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120 DAYS: APPENDIX
RESEARCH SUMMARY
TUTOR’S NOTES
A/P DR LILIAN CHEE, Thesis Supervisor
Emma’s interest in Christmas Island, a place she had not visited, results in 120 days, a thesis which explores the limits of architecture with remote sites and subjects. The distinctive spectacle of the island’s red crab is leveraged in a temporal and shape-shifting architecture – festivaland time-based – centred around the crabs’ mating and migratory schedules. The challenges of reading a site from afar, coupled with the balancing of fact, fiction and speculation, are intriguingly demonstrated in the weaving of the biological crab narrative with two island-specific mythical rituals. It advances significant ideas about remote research, while obliquely critiquing architecture’s relationship with its non-human others. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to A/P Dr Lilian Chee, student mentors Wong Zi Hao and Ian Mun for their patient guidance; guest reviewers Erieta Attali, Stephen Cairns, Erik L’Heureux, Jiminez Lai, Constance Lau, CJ Lim, Victoria Marshall, Ong Ker-Shing, Peter Sim, and Tiah NanChyuan for their invaluable insights.
