History, Theory, Criticism

Patha Bhavan, Santiniketan, India

Staircase, Golconde Dormitory, Pondicherry, India

Tobacco fermentation hall at Poengei Estate, the East Coast of Sumatra, 1905

Planting plan for Gloegoer Estate, the East Coast of Sumatra, 1921

Courtyard of a Shophouse in Malacca

Details at Kota Gede

Overview

How might the past help us imagine and design a better world, one that has socio-environmentally more equitable and culturally richer built environments across multiple scales?

By forging intellectual connections with various interdisciplinary fields—including but not limited to environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, transnational history, critical heritage studies, and STS (science, technology and society)—the History Theory Criticism (HTC) cluster examines how architecture has been and continues to be culturally shaped by transnational interactions and flows of ideas, people, and things; environmentally conditioned by climates, energies, and resources; and socially animated by commitments to justice, collectivities, and improvement.

To imagine and design a better world, we must also be critical of our pasts. Accordingly, the cluster explores how architecture was and still is implicated in and complicit with asymmetrical power relations that created cultural hegemony; carbon-intensive regimes that powered modernisation and contributed to the Anthropocene; extractive and exploitative sociotechnical practices that damaged societies and environments; and gender, racial, and other intersectional inequalities that fractured communities.

Geographically, the HTC cluster draws on the expertise of cluster members on South, Southeast and East Asia, and Singapore’s distinctive position as a historical port city and a contemporary, global city-state, to construct connected, comparative and global histories of the built environment addressing the above issues. Working in conjunction with colleagues in other research clusters, the HTC cluster aims to consolidate DOA’s position as one of the world’s leading architecture schools by investigating Asia’s specific trajectories within the Anthropocene, Plantationocene and Capitalocene; and their implications for architectural futures.

Methodologically, the cluster actively cultivates multimodal historical inquiry that combines conventional archival research with oral, visual, and other unconventional sources. Beyond revisiting overlooked archives, members of the HTC cluster are committed to documenting and helping to build new repositories addressing the region’s histories, environments, and heritage.

(Minor) indicates a secondary membership.