Tay Kheng Soon
Tay Kheng Soon (in straw hat) with his classmates at a Rumah Melaka during his fieldtrip led by his then lecturer Lim Chong Keat, c. 1958/9. Source: Tay Kheng Soon’s collection.
Tay was among the first batch of students to enrol 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 emergence of locally trained professional architects in Singapore coincided with decolonisation 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 “unnatural” nation, from self-government in 1959, to merger with Malaysia in 1963, and finally separation and independence in 1965.
For Tay, 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. Instead, they saw the relevance and the liberating dimensions of modernity, selectively embracing it while they also asked how they, as citizens of a newly independent nation, could contribute to the constant transformation of modernity, gaining recognition as equal members of the cosmopolitan culture. Their embrace did not mean wholesale acceptance; it was a partial embrace mixed with critical interrogation, one that was, and perhaps still is, fraught with tensions and even contradictions.
Tay Kheng Soon (second from the right) showing Deputy Prime Minister Toh Chin Chye (man in suit and tie) his thesis project, 1963. Source. Tay Kheng Soon’s collection.
The best illustration of Tay’s selective embrace of Eurocentric modernity is his design for the Tropical House at King Albert Park. 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.
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. At that time, tropical architecture was seen as an extension of modernist architecture in the temperate metropole, no more than an “acclimatisation” 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.¹ 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.²
Tay Kheng Soon in the Tropical House that he designed, 2014. Source: Chang Jiat Hwee’s photograph.
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 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, sought to resuscitate it. What Tay did was not simply a case of reviving an obsolete discourse.
While mid-century modern tropical architecture was depoliticised 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 aesthetics of the tropics was one that re-politicised the anodyne discourse. Tay emphasised that the aesthetic 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 aesthetics.”³ 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.”⁴
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.⁵
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. 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.”⁶
Tay Kheng Soon speaking to a group of a walking tour participants about the history of Golden Mile Complex after the mASEANa conference in 2019. Source: Chang Jiat Hwee’s photograph.
Tay Kheng Soon standing in front of the Golden Mile Complex that he co-designed, 2019. Source: Chang Jiat Hwee’s photograph
¹ Editors, “Editorial: Commonwealth 2,” Architectural Review 127 (1960): 4; Julius Posener, “Malaya,” Architectural Review 128 (1960): 60.
² Tay Kheng Soon, “Sun Control in Local Buildings,” Dimension: Journal of the Singapore Polytechnic Architectural Society (1962): 43–45.
³ 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), 42.
⁴ Ibid., 43.
⁵ 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), 268.
⁶ Tay Kheng Soon, “Neo-Tropicality or Neo-Colonialism?,” Singapore Architect 211 (2001): 21.
Written by Chang Jiat Hwee, adapted from Chang Jiat Hwee, “Deviating Discourse: Tay Kheng Soon and the Architecture of Postcolonial Development in Tropical Asia,” Journal of Architectural Education 63, no. 3 (2010): 153–58.
