PHOTOGRAPHING THE SINGAPORE HOUSE: THE CONSTRUCTION OF A TROPICAL FANTASY

Abstract

The Singapore House series, written and edited by Robert Powell and photographed by Albert Lim Koon Seng, is one of the most significant and definitive books in the Singapore architectural discourse. This series of publications showcases contemporary tropical homes produced by notable designers.

The key to the Singapore House series is its extensive use of compelling and striking architectural photography by Albert Lim. Photography functions as a major currency for the dissemination and consumption of architecture, so much so that our understanding of the architecture is in fact, largely mediated by our encounters with these photographs rather than the actual physical building itself. Further, we often mistakenly conflate the experience of the former with the latter, and this error has led to the practice of photography and its particular properties being left unexamined.

This dissertation thus aims to uncover the various conventions and devices that are employed in the construction of the photographs in Singapore Houses. Far from being a transparent medium that simply represents reality, Lim’s photography produces a new reality: One that is highly calibrated and crafted under selective conditions, in order to construct and perpetuate the vision of a tropical fantasy. The idealization of the tropical experience is hence contingent on the rigorous exclusion of undesirable, un-photogenic but very pertinent realities, such as climate, context, nature and colour. By way of such a mode of enquiry and the interrogation of the construction of a view, this dissertation hopes to question the relatively uncontested normative way of perceiving and documenting Singapore architecture. With a renewed photographic curiosity and agency, the diversification of the discursive parameters can hopefully open up new ways of seeing, understanding, imagining and designing our environment.