A genealogy of tropical architecture: Singapore in the British (post)colonial networks of nature, technoscience and governmentality, 1830s to 1960s

This dissertation addresses the limitations of the current controversial discourse on tropical architecture in Southeast Asia by positing tropical architecture as a discourse that privileges tropical nature as the prime determinant of built form. By doing so, it traces the genealogy of tropical architecture back to the early nineteenth century, beyond what is commonly assumed in the current historiography as the "founding moment" of tropical architecture, i.e. its institutionalization and naming-as-such in the mid-twentieth century.This dissertation understands tropical architecture not as an autonomous architectural discourse. Not only was it shaped by other specialists of space, such as medical and sanitary experts, military engineers and building scientists, it was also a heteronomous power-knowledge configuration inextricably bound up with the politics of (post)colonial governance. In this genealogy, tropical architecture is understood as a historically changing entity contingent upon the shifting political calculations and technoscientific constructions that established causalities and correlations between tropical nature, built environment, and notions such as health, welfare, productivity and race. Although this dissertation draws its case studies primarily from (post)colonial Singapore, it seeks to understand tropical architecture in relation to its unstated geopolitical "other"---the temperate metropole---and also the larger production, circulation and reception of the discourse and practices of tropical architecture across different time-spaces in the larger British colonial network, from Britain to India to the West Indies and Tropical Africa.Besides the prologue and the epilogue, this dissertation has four main chapters. The first three chapters examine the emergence of colonial knowledge and practices on tropical architecture before the mid-twentieth century. Starting with specific cases in colonial Singapore, each of the three chapters attends to one of the three ubiquitous modern colonial building types of military barrack, pavilion plan hospital and "natives" housing respectively, situating the emergences of their tropicalized forms in the contexts of modern colonial governmental problematizations. The fourth chapter attends to the much neglected technoscientific dimensions of tropical architecture in the mid-twentieth century. It focuses on the institutions, knowledge and practices in building science research and climatic design education, situating them in the politics of decolonization.This genealogy shows how tropical architecture has its origin as a body of systematic knowledge and practices on the building of military barracks in the British tropical colonies in the early nineteenth century. Arising out of the concerns with the health of British soldiers in the tropics and shaped by the miasmic theories of disease transmission, these knowledge and practices were part of a regime of colonial governmentality and its technologies of government. The application of these technologies of government, and the attendant spatial knowledge and practices, subsequently expanded beyond the British population and their barracks in the socio-spatial enclaves of the military cantonments. These governmental and spatial technologies expanded into the larger native population, in fragmented manners and mutated forms, through first the pavilion plan hospitals in the medical enclaves, and then the housing in plantation estates and native towns. By the mid-twentieth century, systematic knowledge and practices on tropical architecture were institutionalized as a set of technoscientific norms in a late (or neo-)colonial power-knowledge regime, widely researched in building research stations, taught in architectural schools and prescribed in international development program.