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 – festival- and 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.

RESEARCH SUMMARY

The project begins with the topic of the archaeology and a fascination with both natural and man-made found objects and what they could tell you about the places they were found in. This led to an investigation into artists’ work that explored such topics, ranging from Susan Hiller and Mark Dion to local artists such as Robert Zhao and Debby Ding.

Chancing upon Christmas Island on multiple occasions while conducting these investigations, I was intrigued by the island: the key points of interests were the famous red crab migration and the popular Singaporean lore that Christmas Island once belonged to Singapore and was sold to Australia. Christmas Island then became the key site of my own research.

Christmas Island was studied from multiple perspectives throughout my body of research. Conducting research remotely and having never been to the island meant that my knowledge was learnt from a wide range of sources, from geologists and biologists to tourists and local islanders. The second section of research covers the multiple facets of the island, ranging from the mainstay phosphate economy and the famous crab migration to the colonial history, ecology and the local rituals, practices and myths of the islanders. While the research attempted to draw parallels and oppositions between these different faces of Christmas Island, for example, by studying territorialisation through the methods that the crab, the phosphate mining industry and political detention exert power, the crab drew the richest findings and drawings due to its unusual scale, its co-existence with land, sea and built spaces that characterise Christmas Island, and the spatial and rhythmic effects of its iconic breeding migration.

The remaining portion of the research attempts to design for the crab and the island in different situations and conditions that utilise the affect of the crab migration in a way that meaningfully engages with on-site situations. This research indicates that to design for a crab is to design for water and earth in the way they gather and move, but also to design for the weather, the ground (-plane) and the visual spectacle.