Drawing: Lilian Chee, Lin Derong, 2020

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How does agency and affect transform architectural knowledge? How do subjects evolve from such strategies of engagement? What forms of evidence become crucial to such knowledge construction? This book argues that the big questions of architecture and urbanism taking place in the fleeting, hyper-modernised, capitalist-socialist nation-state of the Southeast Asian island-city of Singapore may be recast through strategies of embodiment and feeling. It pursues an intimate, material and affective method in the construction of its architectural and urban subjects, works with forms of evidence and imaginations that evolve through occupancy, and is informed by interdisciplinary feminist theories and contemporary visual practice which operate at the frontiers of knowledge construction. The empirical context of study is Singapore, a land-scarce city-state measuring 720 square kilometres with a burgeoning population of 5.5 million. A developmental success story which saw the country rise from third to first world status within less than three decades of self governance, it reinvented itself from a country with no hinterland and no prospects into an economic powerhouse to be reckoned with. Singapore also has a unique track record of political stability with its virtually single party government, and has amassed enough wealth to put the city today as the most expensive place to live in the world. Its public housing, urban infrastructural capacities and architectural scene is reflective of this breakneck speed of development. Extant discussions of this built environment have often focused either on its historical or developmental aspects, with perspectives that privilege a more macro understanding of its urban and architectural evolution. Yet the minute scale of this nation-state consequently results in the categories and spaces of suburb, city, state, country and nation overlapping each other. The outcome is a complex microcosm of entangled national, public and private networks and relationships. Acknowledging this entanglement, this book is positioned instead within the intimate perspectives borne from occupying and experiencing the same built environment. Its chosen subjects, voice and modes of evidence privilege a micro, bodily scale of encounter and engagement with subjects which have conventionally been cast in more abstract and distant terms. The subject areas — heritage, housing and terrain — are encountered and developed through particular strategies of occupation and experience — the anecdotal knowledge of the Raffles Hotel, the excesses of occupancy in the modernist public housing blocks, and the allegorical performances of terrain in the Singaporean landscape. The content focuses on 3 key areas of Singaporean urbanism and architecture — the construction of heritage and history in the monument, the success and genesis of public housing, and the founding of terrain through landfill, reclamation, and the exhumation of sacred land. Each section of heritage, housing and terrain is constituted by three related perspectives: (1) research and archival architectural studies are placed in dialogue with (2) critical reflection made through the visual domains of contemporary art or film, and complemented by (3) original creative-critical architectural work that forms a 'third archive' responding to the arguments and issues raised in the two preceding essays of each section. As a whole, the book is envisaged as a performance that reconstructs and reimagines the Singaporean built environment from a position that is embodied and visceral, practiced and situated, seeing the large from within the intimate.

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Table of Contents

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List of Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Preface: Squinting from a Blindspot

Acknowledgements

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Introduction- Knowing Otherwise: Architecture after affect

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PART I: MONUMENT

Chapter 1: The Ruled and the Unruly: Animality, anecdotes and storytelling

Chapter 2: Tracing the Last Tiger | The Third Archive

Chapter 3: After the Last Train: Remainders at the Tanjong Pagar Station

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PART II: BLOCK

Chapter 4: Keeping Cats, Hoarding Things: Situations in the housing block

Chapter 5: Anarchiving Public Housing | The Third Archive

Chapter 6: 03-FLATS: Architecture filmmaking, disciplinary questions

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PART III: LANDSCAPE

Chapter 7: In the Midst of: Field notes at a cemetery

Chapter 8: Holes in the Ground | The Third Archive

Chapter 9: The Sea, and the Sea: Infrastructure and the dialectical image

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Index

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BOOK REVIEW | Anoma Pieris

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‘Chee takes us on an encounter-as-detour, tracking spatial stories imbued with affect and haunted by precarious power relations. Undoing the discipline’s instrumental ambitions and revealing the fallacy of its purported autonomy, she asks: If we become better attuned to the micro-politics of radically open-ended affective encounters, can our knowledge practices in architecture be transformed?’

Hélène Frichot, Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, University of Melbourne​

 

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'Lilian Chee’s Architecture and Affect is an exceptionally important contribution to the architectural field. It asks a simple but most profound question: how can we account for affective responses to architecture, so often dismissed as incidental yet so vital to lived experience? Chee draws on a series of encounters with spaces in Singapore in order to build a frame through which to incorporate affect into architectural histories, theories, and practices. These encounters immerse readers in residual spaces where scholars still-too-rarely go, from mass housing to cemeteries, and dwell on everyday practices of inhabitation and care, from feeding stray cats to exhuming tombs. A noted filmmaker, architectural designer and feminist theorist, Chee’s original and rooted portrait of architectural affect reflects years of intimate engagement with her sites across many registers. The result is itself a beautiful ‘monument’ – to squinting from blindspots, being captivated by subjects, and never ignoring the tiger under the billiard table.'

Barbara Penner, Professor in Architectural Humanities, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

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'With delight and wit, Lilian Chee opens the door of architecture to anecdotes, stories, film, and photography of lives within, on, and around the structures that architects install. She takes on the ideology of social democratic mass housing and its implications for muted subjectivities enmeshed in the discipline of mortgages and home ownership, while at the same time stirring up spectralities of pasts and futures that are ambiguous and compelling. With this book, Chee re-opens a new chapter in Singaporean critical theory.'

Michael M.J. Fischer, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities,

Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies, MIT

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'A dialectical ingenuity, Chee's Architecture and Affect provocatively recasts the role of architectural history and theory as being three things at once: intellectual, affectively lived, and speculative. Giving alternative and intimate insights into Singapore’s spatial politics, this beautifully illustrated and eccentric fly-on-the-wall work is a critical and imaginative profundity of lasting memory.’​

CJ Lim, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL​​

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