Andrea Goh
Phone: 07490169816 / +65 90905013 E-Mail: andreagohsh@gmail.com
Last Edited: 11 Mar 2016
The Stranger in Your Home The book will speculate how public housing in Singapore (interior, common spaces and exterior organization) was designed as an apparatus Nation-building and the engineering of a nation, and identify the difficulties of the domestic caused by this relation. The concept of the domestic encompasses the ideas of the privacy and ownership and how it is sometimes contested. Unlike the past, when the home was conceptualized as the private sphere of the individual, “modernity” and Nation-building or “politics” have altered the state of the home/ forms of life. The home has evolved beyond the dwelling and seamlessly flows between the private and public domains, more apparently in Public Housing. Singapore’s housing policies are known to be authoritarian and in used as an apparatus for social engineering. In my thesis, I hope to look into Singapore’s housing policies, in particular, the controversial 1983 National Day Rally speech by late Prime Minster Lee Kuan Yew (the only rally transcript which is not shelved in the National Library), where new housing and family policies were introduced to sustain Singapore’s population suggesting that university graduates should marry other university graduates. This speech led to “The Great Marriage Debates” and reveals the elitism and eugenic ideals of the government that are bestowed on its citizen’s ideals of the nucleus family. I will attempt to examine the difficulties of the domestic caused by this omnipresent “stranger/voyeur” who is standing at the window. And through that, try to understand the material culture of the HDB through its design and how it has contributed to the engineering of a nation. The book will include a brief history of the establishment of the Housing Development Board and the Ministry of National Development starting from post-colonial period of the Singapore Improvement Trust to its newest 50-storey public housing located in the heart of the city – The Pinnacle@Duxton, which was completed in 2009. Delving deeper, the book will scrutinize the design of the HDB flats and draw links between the designs and the speculative national social and political agendas and policies that might not be seen as being explicitly related to domestic housing policies. An example of one of the many subjects for examination is the common (public?) area most synonymous with the HDB design – the “void deck”, which is the uninhabited free-plan space on the ground floor of each block of flats, designed to be used for pre-planned gatherings and events (including birthday parties, funeral wakes and wedding luncheons, which might take place just meters apart from each other). It is then not far fetched to assume that this unique spatial typology is a reaction to the history of racial riots and the Nanny-State’s constant urgency for social cohesion and its relation to the policies on ethnic quotas for the HDB flats, formalized in 1980. While other scholarly researchers have focused purely on the political, social and economic aspects of Singapore’s controversial housing policies, this book would focus on the design of the flats at different scales, starting with the examination of the interiority of the individual “cells”, the overall design of the block including its common areas, and lead up to the larger master planning of a satellite town – and how each material feature and design was engineered for a larger national socio-political agenda.
The Pinnacle@Duxton, completed 2009
The Void Deck area empty (top) and it being used as a venue for a wedding luncheon (bottom) 2