[Conversations] The Textual & The Visual

Synopsis:

Why should we bother researching, writing and reading about architecture and design? Aren't these visual fields that have artifacts that speak for themselves? Why should our experience of architecture and design be mediated with texts? Who are the writers of architecture and design? Why do they write? What do they write about? Who do they write for?

In this panel, we invite three prolific writers of different visual fields – Imran bin Tajudeen, Justin Zhuang and Chang Jiat Hwee – to share with us their experience of writing and researching on Singapore in Singapore.

Panellists:
Justin Zhuang is a writer and researcher with an interest in design, cities, culture, history and media. The journalism graduate has contributed to various architecture and design publications, including CUBE, and the New York-based Eye on Design. Previously, he served as an editor for visual culture publication The Design Society Journal and the now defunct FIVEFOOTWAY, an online journal about cities in Asia. Zhuang has worked on various books and websites about design and urban life in Singapore. These include INDEPENDENCE: The history of graphic design in Singapore since the 1960s (2012), Mosaic Memories: Remembering Singapore's Old Playgrounds (2013) and the multimedia journalism website Reclaim Land: The fight for space in Singapore (2009). More at http://justinzhuang.com.

Imran researches vernacular urban heritage in Singapore and Southeast Asia, and its entanglement with colonial and nationalist representational tropes. He also works on historiographical questions in Southeast Asia's Indic and Islamic architecture and the intersection between professional practice and vernacular traditions in the colonial period. He has given public talks on architectural and urban history, and served as Main Consultant for the documentation of the historical cemetery at Jalan Kubor, Kampung Gelam (2014). He was postdoctoral fellow at MIT's Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (2009-2010) and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands (2010-2011). His doctoral dissertation on the architecture, urban histories and heritage issues of Southeast Asian cities (National University of Singapore, 2009) won the International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize for Best Ph.D., Social Sciences in 2011. In 2015, he was awarded Most Promising New Civil Society Advocate by the Singapore Advocacy Awards.

Chang Jiat Hwee (PhD, UC Berkeley) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. Jiat Hwee's research explores the relationship between architecture, environment and technoscience in various colonial and postcolonial social, cultural and political contexts. He is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016), one of the three books shortlisted for European Association of Southeast Asian Studies' Humanities Book Prize 2017. He is also a co-editor (with William S. W. Lim) of Non West Modernist Past (2011) and (with Imran Tajudeen) of Southeast Asia's Modern Architecture: Questions in Translation, Epistemology and Power (2018). His current research is on air-conditioning, built environment and thermal governance in Asia, part of which is being undertaken as a Canadian Centre for Architecture/Mellon Foundation Researcher 2017-19. Besides academic publications, Jiat Hwee has also authored two design monographs and he writes regularly about modern and contemporary architecture in the region for various magazines, including The Singapore Architect.