Review of Everyday Modernism: Architecture & Society in Singapore

Abstract

Following Singapore’s transition to self-governance in 1959 and eventual independence from British rule as a republic in 1965, growing housing needs and subsequent waves of industrialization saw the island-nation’s landscapes and coastlines radically transformed, and its population’s ways of living and working fundamentally reorganized. Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore makes a case for what Chang and Zhuang term the “Singapore vernacular” covering this period up to the nation’s economic prosperity in the 1990s. Putting together an insightful volume that catalogues buildings and structures representative of the time that they were constructed, the authors evoke a vernacular that refers not so much to a single style or building typology, but everyday rather than iconic architecture, at all scales, built for civic, industrial, educational, and entertainment purposes. The authors understand the everyday-ness of this architectural modernism as a concept that is “both specific and general,” which describes buildings of unknown authorship, such as those planned by architects working for government agencies, as opposed to the “heroic modernism” of contemporary projects designed by renowned local practitioners. Another facet of the everyday is the expanded sense of architecture that describes not only building projects but utilitarian structures—overhead bridges, multistorey carparks, hawker centers that house affordably priced food stalls—interwoven in the modern city’s infrastructure.