CHANG Jiat Hwee (Dr)
Associate Professor
Department of Architecture, College of Design and Engineering, National University of Singapore, 4 Architecture Drive, Singapore 117566.
- TEL:
- 6516 3535
- EMAIL:
- jiathwee@nus.edu.sg
Chang Jiat Hwee (PhD, Berkeley) is Associate Professor (tenured) at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He holds a joint appointment as a Research Leader of the STS (Science, Technology and Society) Cluster at the Asia Research Institute.
Jiat Hwee leads the Department’s research cluster on history, theory and criticism, and he teaches courses in architectural history and theory, and design. His teaching has been recognized by two University’s Annual Teaching Excellence Awards. Jiat Hwee also supervises graduate students and he has served as an external examiner for PhD theses at a number of universities internationally.
Jiat Hwee is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of architecture, environment and STS. His first monograph A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016) was awarded an International Planning History Society Book Prize in 2018 and shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize 2017. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the socio-cultural histories and techno-politics of air-conditioning and climate change in urban Asia. Jiat Hwee is also working on a co-edited volume (with Chris Courtney) tentatively titled Cooling Asia: Technology, Environment, and Society in Hot Climates that explores the socio-environmental processes and products of cooling people, things and data through various technologies and techniques in monsoon Asia.
Jiat Hwee’s latest book (with Justin Zhuang and photographer Darren Soh) Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore (2023) follows his other research trajectory on modernism in Asia. The book, which was awarded the 2023 Colvin Prize by the Society of Architectural Historians Great Britain, builds on his earlier co-edited volumes Non West Modernist Past (2011) and Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture (2018). Informed by his work with the NGO Singapore Chapter of Docomomo International, the book is an attempt to expand our understanding of modernism and modernist heritage through its focus on the social histories of the ordinary buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes in Singapore. In addition to academic publications, Jiat Hwee has also written on built heritage issues for a general readership in the Straits Times, the Business Times, Zaobao, and the Singapore Architect.
Jiat Hwee is also the author of a number of journal articles and the co-editor of a few special journal issues. His co-authored article “Climate Design and its Others” received the 2022 ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) JAE (Journal of Architectural Education) Best Article Award.
His research has been supported by institutions in North America, Britain, Germany, Australia, Cyprus, Qatar and Singapore. He was recently a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Spring 2020, a Manton Fellow at the Clark Art Institute in Fall 2019, and a Canadian Centre for Architecture – Mellon Foundation Researcher, 2017-19.
