JIAT-HWEE CHANG

National University of Singapore

Deviating Discourse
Tay Kheng Soon and the Architecture
of Postcolonial Development in
Tropical Asia

In this short review of Singaporean architect Tay hero and creative genius.1 Instead, I seek to lineage with all the Bourdieuian symbolic capital he
Kheng Soon’s work, I will not adopt a ‘‘life-and- understand Tay’s work in relation to his milieu, not is inheriting, but to highlight the socio-political
work’’ narrative that celebrates the architect as a to establish his work in a particular architectural dimensions of postcolonial development
in Southeast Asia and how this has shaped
1. Plan of the Tropical House at King Albert Park. (Courtesy of Tay Kheng Soon.)
Tay’s work.

A Postcolonial Architect
Tay was among the first students to enroll in the
Diploma of Architecture course at the Singapore
Polytechnic in 1958. He graduated five years later
in the pioneer batch of locally educated architects,
joining a select group of local architects educated
overseas in a professional scene that was still
dominated by British expatriates. The socio-political
conditions of this period shaped this generation of
architects and their work, particularly in Tay’s case,
in significant ways. The architecture course at
Singapore Polytechnic was established as part of
the expansion of tertiary and technical education in
the British Empire in the 1950s. After decades of
neglect, in which tertiary and technical education
were deemed irrelevant to the colonial economy,
and were underfunded, the British imperial
government decided to invest in tertiary and
technical education as part of a larger colonial
development and welfare program initiated in the
1940s to address the social problems that were
fueling anti-colonial movements throughout the
British colonies.2 For the first time, architecture
schools were established outside Britain, the British
Dominions, and British India, in colonies such as
Kenya, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and Singapore during
the 1950s.3
Contrary to the hopes of the British
administrators, the program did little to quell the
anti-colonial protests or to halt the march toward
independence. If anything, it only hastened the
process of decolonization. Thus, the emergence of
locally trained professional architects in Singapore
coincided with decolonization and a rising
consciousness of their role in the building of a
post-colonial nation. In Singapore’s case, the 1950s
and 1960s witnessed the difficult birth of an

153 CHANG Journal of Architectural Education,

pp. 153–158 ª 2010 ACSA

2. Elevation of the Tropical House showing the architectural language of line, edge and shade. (Courtesy of Tay Kheng Soon.)
‘‘unnatural’’ nation, from self-government in 1959,
to merger with Malaysia in 1963, and finally
separation and independence in 1965.4
Being a part of the tumultuous transition from
colony to nation meant that these pioneering
architects had first-hand experience of the
inequalities of exploitative colonial rule and strove
to be free from it. However, they also realized that
colonial dominance did not stop with the formal
end of colonial rule and the beginning of
independence. As postcolonial scholars have
pointed out, many colonial power relations lingered
3. The Tropical House. (Courtesy of Tay Kheng Soon.)
London.6 For Tay and Lim, independence meant
not a reactionary rejection of Eurocentric modernity
or a retreat into parochial nationalism through, for
example, the triumphalist assertion of the
supremacy of one’s national traditions and cultures.
on after the end of formal colonization through,
Instead, they saw the relevance and the liberating
for example, what Partha Chatterjee called
dimensions of modernity, selectively embracing it
‘‘epistemic conquest’’ or through other forms of
while they also asked how they, as citizens of a
Eurocentric cultural hegemony.5 Thus, attaining
newly independent nation, could contribute to the
genuine independence meant not just becoming a
constant transformation of modernity, gaining
sovereign political entity and embarking on
recognition as equal members of the cosmopolitan
economic modernization and development. It also
culture. Their embrace did not mean wholesale
meant demonstrating social and cultural
acceptance; it was a partial embrace mixed with
independence, as Tay’s teacher Lim Chong Keat
critical interrogation, one that was, and perhaps
pointed out in the paper he read at the 1963
still is, fraught with tensions and even
Commonwealth architectural conference organized
contradictions.
by the Royal Institute of British Architects in
4. ITE College Central, Bishan Campus, previously Bishan Institute of Technical Education. (Photograph by author.)
Deviating Discourse 154

5. Sketch showing the bio-mimetic strategy of planning the city to achieve the micro-climatic conditions of a tropical rainforest. (Courtesy of Tay
Kheng Soon.)
Architectural Aesthetics and Postcolonial
Politics
The best illustration of Tay’s selective embrace of
Eurocentric modernity is his design for the
Tropical House at King Albert Park (Figures 1–3).
Completed in 1994, the house is considered a
culmination of Tay’s long quest for an
architectural aesthetics of the tropics, following
decades of experimentation with different formal
languages in his previous work, including public
buildings such as schools and hospitals (Figure 4).
6. Kampong Bugis Development Guide Plan, model. (Courtesy of Tay Kheng Soon.)
155 CHANG
The Tropical House was designed in response to
the tropical climate, emphasizing the need to
provide shade from the tropical sun through deep
overhangs, louvers, and zones of transitional
spaces. It was also designed to facilitate natural
ventilation for cooling through the use of porous
walls and screens, the elevation of parts of the
building on pilotis and the deployment of the
one-room thick principle in planning the spaces.
Tay called this the architectural language of ‘‘line,
edge, and shade,’’ one which contrasts with the
emphasis on volume, plane, and light in the
modernist architecture of the temperate zone.7
At first glance, the design appears to adhere to
the climatic design principles of modern tropical
architecture first advocated in the mid-twentieth
century by protagonists such as Maxwell Fry, Le
Corbusier, and Otto Koenigsberger. In fact, tropical
architecture was what Fry described as the ‘‘dialect
of internationalism’’ prescribed for the tropical
colonies ⁄ countries of the British
Empire ⁄ Commonwealth, including Singapore.8 At
that time, tropical architecture was seen as an
extension of modernist architecture in the
temperate metropole, no more than an
‘‘acclimatization’’ of the modern techno-scientific
rationality and design principle to the technical
problems of building in the tropics. It was even
suggested that tropical architecture was primarily
designed by British or British-trained architects.9
Like many others in architecture school in the
tropics at that time, Tay was taught to design in the
idiom of tropical architecture when he was at
Singapore Polytechnic.10
There are, however, a few key differences
between Tay’s proposal and the mid-twentieth
century discourse of modern tropical architecture.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the theory and practice of
modern tropical architecture had become largely
invisible with the ubiquity of air-conditioned

7. Kampong Bugis Development Guide Plan, section. (Courtesy of Tay Kheng Soon.)
buildings. The passive cooling strategies of tropical
architecture, devised to address resource scarcity in
the colonies and the developing countries during
the mid-twentieth century, appeared less
economically relevant in many parts of the tropics,
especially Singapore and Malaysia, with the
availability of cheap energy and low-cost
mechanical cooling equipment. Yet, it was precisely
at this moment that Tay, along with others such as
Ken Yeang, sought to resuscitate it.11 What Tay did
was not simply a case of reviving an obsolete
discourse.
While mid-century modern tropical architecture
was depoliticized and technical, privileging climatic
determinants of built form over more complex
socio-cultural factors that would have foregrounded
the political nature of design problems in the
tropics, Tay’s architectural esthetics of the tropics
was one that re-politicized the anodyne discourse.
Tay emphasized that the esthetic problem of
designing in the tropics was inextricably linked to
socio-economic structural problems that have
colonial origins. He was acutely aware of how
Western cultural hegemony shaped architectural
aesthetics, and he claimed that ‘‘tropical design
continues to be compromised by the ghost of
Northern box esthetics.’’12 According to Tay, the
root cause of the problem was a socio-economic
one. He observed that because tropical economies
were so thoroughly linked to those of the
developed world, they did not have ‘‘the confidence
to chart new grounds and new approaches.’’13
Elsewhere, Tay also argued that the economic
dominance of the West had deep historic roots,
going back to the eco-social inequalities of the
colonial economy in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries:
Looked at from an ecological perspective,
colonialism’s exploitation of tropical resources
in effect transferred the surplus value of crops
produced by solar infusion in a northwards
flow of commodities in exchange for cheap
manufactured goods at prices preferential to
the North and disadvantageous to the South.
Colonial economy was, in effect, a systemic
appropriation of solar energy, which acted as a
pump in service of the northern economies
during their industrial revolution.14
Tay’s combination of a Wallersteinian world
system perspective on unequal exchange between
the metropole and the colonies, an eco-social
perspective on ecological exploitation in capitalist
production, and a postcolonial perspective on
the continual efficacies of colonial power relations
today radically reconstructed modern tropical
architecture.15 Instead of a technical discourse
about passive cooling and thermal comfort, Tay
re-imagined it as an emancipatory aesthetics that
could redress the postcolonial asymmetrical power
relations and purportedly free the postcolonial
subject ‘‘from the political and taste-dictates of
[his] masters.’’16
Urbanization and Ecological Development
in the Tropics
Tay’s tropical architectural aesthetics stand apart
from mid-twentieth century discourse for another
important reason—they were conceived in
conjunction with a rethinking of urban planning in
the tropics. In 1989, Tay published Mega-Cities in
the Tropics, a manifesto for urban design in the
tropics. The next year, he led a team that
implemented his ideas in the ‘‘Kampong Bugis
Development Guide Plan’’ (KBDGP), a proposal for
a test site in the central region of Singapore
(Figures 5–7).17 Perhaps influenced by the generally
acknowledged failure of planned modernist cities in
the tropics, such as Chandigarh and Brasilia, where
the climatically responsive architecture of individual
building was not matched by a similar climatically
sensitive approach to the planning of open spaces
Deviating Discourse 156
and urban infrastructures, Tay noted that
proponents of modern tropical architecture did not
address the problems posed by the tropical climate
at the urban scale. He argued that addressing the
tropical climate at the building level alone was
inadequate as it could not remedy the problems of
excessive heat, noise, and dust generated by an
urban environment inappropriately planned
according to the northern temperate model. Tay
attributed the demise of tropical architecture and
the widespread use of air-conditioning partially to
this failure to conceive an urban planning model for
the tropics.
Tay proposed a compact, high-density, and
multi-tiered city in which multiple usages, such as
residential, commercial, and educational, were
combined. Tay argued that multi-use and
compactness would optimize the round-the-clock
utilization of urban infrastructure, minimize travel
distances, discourage the use of cars, and promote
walking. It would also keep vehicular traffic at the
periphery and allow the spaces between buildings to
be used for public commons to encourage social
interactions. Many of Tay’s ideas anticipate what is
popularly regarded today as sustainable urbanism.
For example, in KBDGP, he proposed that existing
brownfield sites of disused industrial spaces in the
central area be re-urbanized at a density that is
even higher than that of the standard Singapore’s
high-rise public housing. In addition to the benefits
above, this density would also relieve land-use
pressure, protecting Singapore’s few remaining
natural and agricultural landscapes from new town
development. These natural areas and their
attendant biodiversity would thus be preserved
through the intensification of development in
existing urbanized areas.
In these proposals, Tay also demonstrated a
much broader understanding of the tropical
environment than was evident in the middle of the
twentieth century. Influenced by colonial medical
discourse, which viewed the tropics as a pestilential
157 CHANG
site that rendered white men unhealthy and even
degenerate, modern tropical architecture
constructed the environment negatively as a hot
and humid climatic zone that would create
discomfort and reduce efficiency of work.18 Modern
tropical architecture was expected primarily to
ameliorate heat and humidity and provide for the
thermal comfort of its inhabitants. In contrast, Tay
asked how cities could use heat and humidity
productively, turning sun and rain into ‘‘positive and
poetic elements in design.’’19 Tay tried to replicate
the microclimatic conditions of a tropical rainforest
canopy in his tropical city proposals. Tay based this
bio-mimetic move to deal with tropical heat at the
level of the planned urban environment on the
findings of a Malaysian researcher who discovered
that the temperature difference between the
tropical rainforest and the urban center around
Kallang Valley was as much as 8C. The difference
was attributed to the urban heat island effect, on
the one hand, and the cooling provided by the
transpiration and shade of the trees in the
rainforest, on the other hand. The KBDGP proposed
a combination of ‘‘high-level shading,’’ large
shading devices installed between buildings and on
their roofs, and dense vertical and horizontal
landscaping that simulated the canopy of a tropical
rainforest and replicated the cool and shady
microclimatic conditions. Some of these shading
devices also served as rainwater collectors and solar
energy generators using photovoltaic cells. In the
KBDGP, sun is not solar radiation to be shielded
from and rain is not wastewater to be disposed of
efficiently. Rather they are embraced as ecological
resources to be utilized as fully as possible. Tay also
emphasized the ‘‘poetics and rhapsodic
dimensions’’ of urban ecology and explored how to
design a tropical city ‘‘that captivates, and that
enhances attachment and love for the place despite
the density in the cities.’’20
Unfortunately, Tay’s sustainable urbanism was
ahead of its time and Singapore’s state planning
agency did not adopt his ideas. But today, with
sustainable development becoming more
widespread and Singapore adopting an ecological
modernization paradigm, the government has
belatedly implemented policies, including promoting
greenery on high-rises and photovoltaic cells on
buildings, that are similar to what Tay proposed two
decades ago.21
Tay’s proposals for tropical urbanism and
tropical architecture were not simply ecological
visions of cities and buildings in the tropics.
They were, and are, ideas that challenge the
economic dominance and cultural hegemony of
the West and serve to propel Singapore’s socio-
economic continued development. Twenty years
ago Tay observed that: ‘‘Singapore will never be
a first-class city if it cannot initiate basic and
fundamental ideas on what it is and what it can
become. Singapore will always remain in my
mind a second-class, provincial town with global
pretensions if it is not able to focus on the
specifics and poetics of place.’’22 Abidin Kusno
saw Tay’s proposal as a form of ‘‘climatic
essentialism [that] might as well be read,
economically, as a cultural restructuring of late
capitalist development.’’23 And my own initial
interpretations understood Tay’s work as a form
of what Partha Chatterjee called ‘‘derivative
discourse’’ because, however emancipatory his
intentions, Tay based his postcolonial tropical
architectural aesthetics on the reductive and
determinist climatic category constructed by
colonialism.24 Now, however, it is possible to see
this work in a new light and, as I have
demonstrated here, Tay’s reconception of tropical
architecture differs in important ways from its
colonial modern antecedent. Far from being a
derivative discourse, Tay’s construction of tropical
architecture and urbanism constitutes a deviating
discourse that expands and contests the
(post)colonial conception of modern tropical
buildings and cities.
Notes
1. C. Greig Crysler, Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture,
Urbanism, and the Built Environment, 1960–2000 (New York:
Routledge, 2003). See also Magali Sarfatti Larson, Behind the
Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
2. Michael A. Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and
Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London:
Routledge, 1993).
3. Jiat-Hwee Chang, ‘‘Building a (Post)Colonial Technoscientific
Network: Tropical Architecture, Building Science and the Power-
Knowlege of Decolonization,’’ in Duanfang Lu, ed., Third World
Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity (London:
Routledge, forthcoming); RIBAA, Board of Architectural Education:
Minutes of Officers of the Board (January 1952 to April 1960).
4. It was ‘‘unnatural’’ because it is a city without a hinterland and it was
deemed too small to be viable as an independent nation-state.
5. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A
Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001
[1986]). See also Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and
the City (London: Routledge, 1996); Abidin Kusno, Behind the
Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space, and Political Cultures in
Indonesia (New York: Routledge, 2000).
6. Part of the paper was published as Lim Chong Keat, ‘‘Architecture in
Newly Emerging Nations: A Challenge to Education and Practice,’’ The
Builder, 6 Sept. 1963. For the complete paper, see RIBAA,
Commonwealth Conference Committee Papers, Box 1. Lim was to
reiterate a similar position two decades later, see Lim Chong Keat, ‘‘The
International Context for Southeast Asian Architecture,’’ in Robert
Powell, ed., Architecture and Identity: Proceedings of the Regional
Seminar (Singapore: Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Concept Media,
1983), pp. 25–29. See also Mark Crinson, ‘‘Singapore’s Moment: Critical
Regionalism, Its Colonial Roots and Profound Aftermaths,’’ The Journal
of Architecture 13, no. 5 (2008): 585–605.
7. Tay Kheng Soon, ‘‘The Architectural Aesthetics of Tropicality,’’ in
Robert Powell and Kheng Soon Tay, eds., Line, Edge & Shade : The
Search for a Design Language in Tropical Asia : Tay Kheng Soon &
Akitek Tenggara (Singapore: Page One Publisher, 1997), pp. 40–45.
8. Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Dry and
Humid Zones (London: Batsford, 1964). See also Chang, ‘‘Building a
(Post)Colonial Technoscientific Network.’’
9. Editors, ‘‘Editorial: Commonwealth 2,’’ Architectural Review 127
(1960): 4; Julius Posener, ‘‘Malaya,’’ Architectural Review 128 (1960):
60.
10. Tay Kheng Soon, ‘‘Sun Control in Local Buildings,’’ Dimension:
Journal of the Singapore Polytechnic Architectural Society (1962): 43–45.
11. Ken Yeang, Tropical Urban Regionalism: Building in a South-East
Asian City (Singapore: Concept Media, 1987).
12. Tay, ‘‘The Architectural Aesthetics of Tropicality,’’ 42.
13. Ibid., 43.
14. Tay Kheng Soon, ‘‘Rethinking the City in the Tropics: The Tropical
City Concept,’’ in Alexander Tzonis, Bruno Stagno, and Liane Lefaivre,
eds., Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age of
Globalization (Chichester, UK: Wiley Academic, 2001), p. 268.
15. See Immanuel M. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An
Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). For an analysis of
the built environment from the world system perspective, see Anthony
D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World Economy: Cultural and
Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (London: Routledge,
1990). On the eco-social, see Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism
(1970) (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004).
16. Tay Kheng Soon, ‘‘Neo-Tropicality or Neo-Colonialism?,’’ Singapore
Architect 211 (2001): 21.
17. Singapore Institute of Architects, Kampong Bugis Development
Guide Plan (Singapore: Singapore Institute of Architects, 1990); Tay
Kheng Soon, Mega-Cities in the Tropics: Towards an Architectural
Agenda for the Future (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies,
1989).
18. David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and
European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 141–68.
19. Tay Kheng Soon, ‘‘The Intelligent Tropical City,’’ in Robert Powell
and Tay Kheng Soon, eds., Line, Edge & Shade : The Search for a
Design Language in Tropical Asia: Tay Kheng Soon & Akitek Tenggara
(Singapore: Page One Publisher, 1997(1988)), p. 139.
20. Tay, Mega-Cities in the Tropics, p. 13.
21. For ecological modernization, see John Barry, ‘‘Ecological
Modernisation,’’ in John S. Dryzek and David Schlosberg, eds., Debating
the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), pp. 303–21.
22. Tay, Mega-Cities in the Tropics, p. 15.
23. Kusno, Behind the Postcolonial, p. 201.
24. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.
Deviating Discourse 158