Jiat-Hwee Chang
Jiat-Hwee Chang is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore.
He is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016), which is awarded an International Planning History Society Book Prize 2018, and shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize 2017. He recently completed a book manuscript tentatively titled Everyday Modernism with Justin Zhuang and photographer Darren Soh. Jiat Hwee is also co-editor (with William S. W. Lim) of Non West Modernist Past(2011) and (with Imran Tajudeen) of Southeast Asia's Modern Architecture: Questions in Translation, Epistemology and Power(2019).
Jiat Hwee’s research has been supported by institutions in North America, Britain, Germany, Australia, Cyprus, Qatar and Singapore. He was recently Manton Fellow at the Clark Art Institute in Fall 2019, Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Spring 2020, and Canadian Centre for Architecture – Mellon Foundation Researcher, 2017-19.
His current research is in two main areas: the socio-cultural histories and techno-politics of air-conditioning and climate change in urban Asia; and transnational urban and architectural histories in Asia.
He is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016), which is awarded an International Planning History Society Book Prize 2018, and shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize 2017. He recently completed a book manuscript tentatively titled Everyday Modernism with Justin Zhuang and photographer Darren Soh. Jiat Hwee is also co-editor (with William S. W. Lim) of Non West Modernist Past(2011) and (with Imran Tajudeen) of Southeast Asia's Modern Architecture: Questions in Translation, Epistemology and Power(2019).
Jiat Hwee’s research has been supported by institutions in North America, Britain, Germany, Australia, Cyprus, Qatar and Singapore. He was recently Manton Fellow at the Clark Art Institute in Fall 2019, Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Spring 2020, and Canadian Centre for Architecture – Mellon Foundation Researcher, 2017-19.
His current research is in two main areas: the socio-cultural histories and techno-politics of air-conditioning and climate change in urban Asia; and transnational urban and architectural histories in Asia.
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Books by Jiat-Hwee Chang
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
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.
“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)
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
Translation by Chen Kehao
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
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.
Keywords: tropical architecture, bungalow, military barrack, labourers’ housing, colonial biopolitics,
power-knowledge"
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
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.
“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)
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."
Translation by Chen Kehao
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
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.
Keywords: tropical architecture, bungalow, military barrack, labourers’ housing, colonial biopolitics,
power-knowledge"
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)
in Contested Territories of Design and Architecture, Charlotte Ashby and Mark Crinson eds (London: Bloomsbury, 2022)
Originally published in Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, edited by Duanfang Lu, 211-35. London: Routledge, 2010.
In the themed section on 'Organisational Group and Atelier Group in Asia--Reading Architects' Ecosystem of Generic Cities," co-edited by Kengo Hayashi.
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.
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.
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