Mr Lee

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7/7/07, 12:43 PM

Provision-Black & White The Singapore House D707-15/4234

A Bungalow for an Electrician Built for the Eastern Extension Australasia & China Telegraph Co. (forerunner of today’s Cable & Wireless), the bungalow shown here is typical of the more modest Anglo-Malay style of bungalow that was once such a characteristic feature of the Singapore and the Malayan landscape. Erected just after the First World War, it was designed by the firm of Swan & Maclaren, at that time the premier architectural practice in Singapore. The plan is symmetrical, with two bedrooms placed on either side of a central dining room and a forward projecting ‘lounge verandah’. The bathrooms are at the rear and the kitchen and servants’ quarters are detached from the

Junior Electrician’s bungalow, Morse Road (c.1920s).

The original, locally-manufactured Chinese roof tiles have since been replaced by corrugated zinc sheets; the use of zinc sheeting as a roofing material dates back to the end of the nineteenth century and was regularly used as such for contemporary bungalows in Australia and Africa.

main body of the house, to which they are connected by a covered walkway.

All these elements can ultimately be traced back to the Anglo-Indian bungalow of British India. Where these houses depart from the Anglo-Indian prototype is the elevated floor which is raised off the ground on masonry piers — evidence of the influence of traditional Malay architecture.

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7/12/07, 12:32 PM

Provision-Black & White The Singapore House CD707-53/4270

The Colonial Bungalow

The colonial house, in Singapore as well as in every other far-flung corner of the British Empire, begins and ends with the bungalow. Strictly speaking, a bungalow is a single-storey dwelling, but as one-time editor of The Straits

Times, John Cameron, observes in Our Tropical Possessions in Malayan

No. 1 Winchester Road, Alexandra Park (mid-1930s).

Built for the army in the buildup to the war in the Pacific, this black and white bungalow on the former military estate of Alexandra Park, exemplifies the evolved bungalow form in Singapore and the Straits Settlements, a century and more after its introduction from British India.

India (1865), the term is “... often applied to any style of dwelling-house in the East.” I suspect that the reason for this lies partly in what might properly be described as the defining feature of bungalow architecture, namely the verandah; if every bungalow has a verandah, then equally every house

Verandah living in British India, from Curry and Rice (on Forty Plates), or the Ingredients of Social Life at “Our” Station in India, by Captain George Francklin Atkinson (1859).

with a verandah shares some of the qualities of a bungalow.

The verandah was the main living area in the colonial home, an intermediate space between the outside world and the inner sanctum of the house, a place for entertaining guests, writing letters home, or simply relaxing with a cup of tea. In the popular imagination it has acquired an iconic status, inseparable from the image of the stoic Englishman, dressed for dinner, with a smouldering cheroot in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other, watching the sun go down on another day of tireless empire-building in a hot and heathen land. As Jan Morris observes, in her Stones of Empire:

the buildings of British India, “As long as the British in India are remembered at all, they will be remembered against the background of the bungalow, taking sundowners on its verandah [and] playing badminton on its lawns.”

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8/2/07, 6:45 PM

Provision-Black & White The Singapore House CD807-3/4234

OUT OF INDIA ANGLO-INDIAN INFLUENCES

THE BLACK AND WHITE HOUSE did not suddenly appear on the scene, fully-formed and without antecedents, but rather was built upon an existing architectural tradition that was already well established in Singapore by the end of the nineteenth century. Many characteristic features of the black and white house such as broad verandahs, high ceilings, tall jalousie windows and widely overhanging eaves, were all part of the local architectural lexicon long before the first black and white houses came to be built. They came from India, where the British had been established since the early part of the seventeenth century and had evolved their own unique style of domestic architecture — the Anglo-Indian bungalow.

Subsequently exported to every corner of the globe courtesy of the British Empire, the bungalow was introduced to Singapore with the founding of the East India Company’s new

trading post on the island by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819.

Dr. McKinnon’s residence, Prince of Wales Island (c.1812); chromolithograph, taken from an original sketch by James Wathen.

Dr. McKinnon’s Penang residence, foursquare in plan, with a pyramidal roof of local thatch and verandahs on all sides, reveals a close affinity with contemporary AngloIndian bungalows in British India, save for the fact that the latter were more likely to have been single-storey structures. This is pretty much as one might expect, given that most of the early British merchants and pioneers who settled Penang and Singapore had previously served with the East India Company in Bengal and other parts of India.

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7/9/07, 5:51 PM

Provision-Black & White The Singapore House D707-15/4234