Description
About the Editors

What is the modern in Southeast Asia’s architecture and how do we approach its study critically? This pathbreaking multidisciplinary volume is the first critical survey of Southeast Asia’s modern architecture. It looks at the challenges of studying this complex history through the conceptual frameworks of translation, epistemology, and power. Challenging Eurocentric ideas and architectural nomenclature, the authors examine the development of modern architecture in Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, with a focus on selective translation and strategic appropriation of imported ideas and practices by local architects and builders. The book transforms our understandings of the region’s modern architecture by moving beyond a consideration of architecture as an aesthetic artifact and instead examining its entanglement with different dynamics of power.
Jiat-Hwee Chang is associate professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016) and a co-editor of Non West Modernist Past: On Architecture and Modernities (2011).

Imran bin Tajudeen is assistant professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. His work on historiographical challenges and translations across architectural categories include chapters in Spirits and Ships (2017), Architecturalized Asia (2014, Choice’s Outstanding Academic Title of 2014), and Colonial Frames, Nationalist Histories (2012).

Authors

Southeast Asia's Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power