitiveness and nuances of culture? How do the practices and performances of the profession take into account the hybrids and collaborations that define the broad scope of projects? The dilemma of competency lies in the rigorous study of the conditions and processes of architecture, configuring and situating skills and capabilities.
http://www.ardeth.eu/magazines/competency/