DoA Symposium: Building / Community in the Tropics and Beyond

The principle of site specificity has long guided most works of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. Yet what the “site” means itself remains mutable and contested. Recent design scholarship and practice progressively turn to local, indigenous, and traditional ways of shaping environments as critiques of modernist legacies of uniformity and standardisation. Still, we must remain attentive to how tropical contexts have been shaped by colonialism, resistance, and cultural hybridity. How, then, should the design professions engage with historical conditions that inhabit the present? Who are the communities we work with? For whom do we design? Who constitutes our own communities of practice?

This symposium, entitled ‘Building Communities in the Tropics and Beyond’, probes such questions. It brings together artists, academics, and practitioners to examine how design engages questions of identity, place, and indigeneity. It examines who designers work with and for, how we address displacement and erasure, how we might integrate traditional knowledge without extractive logics within institutional constraints, and who ultimately holds authorship.

Date: 27 January 2026

Time: 8:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Location:

SDE3-1-Exhibition Hall, 8 Architecture Drive, National University of Singapore

Please RSVP here.

SCHEDULE

08.00–08.30     Registration

08:30–08.50     Welcome

09.00–10.30     Memories

Vivienne Wee, Ethnographica, Singapore

Shu-Mei Huang, National Taiwan University, Taiwan

(Moderated by Saptarshi Sanyal, NUS)

 As memories in a material sense, records form palimpsests that both inscribe and erase. Acts of remembering are also acts of forgetting, shaping access to land or place, and claims to identity and culture. What is archived and narrated can enfranchise or disenfranchise communities. This session explores how new architectural, environmental, and landscape practices might address erasure and displacement in memory and records, and how interdisciplinary methods can recover marginalised histories across academic and public realms of heritage and culture.

11.00–12.30     Practices 

Yori Antar & Varani Kosasih, Uma Nusantara Foundation, Indonesia

Raoul Castillo Amores & Yani Amores Dutta, The Regenesis Project, Philippines

(Moderated by Florian Heinzelmann, NUS)

Standardised design and construction strive to produce uniform architectural outcomes. Yet such processes become detached from local histories, climates, and ways of life. Focusing on architecture and landscape as intertwined practices, this session centres acts of critique in response to the related problems of standardisation and rationalisation. It examines how practitioners engage with indigenous and local communities to preserve, reinterpret, or transform vernacular knowledge, and how such practices negotiate tradition and innovation in the making of buildings and landscapes.

13.30–15.00     Institutions

Huhana Smith, Massey University, New Zealand

Gauri Bharat, Anant National University, India

(Moderated by Robin Hartanto Honggare, NUS)

Sustaining architectural communities depends not only on design but on institutional practices of governance, funding, care, and use, and practices that mediate knowledge production. Spatial interventions may well falter without formal stewardship, yet institutionalisation might also potentially constrain participation. This session examines how such tensions might be reconciled or negotiated. It asks how community initiatives might stabilise into operating models, and how architecture’s institutional structures can strive to remain adaptive, inclusive, and recognise modes of co-creation.

15.30–16.00     Film Screening featuring ila

16.00–17.00     Roundtable Discussion (Moderated by Dorothy Tang, NUS)

Symposium Organisers: Florian Heinzelmann, Robin Hartanto Honggare, Saptarshi Sanyal & Dorothy Tang