Temporary domesticities: The Southeast Asian hotel as (re)presentation of modernity, 1968–1973

Abstract

This essay examines the building of the Southeast Asian luxury hotel during the 1960s and 1970s as instrumental to the reshaping and consolidation of the global image of modernity for the region. While the war against slums and homelessness was being fought in the new towns, with public and private housing estates and blocks of flats for the working and middle classes, the branding of the modern Asian city was taking place at the waterfront and in the main thoroughfares of these cities. Not only did the luxury hotel present a stark contrast to the crowded, slum-filled imagery of these developing industrialising cities, its proponents— governments, developers and architects—sought to use it to replace ‘Third World’ impressions with ‘First World’ experiences. Driven by economic pragmatism, the proliferation of the slab-tower and podium building, and its interchangeable use as hotel and residential flats in the Southeast Asian city, witnessed a period of regional networking, investments, brand building, knowledge expertise transfers and the rise of a mobile class of international travellers. This essay argues that in response to Cold War political and economic contingencies, these temporary spaces of domesticity and consumption were part of an incipient complex of regional cultural identification in which architecture was paramount. It challenges the reading of the hotel interior as simply an orientalised space of consumption for foreign tourists and, instead, posits that it was complicit in the production of the citizenry as participants in these new public spaces of the emerging economies of Hong Kong and Singapore. Focussing on how such hotels were presented and described in newspapers and specialist trade journals, the essay seeks an alternative way to understand modern domesticity in these cities beyond the centre-periphery schema of one-way transfers of knowledge and expertise.