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Abstract
Colonial-period military estates in Singapore are being gentrified for adaptive reuse producing high-end hospitality and retail venues for expatriate and tourist consumption. These include the feted “Black and White” residential enclaves synonymous with Singapore’s tropical aesthetic. But underlying this reinvention is a disturbing history of wartime repurposing under the Japanese Imperial Army, which temporarily destabilised the meanings and representations of these buildings. The seemingly undisturbed architectural typologies of barracks, bungalows and timber huts were backdrops to war, military occupation and captivity. This paper explores how the aesthetic affects and affectations that accompany adaptive reuse may conceal or disclose unsettling histories. It contrasts contemporary celebration of these revitalised historical neighbourhoods with their very different representation by wartime captives.
Funding: The research for this paper has been funded by an ARC Future Fellowship, “Temporal Cities, Provisional Citizens: Architectures of Internment,” FT140100190 (2015–18).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Peter Scriver and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the paper.
Notes
Notes
1 Amanda Achmadi, “The Architecture of Balinization,” in Architecture and Identity, ed. Peter Herrle and Erik Wegerhoff (Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin, Habitat Unit, 2008), 73–90, provides a critique on tourism practices based on orientalist themes; see also John Bastin, ed., Travellers’ Singapore: An Anthology (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994).
2 See Robert Powell, The Asian House: Contemporary Houses of Southeast Asia (Singapore: Select Books, 1993); Robert Powell, The Tropical Asian House (Singapore: Select Books, 1996); Robert Powell, The New Asian House (Singapore: Select Publishers, 2001); and Tan Hock Beng, Tropical Retreats: The Poetics of Place (Singapore: Page One publishers, 1996).
3 Jean Beaumont, “Contested Transnational Heritage: The Demolition of Changi Prison, Singapore,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 15, no. 4 (2009): 298–316.
4 Julian Davidson, Black and White: The Singapore House, 1898–1941 (Singapore: Talisman, 2006), 11.
5 Jiat-Hwee Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 2016), 51–93.
6 Davidson, Black and White, 1.
7 Davidson, Black and White, 8. He notes that Lee Kip Lin, The Singapore House 1819–1942 (Singapore: Times Editions, 1988) and Norman Edwards, The Singapore House and Residential Life (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990) paid them scant attention.
8 Brian P. Farrell, “Too Little, Too Late, Preparing for War, 1941–1942” and “Bitter Harvest: The Defence and Fall of Singapore,” in Between Two Oceans: A Military History of Singapore from First Settlement to Final British Withdrawal, ed. Malcolm Murfett, et al. (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2005), 175–244, see in particular 182–217.
9 The British military stayed on after independence in 1965, maintaining defence in the region, but withdrew in stages between 1968 and 1971 due to changes in British attitudes towards their role in the Far East.
10 In reference to the book title by Davidson, Black and White.
11 Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Lily Kong, Portraits of Places: History, Community and Identity in Singapore (Singapore: Times Edition, 1995), provides an overview of the multiple environments transformed by urban renewal.
12 Kwok Kian Woon, C. J. Wee Wan-Ling and Karen Chia, eds., Rethinking Chinatown and Heritage Conservation in Singapore (Singapore: Singapore Heritage Society, 2000), lays out the debates surrounding this proposal. According to census data, the ethnically Chinese population for this period stood at around 77 percent.
13 Naidu Ratnala Thulaja, “Duxton Road,” The National Library Board, Singapore Infopedia, http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_357_2005-01-22.html. The area was associated with cheap brothels during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
14 G. Uma Devi et al., Singapore's 100 Historic Places (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 2002), 66.
15 Jianna H. S. Tan, “Chijmes,” The National Library Board, Singapore infopedia, http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_828_2004-12-15.html?s=CHIJ; “URA: Serenity and Ambience of CHIJ Site Will Be Kept,” The Straits Times, April 1, 1990, 13.
16 C. M. Turnbull, A History of Singapore, 1819–1988 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989), 138.
17 Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture, 79 and 85, in reference to Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 101. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Giorgio Agamben, writing on the Holocaust, describes the camp as a space of exception where a subject is stripped of political status and reduced to mere biological existence, “bare life,” the hidden foundation for sovereign power.
18 Propertyguru, “SLA Releases 33 B&W Bungalows for Rent,” September 1, 2010, https://www.propertyguru.com.sg/property-management-news/2010/9/28556/sla-releases-33-b-amp-w-bungalows-for-rent.
19 Davidson, Black and White, 91.
20 Singapore Land Authority, Retail and F&B Tender for Blocks 17 & 18 Dempsey Road, undated, https://www.sla.gov.sg/News/articleid/601; “Tanglin Village—A Distinctive Community of Lifestyle, Education and Art Interests,” November 7, 2006, https://www.sla.gov.sg/News/articleid/299/parentId/97/year/2006?category=Press%20Releases.
21 Davidson, Black and White, 116.
22 Davidson, Black and White, 134–35.
23 Alex Lim and Alfred Teo, Black & White: Our Homemade Heritage (Singapore: Singapore Land Authority, 2017).
24 Housing and Development Board, “Public Housing—A Singapore Icon,” http://www.hdb.gov.sg/cs/infoweb/about-us/our-role/public-housing–a-singapore-icon.
25 Lim and Teo, Black & White, 8.
26 Lim and Teo, Black & White, 83.
27 Lim and Teo, Black & White, 69.
28 Jon Cooper, Tigers in the Park: The Wartime Heritage of Adam Park (Singapore: The Literary Centre, 2016), 9–16, and based on personal communication in January 2015.
29 See, for example, “The Long and Winding Road,” https://thelongnwindingroad.wordpress.com/ (accessed June 8, 2018).
30 See Karl Hack and Kevin Blackburn, Did Singapore Have to Fall? Churchill and the Impregnable Fortress (London: Routledge, 2004).
31 David Nelson, The Story of Changi, Singapore (Singapore: Changi Museum, 2001), 10.
32 Murfett, et al., Between Two Oceans, 329.
33 Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack, War Memory and the Making of Modern Malaysia and Singapore (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press), 138.
34 Mamori Shinozaki, My Wartime Experiences in Singapore, interviewed by Lim Yoon Lin (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1973), 98–99, available at the National Archives of Singapore, Oral History Interviews, Boon Leong Chia, acc. no. 001813.
35 Many private papers donated by ex-POWs are held at the Australian War Memorial and Imperial War Museum (IWM) archives.
36 Mike Davis, “Frank Gehry as Dirty Harry,” in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990), 236–40.
37 Mirjana Lozanovska, Ethno-Architecture and the Politics of Migration (London: Routledge, 2016), 221.
38 Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2007); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988), vol. 2; Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
39 Warchitecture: Sarajevo: A Wounded City, an exhibition by the Bosnia-Herzegovina Association of Architects, Das Sabih, Sarajevo, May 1992–October 1993; see also Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
40 Jonathan Wynne, “Haunting Orpheus: Problems of Space and Time in the Desert,” in The Affective Turn: Theorising the Social, ed. Patricia Tacineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 209–30.
41 Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
42 Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture, 51–93.
43 Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture, 55, 56.
44 The Straits Times for 1939 describes a number of shows, dances, a circus and several private parties held there during the year; see National Archives of Singapore digital newspaper archives.
45 Imperial War Museum, UK: Private Papers 10188, Captain W. A. Baker.
46 Brenda Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 137–43.
47 T. M. Hart, “Changi Prisoner of War Camp, 1942–1945,” Private Papers 11017, Imperial War Museum, London (IWM).
48 R. P. W. Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience (London: Routledge, 2003), 65–80. This occurred following the execution of four men who attempted to escape in August 1942.
49 Harry Silman, diary entry, September 2, 1942, Private Papers 18748, IWM.
50 Such inverse wartime encounters of military and penal architectures in European colonial experience also anticipated the later critique of the coercive instrumentality of Enlightenment institutions. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
51 Yeoh, Contesting Space, 243–68.
52 Silman, diary entry, September 2, 1942.
53 See Giorgio Agamben, “The Camp as Nomos of the Modern,” trans. D. Heller-Roazen, in Violence, Identity and Self-Determination, ed. H. de Vries and S. Weber (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106–18, describing Changi as a garden city.
54 Henry Probert, The History of Changi (Singapore: Changi University Press, 2006), 14.
55 Davidson, Black and White, 109–31.
56 National Archives of Singapore (NAS), Oral History Interviews, Cyril Gilbert, acc. no. 002964/2, disc 1, 11.
57 Nelson, The Story of Changi, 6.
58 NAS: Cyril Gilbert, disc 1, 14.
59 IWM, UK: Silman, entry for April 4, 1942, 16–17.
60 Digital Archive of India: Army Regulations India, India Barracks Synopsis, Calcutta 1930, 28, http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/handle/2015/72244.
61 W. J. Simpson, The Sanitary Condition of Singapore (London: Waterlow, 1907).
62 Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture, 129–61.
63 Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience, 137–65.
64 IWM, UK: Private Papers 2926, “The Diary of Charles Pearson Ambler, Held Prisoner by the Japanese 1942–45 in Singapore,” entry for April 28, 1944, 52–53.
65 Singapore Naval Base–Dockyard Permanent Coolie Lines, showing single coolies’ blocks, 1937, ADM 195/111, National Archives, Kew.
66 Colonel D. A. S. Houghton, “Diary of the 88th Field Regiment RA (9th Indian Div., 1941–45),” Private Papers 11062, IWM.
67 Houghton, “Diary of the 88th Field Regiment RA,” 9.
68 See short excerpts by the following travellers: George Windsor Earl (1832–34), “Singapore in the Early 1830s,” 23–30; Dr J. Berncastle (1849), “The Baneful Effects of Opium Smoking,” 67–70, both recounted in Bastin, Travellers’ Singapore.
69 J. F. F., “Changi Cantonment 1933–37,” Royal Engineers Journal 51 (1937): 355–62, 357.
70 Melody Zaccheus, “History Rich Sembawang, Gateway to Singapore’s WWII Past,” The Straits Times, https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/sembawang-gateway-to-singapores-wwii-past.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Anoma Pieris
Anoma Pieris is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne. Her publications include, Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka: The trouser under the cloth (Routledge 2012), Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: a penal history of Singapore’s plural society (University of Hawaii Press 2009). Anoma is co-author with Janet McGaw of Assembling the Centre: Architecture for Indigenous Cultures. Australia and Beyond (Routledge 2015).