LumiNation 2020 – The Shape of Home: Urban Abodes in Colonial Singapore
Event Details
8 Aug 2020, SAT
9am
Online
Colonial Singapore’s architecture and socio-morphological fabric continued several patterns from the region’s cosmopolitan pre-colonial urban centres, while also reflecting its new regulations and construction practices. Moving beyond shophouses and “colonial bungalows” as default tropes, this talk examines a range of building types developed for Singapore’s diverse range of migrants. Their construction, ownership, and usage cut across ethnicity and reflected class, occupation, and other socio-economic factors from merchants to clerks and coolies. Specific features also reflect the desire of owners and investors to evoke their former homes or flaunt signifiers of class, and attest to inter-colonial and transcultural exchanges.
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About Dr Imran bin Tajudeen
Dr Imran bin Tajudeen researches architectural encounters in maritime Southeast Asia across the longue durée. He examines the vernacular city and its heritage tropes. His doctoral dissertation on this topic (NUS, 2009) won the ICAS Book Prize in 2011. He is co-editor of Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture (2018), and was postdoctoral fellow at MIT's Aga Khan Program (2009–10) and the IIAS in Leiden (2010–11). He has published on Southeast Asia’s mosques in trans-regional and vernacular-Indic translations across and is currently working on a monograph on this subject. He was Mutawa Visiting Fellow in OXCIS (Oxford, 2019-2020) and is currently Visiting Senior Fellow at NUS Dept of Malay Studies.
