The essay "Alternative (Hi)story of the SIT Flats: A re-appraisal through anecdotal fragments" is an edited version of my Master of Architecture Dissertation Paper.
[EXCERPT]
Introduction
Being one of the pioneers in the historical milestones of Singapore’s growth, the development of Singapore Improvement Trusts’ (SIT) flats were the first signs of modernity in housing projects undertaken by the British colonial government in the 1920s. A predecessor to the Housing Development Board (HDB), the SIT was set up by the British colonial government in the 1920s to develop the first mass housing prototype. The SIT aimed to ‘provide for the Improvement of the Town and Island of Singapore’, which was carried out in the form of condemning buildings deemed unfit for human habitation and providing homes for those affected.[i]Today, we see traces of SIT flats interspersed over Singapore in areas such as Tiong Bahru, Queenstown and the Old Airport Estate, where the flats take on iconic architectural roles, frequently defining the identity of these places. In records of its pre-war establishment, the SIT’s development of Tiong Bahru in 1936 was considered a major achievement – it became a ‘blueprint for the future development of Singapore’s public housing’, an instant pride of the nation.[ii]In the span of five years, the estate of 784 flats came to accommodate approximately 6,000 people, which included poorer Europeans.
Often, historical records of the flats have included physical built forms, style and typology, while the domestic nature of these flats have been negated.[iii]Yet, anecdotal fragments related to the SIT flats still linger, striding between the unnoted and the legitimate. The replicated typology and anonymity of duplicated floor plans, coupled with constant change in tenancy and function, contributed to an ambivalent relationship between architecture and the domestic realm. Henri Lefebvre, in addressing themes of everyday life and the nature of space, argues that the concept of everyday life is one that is ‘elusive’, suggesting that in every image of stability there is a contradictory element of the ‘transitory and (the) uncertain’.[iv]Within this ambivalence resides an opportunity to unravel the multi-faceted stories of domesticity associated with the SIT flats. These stories exist in embedded fragments and challenge the conventional notion of ‘home’, as portrayed by the official history of the SIT.
All too easily history focuses selectively on particular parts of the past, excluding specific sections of the public, or even the public as a whole, in favour of highly legitimised histories of the State and institutional elites. [v]
History is created where selected voices are amplified, and the exorbitant often silenced.[vi]In contrast, an anecdote allows us to enter beyond cosmetic portrayals of an architectural history, with its ‘ability to reflect the general reality underlying those facts of the general view of that reality’.[vii]‘Once upon a time’, ‘it was a Sunday (...) a few years before war’, ‘abandoned more than 10 years’ – these are temporal cues that suggest vague but timely insertions in historical narrations, a trait of anecdotal accounts that belie an urgency to narrate the story and the position of that story in time. Thus, these anecdotal fragments from residents, archival records, blog entries and personal correspondences construct a larger historical narration of the SIT flats, opposite in meaning and value, yet necessary to the fabrication of a bigger and more inclusive picture.They form alternativehistorical readings that challenge factually recorded publications – existing as a kind of ‘secret’ history which is sometimes disregarded as excessive or trivial.[viii]By unravelling accounts, buried and scattered in audio reels, microfilms and hearsays, I became the audience of untold stories, as well as the narrator of alternative hi(stories). In stringing together a series of anecdotes about the SIT flats, my intention is not to turn perceived truths into unquestionable historical artefacts. Rather, I propose that one may find alternative, albeit controversial modes, of architectural knowledge that necessitate a re-reading of these spaces.
While anecdote is the opening to history, anecdotes are characteristically embedded in larger, overarching histories. The teleological drive tends to make those larger histories, ironically, ahistorical.[ix]
An anecdote as a ‘short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident’ is fascinating because of its very ability to transcend the barriers of serious theoretical debates.[x]Jane Gallop attempts to theorise the anecdotal story, elucidating that personal voice can in fact present, and be part of, a theory. According to Gallop, anecdote and theory have diametrically opposing connotations, with the former being more relatable to people. By working with these two aspects simultaneously, the theory is ‘lived’ and the subject is ‘theorise(d)’.[xi]Anecdotes are used to break boundaries of abstract theories, and hence, anecdotal theory refers to the combination of personalised narrative and theoretical frameworks. A recitation of anecdotes plays on ‘circumstantial detail’ that distorts or reverses a well-known history, with these details sometimes capable of altering the accepted hierarchy of spaces.[xii]The parameters drawn in writing about histories can thereby encompass subjects that are taboo or scandalous, since anecdotes may be true or fabricated, and more virulently exist as rumour and gossip. As Michel de Certeau delineates, ‘narrated history creates a fictional space. It moves away from the “real” – or rather it pretends to escape present circumstances’.[xiii]
Governed by the themes of abjection, infidelity and hysteria, this essay looks for alternative settings constructed from extant anecdotes surrounding the SIT flats. These themes are critical in their ability to reveal architectural history through ‘consumption, appropriation and occupation’.[xiv]Using historical and psychoanalytical references that are projected against my own interpretation of the three spatial configurations, selected anecdotes will be framed: ‘house of torture’ visits the subjects of abject and fear in the context of 1940s Japanese occupation, ‘den of beauties’ explores the notions of vice and infidelity, and lastly, ‘madwoman’ looks into hysteria and taboo surrounding an occupant’s flat.
Notes:
[i]Jon S.T. Quah, ‘Administrative Reform and Development Administration in Singapore: A Comparative Study of the Singapore Improvement Trust and the Housing Development Board’ (College of Social Science, Florida State University, unpublished thesis, 1975), p. 67.
[ii]Teo Siew-Eng and Victor Savage, ‘Singapore Landscape: A Historical Overview of Housing Image’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, v. 6 (1985), p. 57.
[iii]For example, see Jane Beamish and Jane Ferguson, A History of Singapore Architecture: The Making of a City(Singapore: G. Brash, 1985), p. 137. The development of the SIT flats was briefly inserted within the overall history of Singapore architecture: ‘Various estates were designed in the emerging style of ‘workers housing’ which was to become so prevalent from the 1930’s onwards. (...) Built of reinforced concrete with flat roofs and windows which wrapped around the corner, these new buildings spelt the promise of the future. Inside, the flats were small and basic, but they provided much better shelter than the shantytowns and slums in which the majority of the poor had to live in Singapore’.
[iv]Mary McLeod, ‘Henri Lefebre’s Critique of Everyday Life: An Introduction’, Deborah Berke and Steven Harris (eds), Architecture of the Everyday(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), p. 13.
[v]Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivaro, and Jane Rendell, ‘Introduction: Narratives of Architecture in the City’,Iain Borden (ed.), Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), p.12.
[vi]Nirmal Purushotam, ‘Silent Witness: The ‘Woman’ in the Photograph’, Chan Kwok Bun and Tong Chee Kiong (eds), Past Times: A Social History of Singapore(Singapore Times Edition, 2003), p.33.
[vii]Lionel Grossman, ‘Anecdote and History’, History and Theory,v. 42 n. 2 (May 2003), p.159.
[viii]Jane Gallop, Anecdotal Theory(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p.8.
[ix]Ibid., p.88-9.
[x]Ibid., p.2.
[xi]Ibid., p.11. Through the lens of anecdotal theory, the details of ‘lived experience’ that are often overlooked or suppressed in historical records are theorised and discussed in architectural discourse.
[xii]Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p.89.
[xiii]Ibid., p.79.
[xiv]Rendell, ‘Introduction: Gender, Space, Architecture’, Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden (eds), Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction(Routledge, 2000), p.233.