Book Launch + Guest Lecture: Architecture and Affect Precarious Spaces (with Dr Victoria Jane Marshall)

Please join us for the book launch for Associate Professor Lilian Chee and Senior Lecturer Victoria Marshall by Professor Jane M. Jacobs.

Date: Friday, 4 Oct 2024
Time: 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Venue: SDE3 Level 4 Barrel Room

Architecture and Affect Precarious Spaces – Lilian Chee

Architecture and Affect is motivated by two questions: Why does dismissed affective evidence trouble us? What would it mean for architecture to assemble such discrepant evidence into its discourse?

Arguing that the persistent refrains of lived affect dwell in architecture, this book traces such refrains to a concept of architecture wedged in the middle ground—jammed amidst life, things and events. Rather than being aloof from its surrounds, architecture-in-the-midst challenges an autonomous epistemology. Beyond accounting for the vivid but excluded, this book develops a frame and a disposition for thinking critically about, speculatively through, and being grounded by, encounter. Examining affect through a constellation of spaces in contemporary Singapore, it details architecture’s uneasy but inextricable relationship with key subjects relegated to the incommensurate, the peripheral, the scenic and the decorative. The outcome is a politicized architectural discourse simultaneously grounded and speculative; bridging depth and intuition, thinking and feeling.

Dr Lilian Chee is Associate Professor of Architectural Theory and Design at the Department of Architecture in the National University of Singapore, where she leads the Research by Design Cluster. She also serves as Academic Director at the NUS Museum, and Assistant Dean at the College of Design and Engineering. She holds a joint appointment at the Department of Communications and New Media, FASS, where she directs the Minor in Visual Cultures program. Her work includes Architecture and Affect (2023), Art in Public Space (2022), and Remote Practices (2022); the documentary Objects for Thriving (2022) and the award-winning essay film 03-FLATS (2014). She leads the Social Sciences Research Council-funded Foundations for Home-based Work (2021-24). She writes on affect, architectural representation, domesticity, and works creatively across the intersections of architecture and visual cultures.

Periurban Cartographies: Kolkata’s Ecologies and Settled Ruralities – Victoria Marshall

Periurban Cartographies looks through the prism of the “almost urban” to consider what a “city” is or could be. In doing so, the book challenges assumptions and reconsiders design practices.
The research reported upon in this study draws on thick description of everyday life and diffuse power in periurban Gangetic West Bengal/Kolkata. It does so in the hope of enriching our understanding of incremental modes of political empowerment and the futures they make. The intention is to not just communicate the transformations at work in creating a particular “kind of urban”, but also to point to connections that make us rethink the ways in which change happens.

The book is a contribution to work being done on urban theory-building from elsewhere than the Global North, specifically from Asia, and periurban Gangetic West Bengal/Kolkata. It is not simply a look at a novel and singular condition in and of itself but uses that singularity to better understand periurbanism generally and urban political ecologies particularly. Current scholarship in urban political ecology reminds us of some of the enduring tensions around the conceptualizations of region, socio-natures and agency, and practice. The urban political ecology approach in this book offers a way of moving past some of these tensions.

Dr Victoria Jane Marshall is Senior Lecturer at the National University of Singapore, where she is director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program. Victoria’s research is focused on the future of urban-rural hybridity in Monsoon Asia. She is also interested in how critical environmental research approaches can productively overlap with urban / architecture / landscape design representation and practice. Her works include Periurban Cartographies: Kolkata’s urban ecologies and settled ruralities (2024) and a co-authored book entitled Patch Atlas (2019). In 2021 she completed a PhD in geography from NUS.

Dr Jane M. Jacobs is currently Professor in Urban Design and Director (Academics) with Monash Indonesia Jakarta. She has previously held positions at The University of Melbourne, The University of Edinburgh and Yale-NUS College. She has published on postcolonial geographies, the social production of built environments, the history of high-rise housing, the politics of urban heritage and comparative urbanism. Her book publications include Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (1996), Cities of Difference (1998), Uncanny Australia (1998), and Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (2014).