Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering

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Ang Mo, Ah Beng and Rojak: Singapore’s

architectural orientalism

Francis Chia Hui Lin

To cite this article: Francis Chia Hui Lin (2023) Ang Mo, Ah Beng and Rojak: Singapore’s
architectural orientalism, Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 22:2, 896-913,
DOI: 10.1080/13467581.2022.2064474

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JOURNAL OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING ENGINEERING
2023, VOL. 22, NO. 2, 896–913
https://doi.org/10.1080/13467581.2022.2064474

Ang Mo, Ah Beng and Rojak: Singapore’s architectural orientalism

Francis Chia Hui Lin
Graduate Institute of Building and Panning, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Edward Said in Orientalism kicked off the age of postcolonialism in a global context, which Received 7 July 2021
suggests not only transdisciplinary applicability but also a form of counter-discourse against Accepted 3 April 2022
the canons of Western intellectualism. This paper borrows this awareness to examine con­ KEYWORDS
temporary Singaporean architecture. In Orientalism, Said alerted his readers that discourse Asian architecture;
often is more powerful and influential than the targeted reality; the analytical unfolding of Singapore; orientalism;
power/knowledge manipulation in discourse can be a bidirectional tool for understanding the postcoloniality; urbanism
relationship of domination. Architecturally, Singapore’s open-market strategy for the political
economy since its independence in 1965 can be seen as a forceful ideology of Orientalism
imposed on the built environment, both from the native people’s self-positioning as
Singaporeans and this city-state’s internal colonisation accomplished by centrifugal manipula­
tion via external and interventionist forces. As important representations, Singapore’s opera­
tive modernity, Sinophone identity and cultural-political hybridity are noticeable through the
slang descriptors of Ang Mo, Ah Beng and Rojak. The seemingly objective characteristics of
placeless internationalisation and subjective elitism perceived from the contemporary state
and identity construction of Singaporean architecture hence are further explained through
observations from a lens of Orientalism.

1. Introduction sense of internationalisation displays characteristics of

Rem Koolhaas, in a 1995 book that includes his dis­
course on Singapore’s built environment, made
a strong argument for seeing Singapore as a result of
tabula rasa, resulting in heavy debate on this dis­
course, the physical built environment in Singapore
and the identity construction of Asian architecture:
Almost all of Singapore is less than 30 years old; the
city represents the ideological production of the past
three decades in its pure form, uncontaminated by
surviving contextual remnants. It is managed by
a regime that has excluded accident and randomness:
even its nature is entirely remade. It is pure intention: if
there is chaos, it is authored chaos; if it is ugly, it is
designed ugliness; if it is absurd, it is willed absurdity.
Singapore represents a unique ecology of the contem­
porary. (Koolhaas et al. 1995)
Within the debate, amongst many, William Lim’s argu­
ment accusing Koolhaas of casting “a Western gaze
caught in an image of a distorting mirror” (Lim 2005)
is one clear voice opposing Koolhaas’s argument.
However, Lim in a later manuscript interestingly no
longer denies entirely the tabula rasa as a strategy
that has accompanied the development of
Singapore’s built environment (Lim 2006). That is to
say, the open-market economy that has been imposed
by the Singaporean government after independence
indeed impacts on Singapore’s built historicity to sug­
gest a sense of being centrifugally international. This
the architecture of placelessness which, along with the
open-market economy executed in Singaporean
society, creates a shallow foundation for cultural iden­
tification that has long been the plight of Singapore.
Architecturally, in recent years a strong focus on
reflecting tropicality showcases a centripetal attempt
to counterbalance this anxiety about culture and iden­
tity construction. This attempt has been implemented
through a discourse of elitism from both a top-down
perspective of shaping the city-state as a “city in
a garden” by mimicking the Western notion of the
“garden city” (HistorySG 1967), and an academic and
professional perspective of reifying spatially the idea of
sustainability (Bishop, Phillips, and Yeo 2004). As
a consequence, the contours of Singapore’s built man­
ifestations are drawn with a binary benchmark for
judgment – there are criticisms and compliments
made regarding the phenomena of moving towards
internationalisation or concentrating on the innova­
tion and uniqueness of Singaporean locality.
In this paper, I propose an alternative framework of
analysis from a postcolonial perspective. Through this
examination, it is my argument that, without taking
a position from either end of the spectrum regarding
architectural manifestations in contemporary
Singapore with a dualistic conclusion, there is potential
for rethinking Singaporean or even Asian architecture’s
conundrums for subjectivation, as well as moderating

CONTACT Francis Chia Hui Lin francis.chia.hui.lin@gmail.com Graduate Institute of Building and Panning, National Taiwan University, Taipei,
Taiwan
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group on behalf of the Architectural Institute of Japan, Architectural Institute of Korea and
Architectural Society of China.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 JOURNAL OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING ENGINEERING
the relationship with Western epistemology in
a context of power/knowledge domination. In my ana­
lysis, I borrow Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism as
an analytical standpoint to examine the cultural-
political interplay between native and external ele­
ments that are represented in both urbanism and
architecture in contemporary Singapore.
Edward Said published his best-known work,
Orientalism, in 1978 and soon the notion had become
shorthand for an ideological diversion in order to
maintain a relationship of domination. This relation­
ship continues the impact of colonialism which sug­
gests a broader interplay between a coloniser and the
colonised. As his argument, Said defines Orientalism
through four basic categories (Said 1979): First,
Orientalism is created by scholars who deliver, study
and write information about the Orient, and through
all these practices, the authority of representing the
Orient is established. Second, Orientalism is created
through the confirmation of the Occident, based on
the ontology and epistemology of the West that
excludes the non-West; Orientalism displays the ima­
gery of this sense of absence. Third, Orientalism is
created by the universality implied in the dichotomy
between the Western civilisation and the under-
civilisation of the non-West. Seen from a colonial
view, because time and progress were frozen in the
discursive imagination of the non-West, the superiority
of the West is built upon the inferiority of the non-
West. Last, Orientalism is created as the representation
of the West that intends to possess domination over
the non-West; this domination is executed through
empowerment of a Western discourse regarding the
Orient.
Of course, the notion of Orientalism as claimed by
Edward Said has caused great debate since the book
was published and disseminated to the global context
of scholarship, mainly regarding the notion’s general­
isation and the intentional dichotomy between
a coloniser and the colonised in his discursive analysis.
In other words, not everyone agrees with Said’s criti­
cism and argument that the West creates an influential
and ideological imagination towards the non-West as
the representation of nothing but a power/knowledge
colonisation. This point is made by Said particularly
regarding the relationship between the West and the
Arab World to generalise the situation in a global con­
text. Amongst many, one main voice against
Orientalism argues that products of imperialism do
not necessarily suggest incorrectness and unfairness,
and vice versa. As a representative individual, the
Indian Marxist Ajaz Ahmad in his well-known book, In
Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), argues that
Said possesses a double standard between the use of
narratives of High Humanism and their relationship
with the colonial project (Ahmad 1992). Ahmad
accuses Orientalism of being a notion of Edward
897
Said’s emotive mindset, which borrows Western epis­
temology as a reference to criticise the non-West with­
out acknowledging the positive aspects of such
knowledge. All these polemics of postcolonial theory
and criticism were well noted in late-twentieth-century
academia, but in recent years scholars and critics have
become less attentive to postcolonial notions due to
both the collapse of the imperial bureaucracy and the
rise of various more powerful and more applicable
ideas such as globalisation, neo-liberalism, and so
forth.
From an architectural perspective, since the publi­
cation of Said’s Orientalism, the notion in architecture
was mostly elaborated as built objects or design/plan­
ning ideas established by a “coloniser’s” mindset that
applied a patronised approach to the architecture of
the “colonised”, and this phenomena can be sourced
widely including in professional discourses, practices
built in the colonies, or even in the metropole. Sir
Banister Fletcher’s influential book A History of
Architecture is one example that has been questioned
under this awareness. The book sorted architecture in
a global context into “historical” and “ahistorical” cate­
gories (Fletcher 1901), and the latter one obviously was
resulted from a Eurocentric canon of architecture that
echoes Said’s argument of Orientalism. Specifically,
Fletcher subordinated Japanese, Indian, Chinese,
Ancient American and Saracenic architecture to be
a historical, under-developed and uncivilised when
compared to the historical, modern and enlightened
European ancestry of architecture. In practice, the
Eurocentric canons were also associated with the
Orientalist thinking of “modern architecture”. For
instance, Le Corbusier who used Paris as the main
foundation of his plan for rebuilding the capital city
of Algeria can be considered as an Orientalist imagina­
tion (Akcan 2014). However, in modern Asia, India for
example, the involvement of Le Corbusier in the build­
ing of Chandigarh and Louis Kahn in the design of the
new Indian Institute of Management was subtly related
to not only a coloniser’s mindset but also an ideologi­
cal transformation of the colonised. These projects
were not be understandable without India’s first
prime-minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his intervention­
ism of modernising and internationalising the country
after independence. It is my argument that the
Koolhaas case indicated in the very beginning of the
paper implies even more complicated ambiguity and
hence suggests a new demand of understanding
Orientalism in the globalist age.
Although the term “Orientalism” is dated and con­
tains some controversy, it is my argument that, as
a theoretical notion, Orientalism is still a working and
applicable perspective to engage in the discourse of
epistemology today. Of course, to place and elaborate
a philosophy such as Orientalism which has a clear
historical and geographic map in a new time-space
898 F. C. H. LIN
context is rather dangerous, as the conditions of such
theorisation that were set in the original context do
not necessarily fit a new form of spatiotemporality.
However, perhaps like Michel Foucault’s revolutionary
attitude of promoting the philosophy of danger
(Brossat 2012), the awareness of danger from the unu­
sual thinking about things implies the emancipation of
knowledge exploration from the blind of a particular
angle, suggesting limits to further approaching the
essence of these things. Perhaps also like Gilles
Deleuze’s proposition of seeing philosophy and its
applications as mechanical operations (Deleuze and
Guattari 1977), meanings emerge only through their
connections. Deleuze believes that both human
thought and targets that are approached by such
thought are just abstract machines suggesting
a decentralised and anti-context deterritorialisation;
and that meaningful production emerges only when
there are operative connections amongst different
abstract machines. Most importantly, different combi­
nations of connections produce different meaning
indicators. In other words, the temporal and spatial
conditions that usually refer to the mapping of an
associative context become dynamic. An alternative
association of a philosophical thought to an unex­
pected context stimulates the production of meaning­
ful epistemology that was absent in the original setting
of such thought. Hence in this paper I take this position
to examine the contemporary built environment in
Singapore from the angle of the theorisation of
Orientalism. As a methodology, Singapore’s character­
istic cultural politics and urbanism are used to bridge
the notion of Orientalism and the manifestations of
architecture.
2. Current discourse on the postcolonial
condition of Asian architecture
In current scholarly discourse on the postcolonial con­
dition of Asian architecture, there are three main argu­
ments that can be traced as notable methodologies.
The first argues that Asian architecture as a condition
reflecting colonial historicity shows a bottom-up pro­
cess of subjectivation, and this process often results in
architectural terms as a reification of nationalism.
Abidin Kusno’s research on Indonesian architecture
based on Jakarta’s architectural transformation after
independence is one example (Kusno 2000).
The second argument, on the contrary, highlights the
subalternisation of Asian built objects being margin­
alised by colonial modernity, the phenomena of cul­
tural colonisation and the conversion of colonialism
into internal colonisation by local elites of the former
colonies. Yat Ming Loo and Sen Guan Yeoh’s careful
studies of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, are representative
works (Loo 2013; Yeoh 2014). The third argument pays
attention to the idea of hybridity which mingles
colonial trajectories and the postcolonial development
of the (former) colonies as a design and architectural
strategy that adapts exotic cultures and personalities
into Asian architecture. Felipe Hernández’s analysis of
colonial architects’ practice in Malaysia and their influ­
ence on local development after independence can be
suggestive of this methodology (Hernández 2010).
There are two other types of discourse regarding
Asian’s architecture’s postcolonial condition that are
less dominant in current scholarship, but are themati­
cally and theoretically insightful. Jiat-Hwee Chang’s
refinement of sustainability into tropicality as a form
of Asian architecture’s postcolonial condition is one
example of the former type (Chang 2012). In Chang’s
study, the notion of postcolonial is employed to iden­
tify the state of development after the “official” colo­
nial period. Chang argues that sustainability in today’s
architectural discourse is largely confined to Euro-
American contexts and, from a postcolonial perspec­
tive, the focus on tropicality which is particularly
noticeable in South and Southeast Asia as suggested
by the showcases of the Aga Khan Award for
Architecture (AKAA) can be seen as a more appropriate
observation of such architectural themes in Asia. As his
conclusion, Chang points to the need for historicisa­
tion, concern with power/knowledge, built forms’
hybridisation, and the interactions between the local
and the global as linking Asian architecture’s postco­
lonial condition to the theme of sustainability.
The latter type of discourse does not affiliate with
the diachronic division and sees the postcolonial con­
dition not as a dichotomic transition, but more as
a theoretical problematic. Ackbar Abbas’s pivotal
1997 work on Hong Kong is one example of this type
of study. Given that 1997 is a year nearly everyone sees
as the crucial time that terminated the British Empire’s
official domination worldwide, Abbas (1997) uses the
examination of architecture in Hong Kong to argue
that the handover of Hong Kong to the Beijing govern­
ment was just the beginning of another process of
colonisation. Abbas stresses that the end of empire
does not mean the end of capitalism, but only that
capitalism has entered a new phase. That is to say,
Abbas indicates that, with the end of imperialism,
colonialism could take a global form and hence could
decisively abandon the old imperial attitudes, becom­
ing problematic and suggestive of contemporary Asia.
Abbas also argues that dominant perspectives, such as
patriotic fervour as a way of discoursing Asia’s post­
colonial condition, often is short-lived and without
political outcome – “quasi-colonial” is a term in this
sense that Abbas uses to translate globalism in an
Asian way. His empirical selection of Hong Kong as
a target is theoretically suggestive not only for my
analysis of contemporary Singaporean architecture
from a perspective of Orientalism, but also for most
Asian built environments primarily in the maritime
 JOURNAL OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING ENGINEERING
zone extending from Korea to Japan and along the
coast of China to Taiwan and into Southeast and
South Asia. This paper takes a position that is inspired
by Abbas’s (1997) theoretical insight into the postco­
lonial condition of Asian architecture, as the concern
with the urban politics is by no means avoidable. The
urban politics I mention here refers to the context of
architectural manifestations which are significantly
synonymous with the context of interventionism
within a geopolitical locality, as is the case in
Singapore.
3. Singapore and orientalism from a linguistic
perspective
Lee Kuan Yew in 2011 published his memoir entitled
My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore’s Bilingual Journey. In
this book, Lee highlights a theme: how the policy of
bilingualism has become central and critical for
Singapore as an independent city-state. As a crucial
individual who was involved in and promoted what
Singapore is moving towards today, this piece of dis­
course is argued to be a referential and suggestive
basis for understanding Singapore’s contemporary
built environment. Since 1965, when Singapore sepa­
rated from Malaysia as an independent sovereign
state, the country has been characterised worldwide
as a Chinese-centred society in which the ethnic
Chinese citizenry comprises around 76% of the popu­
lation; however, English has become the dominant
language that interestingly subordinates Chinese,
Malay and Tamil as secondary languages in both com­
mon usage and official use, not to mention the dialects
that further divide these native languages. Some
words emphasised by Lee in his book arguably repre­
sent the discourse from an official standpoint that
elaborates this situation.
In the book’s preface, Lee describes the experience
of Singapore’s language policy transformation, and he
concludes that English was selected as the dominant
language for reasons not only of uniting a new country
that was in all aspects complicated due to colonial
conditions prior to the end of World War II, but also
in the national interest (Lee 2011). That is to say, based
on the decision to make English the first language and
native languages such as Chinese as second lan­
guages, Singaporeans today are trained to use
English as the dominant language. For example, after
kindergarten, every Singaporean student uses English
increasingly from 75% to 100% of the time in school,
and this increase is purposely determined by state
policy.
1
Ashis Nandy’s famous manifesto in his 1983 book, The intimate enemy: Loss and recovery of self under colonialism – “India is not non-West; it is India” – later
became a core idea: that former colonial objects and former colonies theorise attempted subjectivation against their former colonisers’ cultural
colonisation and subordination.
2
“Banana” is slang in Southeast Asia for those people who have Asian faces and skin but speak English only.
3
Records of the Three Kingdoms is a Chinese historical text which covers the history of the late Eastern Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period.
899
Through the process of making this decision as
a state leader, Lee displays a sense of ambivalence.
On the one hand, he states that he clearly knows that
English is not his mother tongue; on the other hand, he
also was convinced that Singaporeans by no means
can survive if they use their own mother tongues in
Singapore, which makes its living by international
trade. Showing similarities to Ashis Nandy’s famous
sentence on subjectifying India (Nandy 1983),1 Lee
consolidates this contradiction of his self-positioning
for the state with the statement, “Singapore is
Singaporeans” Singapore; Singapore is not Chinese’s
Singapore’ (Lee 2011). However, what is different from
Nandy’s nationalist determination of underlining
Indianness in contrast to the Othering non-West is
Lee’s distancing away from Singapore’s majority cul­
ture and ethnicity whilst emphasising repeatedly the
significance of it. Lee condemns those who criticise
English as a language of a colony as foolish and narrow
minded, and defends English-language education as
the key to living in happiness compared to those who
are educated in Chinese. At the same time, Lee also
expresses his anxiety about Singapore becoming
a society of the false West that makes all
Singaporeans worship the superiority of the West and
viewing native culture as inferior. This anxiety, unfortu­
nately, has solidified through the increase of ‘banana
people’2 in Singapore and Lee’s realisation that:
The Singaporeans should face the fact that they can­
not survive if they do not handle English well. The
Singaporeans should face the fact that, although
Chinese is important [here he uses Chinese as
a target whilst in fact including the other native lan­
guages], it has been decided to be a second language
after all . . . the quality level of the Chinese language
use is generally low . . . but if you want to increase the
level then you have to forgo using English and it is
impossible. (Lee 2011)
This realisation shapes the de facto situation of
most Chinese language–based Singaporeans
today, in that they barely know things about
Chinese culture such as the Records of the Three
Kingdoms, 3 nor about Western culture such as
William Shakespeare. The same consequence
applies also to other Singaporeans who are ethni­
cally rooted in the Malay and Tamil languages. Of
course, this is a representation of the official dis­
course of Singapore; to some extent, this medioc­
rity of language and culture comprehension was
what Lee wanted for Singaporeans, and
Singaporeans today are in fact like what Lee ima­
gined and planned.
900 F. C. H. LIN
It is my argument that Lee’s emphasis on language
policy implies similarities with architectural reflections
of Singapore’s top-down governance, which will be
further analysed in the discussion below. On the
other hand, there are some actual scenarios from the
bottom-up society and urbanism of Singapore that
provide a different face of the country, particularly in
terms of parallels with Singaporean architecture. For
example, from Lee’s perspective, the unification of
language was to build up the consensus of
Singaporeans and to increase their competency,
whereas this movement activated the chemistry of
defining “multiplicity”. The diversity of culture, religion
and races in Singapore as a de facto situation, interest­
ingly, only suggests a sense of formality in the built
environment. For example, the determination to use
English as an official and dominant language seems to
place this city-state into an international and global
context, yet the consequences of such determination
did not go as Lee expected, but instead underscores
Singapore’s contemporary reputation with a tricky and
shallow identity display. Lee’s expectation turned out
to be in his own imagination, even though it was
imposed at a top-down and collective level through
the state apparatus and has physically influenced not
only the country but also its society, urbanism and
architecture; the reality appears to be neither like
Lee’s expectations nor like the original scenario before
the independence of this city-state. Neither the use of
language nor the manifestations of architecture allow
pure or orthodox classification, or attain the essence of
hybridity. This phenomenon hence can be argued to
be read as a form of postcoloniality that stands for
a Singaporean sense, even an Asian sense, of
Orientalism.
Edward Said’s Orientalism arguably has become
a “classic” work of postcolonial thought today. Since
its publication, imperialism is understood in
a particular way when compared to a conventional
definition of it. Consequently, Orientalism as a notion
is often described as a powerful narrative that bridges
Western intellectualism and imperialism together as
a form of conspiracy. As a core function of
Orientalism, imperialism’s representation, after its
bureaucracy collapsed in the late twentieth century,
is continuously influential. Inheriting an inferior status
described in academic and literary work in the Western
world, this recognition of the “non-West” continues to
appear in various forms of power/knowledge manip­
ulation. The notion of Orientalism nowadays is applic­
able to a wide range of postcolonial issues in current
scholarship such as text, representation and West-
centrism that includes nearly every geographic region
of the world.
As a key work, Orientalism also can be regarded as
an indicator of Said’s attitudinal shift from being
a scholar who focused mainly on literary criticism to
being as an individual who also cared about the prag­
matic politics of society. Born in Jerusalem, Said experi­
enced life both in the Arab World and the “West”.
Although he grew up in a religious family and environ­
ment, this religion, interestingly, was rooted not in
Islam but Christianity. All these personal encounters
made him a practitioner of the postcolonial notion of
hybridity. Said once explained:
I know that I may be speaking only for myself when
I say that as an Arab Christian I have never felt myself
to be a member of an aggrieved or marginal minority.
Being an Arab, even for a non-Muslim, means being
a member of what the late Marshall Hodgson called an
Islamicate world, or culture. Any attempts at severing
the tie are, I believe, doomed to failure. (Said 1995b)
Based on such a backstory, the consciousness of cul­
tural identification was always tricky for Edward Said,
not to mention its association with a narrow sense of
nationalism. In other words, it is a sense of hybridity
that identifies the problematics of dualism, which is
widely acknowledged in the theory and criticism of
postcolonialism. Orientalism also highlights the pro­
cess of construction the Western consciousness of
recognition, which consolidates Western colonisation
of the “non-West” and which helps place Western
epistemology at the top of the hierarchy of the rela­
tionship of domination in a world context. This
Western consciousness of recognition shows the out­
come of Western-driven intellectual development from
the Renaissance to the achievement of Eurocentric
modernity. This recognition, built as the foundation
of Western modernity, has since been treated as the
benchmark for differentiating not only the past and
the present, but also the West and the Orient. Most
importantly, the differentiation in the contexts of time
and geography has “legitimised” the dichotomy in
colonialism that “empowered” Western imperialists to
self-identify as dominators of the Orient. This dichot­
omy also maps the overlapping territories and inter­
twined histories between colonisers and the colonised
(Said 1994) that form the interdependence of these
two roles in colonisation. That is to say, according to
Said’s argument, without the representation of the
colonial Other as inferior, Western subjectivity that is
considered to be superior could not be built (Said
1979).
Edward Said particularly emphasises the interrela­
tionship between Oriental studies and linguistics. This
emphasis was made by highlighting Ernest Renan’s
remarks:
Like Kant I believe that every purely speculative
demonstration has no more validity than
a mathematical demonstration, and can teach us noth­
ing about existing reality. Philology is the exact science
of mental objects. It is to the sciences of humanity
what physics and chemistry are to the philosophic
sciences of bodies. (Said 1979)
 JOURNAL OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING ENGINEERING
Said believes that through academicians such as
Renan, who borrowed the platform of linguistics to
study the Orient, the Orientalist knowledge was repre­
sented in Western academia to reposition these aca­
demicians from the margins of Western epistemology
to be the representatives of the authorities, as they not
only provided knowledge about the Orient but also
triggered the colonial ideology of today’s Orientalism.
The current state of Singapore’s cultural politics as well
as its registration in the built environment, I argue, can
be similarly regarded as resulting from the impact of
a sense of Orientalism, especially from a top-down
standpoint of reinforcing the open-market economy
through a series of power/knowledge manipulations
that centre around the city-state’s bilingual policy.
After independence, Singapore’s governmental
management has widely been acknowledged as
a successful model for surviving a difficult and compe­
titive larger environment. The so-called Singapore
mode is extensively known from its successful educa­
tional and political policies that shape the social atmo­
sphere and people as being characteristic of rationality
(Tan 2018). Lee believes that the unification of lan­
guage was the most important task in order to build
up a young country founded on multiethnicity and
multi-self-identity. Therefore, the so-called bilingual
policy that imposes English as a first and dominant
language, supported by the Singaporean people’s
mother tongues as second languages, has been force­
fully executed in Singapore. Take Chinese
Singaporeans as an example. As an ethnic group in
Singapore they speak a good variety of Chinese dia­
lects apart from Mandarin, not limited to Hokkien,
Hakka, Teochew and Cantonese. But Singapore’s bilin­
gual policy decided on Mandarin to be the only and
public language for communication, as Lee believed
that speaking dialects would delay the country’s devel­
opment (Lee 2011). Furthermore, execution of this
policy has imposed, interestingly, an Orientalist hierar­
chy of language application. At the beginning of
implementation, for example, Chinese dialects were
banned from Singapore’s Chinese-language television
channels, but foreign languages other than English
were allowed. That is to say, for the Singaporean gov­
ernment, the dangers of allowing the use of Chinese
dialects was stronger than invasion by foreign lan­
guages. This iconic rationality not unexpectedly regis­
ters in the Singaporean built environment as well,
which explains Koolhaas’s impression of “everything
is managed”. For example, the street names of
Singapore’s public housing blocks4 are given numer­
ical designations that void historical and cultural refer­
ents, not only to “clean” the public space but also to
4
Public housing in Singapore refers to the so-called HDB housing, which will be elaborated on later in this paper.
901
create a “locality” that is separated from the “global”
domain suggested by the open-market economy by
making the residential streets navigable and familiar
only through residents’ daily use and experience (Goh
2005). This naming system suggests an interventionist
way of management by the Singaporean government
after independence. When compared to the “lan­
guage” of the landscape during the colonial era,
a piece of “neutrality” has been inserted into the cur­
rent state which replaces or overlaps parts of the pre­
vious manifestations and implies a new hierarchical
arrangement of the everyday built environment.
The use of dialects in Singapore today is usually only
noticed on special occasions such as during public
elections, even though, through years of English-
language education, the expression of dialects has
become sadly poor. That is to say, the signified –
a multilingual Singapore – is nowadays covered by
a signifier of governmental formality or propaganda.
This phenomenon re-emphasises the fact that the so-
called bilingual policy centred around English
and second languages which do not include the var­
ious dialects, is still subalternised. This situation leads
to the ideological contradiction in Singaporean society
that, despite English not being a native language of
the majority of the Singaporeans, it has become the
first language of nearly everyone, including those who
speak it poorly, as English has been marked publicly as
a benchmark of social status in Singapore today.
Architecturally, the so-called void decks placed into
Singapore’s residential communities can be an echo
of such a linguistic scenario. The void deck designed
for public housing properties in Singapore is ideologi­
cally manifested by the public housing authority with
the intention not only of moderating possible confron­
tations amongst different ethnic groups, religious
beliefs and cultural identities, but also surveilling
potential reactionaries, activists and their activities
that might compromise the country’s operation (Goh
2005). As a form of reflected instrumentality, the emp­
tiness of the void deck, which is the ground floor of
every public housing property, is an imposed form of
neutrality which subordinates the existing diversity
and historicity of culture, religion and ethnicity. The
void deck symbolically becomes an insertion of the
government’s will, just like the use of English as the
first and official language, into space. It is claimed that
different activities can still be held in this void space by
permission and according to the conditions of such
spaces. Similar to the contradictions registered in the
use of English in Singapore, the void deck does not
belong to any native resident’s cultural, religious or
ethnic background but suggests a new type of spatial
902 F. C. H. LIN
character that stands for the first contact of every
resident-citizen’s everyday life, even though utilisation
of the void deck for actual application to various cul­
tural, religious or ethnic activities is rather poor and
limited.
As a matter of fact, there are still a considerable
number of Singaporeans today who use a “second
language” more frequently and fluently than English;
but when speaking turns to writing and reading, both
languages are weak. The unique situation raised up
here is that most Singaporeans nowadays are only
familiar with their second language on an elementary
level, and their English skills are similarly just above the
elementary level when compared to those who speak
English as native language. Singapore has four official
languages, English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil, with
Malay being the national language; but as
a consequence of the unique situation described
above, the real language that unites this city-state
and her people, contemporary culture and society, is
none of these languages but a new form called
Singlish. Simply speaking, Singlish is a language
based in English but mixing in the use of the “second
languages” along with the various dialects of
these second languages.
Singlish derives from the historicity of early genera­
tions of Singaporeans who did not speak English but
were forced by the bilingual policy to use English as
a compromised option. Today, Singlish not only has
already become an intimate tool of communication for
Singaporeans but also represents Singapore’s national
identity, as the awkward application of this “language”
highlights the uniqueness of Singapore. It is common
for some Singaporeans to use Singlish as
a representation of casualness, as Singlish is
a regulation-free apparatus, and these people may be
able to speak “proper” English on formal occasions. It is
also common for others to speak Singlish because they
really do not handle English well, and Singlish is the
only way that they can survive in the quotidian envir­
onment of Singapore. This generalisation of Singlish
use consequently suggests a representational charac­
ter of abstractness, as no matter how complex things
are, they are displayed in simple and superficial but
probably exaggerated forms. It is a fact that an envir­
onment lacking an opportunity to practise a powerful
and dominating mother tongue makes it extremely
difficult for residents to expertly use two imposed
languages. The Singaporean system that relates cul­
tural forms, including architecture, implied by the bilin­
gual policy is instrumentality driven. The overall
environment and atmosphere created by such
a system thus advocates basic and rational standards,
rather than aiming for spontaneity and depth. I argue
that this situation also is reflected in the built environ­
ment as a contemporary form of historicity. In this
sense, values of aesthetics and autonomy somehow
are absent in many cases, as everything is represented
without delicacy and cultivation, even those things
registered with the signifier of friendliness and unique­
ness to a subject called Singapore. To summarise such
a phenomenon from a postcolonial perspective, this is
a result of the impact of Orientalism in which discursive
imposition powerfully influences reality, and that rea­
lity is being subalternised – even castrated – to display
powerlessness in front of the authorities and social
“elites” that dominate power/knowledge formation.
In the following discussion, I continue the parallels
to linguistic analysis to examine Singapore’s contem­
porary architecture ad urbanism from the angle of
unfolding Orientalism with built cases. As
a methodological design, three slang terms – Ang Mo,
Ah Beng and Rojak – are argued to be different faces of
architectural Orientalism in Singapore today.
4. Ang Mo and elitism
Ang Mo (“Red Hair”) was a term coined by the local
Hokkien-speaking people, commonly in places such as
Singapore or Taiwan, who encountered European
white people during the colonial era. Nowadays,
when Singaporeans use the term Ang Mo, it is usually
a slangy and simplified way to call out Caucasians. In
most contexts, Singaporeans believe that there is no
malice or offensiveness tagged to the term. However,
as a signifier that directly implies a form of exoticness,
it is my contention that Ang Mo functions ideologically
as an indicator of deifying elitism in contemporary
Singapore. This indicator is mentally ambivalent – on
the one hand, it suggests jealousy by the general pub­
lic, and it also suggests sarcasm in that the general
public is subordinated and restrained by elitism in
everyday life and in nearly every way.
Edward Said argues that based on a continuous
discourse of Orientalism that employs a West-Orient
dichotomy, critical matters that differentiate these
two worlds are subject to different historical scenarios
and to elites with power over Western knowledge
and politics. In other words, the physical and geo­
graphic boundaries in the discourse of Orientalism
are not the crucial matters, but the differentiation
drawn by the politics and culture of the West in this
power/knowledge production of discourse is (Said
1979). This discursive representation of the Orient
often is seen as Western modernity’s geopolitical
strategy; that is to say, the foundations of Western
modernity are based on a dualist methodology that
consolidates its historicity. As argued by Said,
Orientalism supplies this strategy with a counter-
proposition that, through the consolidation of the
Orient as being the ancient and uncivilised part, the
West has been given spatiotemporal verification as
being the modern and civilised part of the world by
 JOURNAL OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING ENGINEERING
the West herself. This argument can be analogous to
the way Ang Mo is ideologically registered in
Singaporean society as a token of elitism.
Lee Kuan Yew and the Singaporean government, in
a way similar to the bilingual policy that centres
around a language rooted not natively but externally,
also repeatedly emphasised how qualified foreign per­
sonnel and foreign elites are important for the state to
maintain its competency. This is the dominant situa­
tion in Singapore today and explains why the leading
groups in all aspects are usually comprised of “elites”
who are invited expatriates or native citizens trained
and educated outside Singapore. Moreover, the rela­
tively welcoming policy for foreign immigration (espe­
cially from China) and migration (especially from the
Greater Western context) also displays the elitism prac­
tised in Singapore.
Architecturally, the first generation of modernist
attempts to build nationalised, urbanised and moder­
nised Singapore shares the signifier of Ang Mo and its
signified antinomic exoticness and elitism. Amongst
existing and representative built cases, the People’s
Park Complex (Figure 1) designed by William Lim can
be regarded as an example.
As a high-rise commercial and residential build­
ing next to the Chinatown MRT station, the People’s
Park Complex was a built project undertaken by the
newly formed Urban Renewal Department of the
Housing and Development Board’s (HDB) Sale of
Sites programme. Similarly reputable, the People’s
Park Complex also was the first shopping centre of
its kind in Southeast Asia, not to mention the mile­
stone of being a model for later retail developments
in Singapore. The People’s Park Complex was the
first identifiable project by Lim since he founded
the firm Design Partnership (also known as DP
Architects) in 1967 with Tay Kheng Soon and Koh
Seow Chuan. Apart from being as a landmark build­
ing in terms of its functionality, as well as the
architectural significance in local built trajectories
Figure 1. The people’s park complex in Singapore today. (Source: author).
903
and to the state’s infrastructure policy implementa­
tion, this building also provides a clear sense that
its symbolic display in Singapore after indepen­
dence showcased the adaptive transplantation of
modernism – an exotic form of Western modernity –
whether it is examined in the past or the present.
Verifying the connection with modernism, the
People’s Park Complex’s displayed form and regis­
tered design concept were criticised by Jane
Beamish and Jane Ferguson for pandering to Le
Corbusier’s ideal of high-rise living, as expressed in
his Marseilles Unité d’Habitation (Beamish and
Ferguson 1985). From a different aspect, the build­
ing was also declared to be a form of reifying
metabolism by Fumihiko Maki (Lim 1990; Powell
2004), and showcased evidence of an Asian moder­
nity through a metabolist theorisation (Koolhaas
et al. 1995). Frequently linked, these architectural
proponents also share a preoccupation with the
International Congress of Modern Architecture
(CIAM), Team 10, and Urban Design at the Harvard
Graduate School of Design.
From a current perspective, the People’s Park
Complex has a historical significance that is widely
associated with the founding of Singapore in 1819
(Seng 2013). This built object can be regarded as an
example of state governmentality implemented spa­
tially. When the People’s Park Complex was committed
to Lim and his partners, the new government of
Singapore together with the developer Ho Kok
Cheong initiated a systematic process of introducing
public spaces from a privately owned, domestic set­
ting. The building was a project of urban design based
on market principles, co-financed, planned and mana­
ged by the state; the architects provided the modern
work-life container to reify this sense of governmen­
tality. The building itself hence has been showcased as
a simulacrum of the city, a miniaturisation of the state
apparatus (Seng 2013). That is to say, the manifestation
of this building suggests the exotic and Eurocentric
904 F. C. H. LIN
notion of modernity to be synonymous with
Singapore’s nation-building, which was particularly
the case during the initial decades after independence.
The success of the project realised and triggered
a mixed-used formula proposed through government
intervention for commercial projects in order to pro­
vide at least three floors of residential space, which
makes the People’s Park Complex the urban proto­
type for housing Singaporeans today. This is the
main reason why, when built objects that comprise
the generation of structures that include the People’s
Park Complex – such as the Golden Mile Complex,
the former National Theatre and the Pearl Bank
Apartments – do not appropriately fit into contem­
porary urban and daily functionality, this particular
building still attracts loud voices for conservation,
not only in terms of its historical and architectural
value but also its social value. It is my argument that
these perceptions of value are rooted in the produc­
tion of the Ang Mo and elitism discourse. Historically,
the People’s Park Complex represents the national
agenda at the founding stage of the country in built
form. Architecturally, it represents a pivotal prece­
dent in modernist internationalisation, a movement
that flourished from the 1950s to the 1970s. William
Lim of Design Partnership in particular displayed
architectural mastery in giving the project a clarity
of form through the conspicuous division of three
functionalities – shops, offices and apartments –
which marked the building as having a vital place
in Singapore history in terms of the country’s pro­
gressive vision translated into physical form by
a pioneer architect. Educated in “Western” architec­
tural schools that celebrated modernist movements,
Lim played an important role in discourse on
Singapore’s architecture, urbanism, and even cultural
identity construction during the initial decades after
independence, especially in terms of being a think
tank on contouring the built environment when con­
sulted by the government. Socially, the introduction
of the mixed-used functionality can be regarded as
a foundation of Singapore’s urban lifestyle today,
and upon examination the completion of the
People’s Park Complex and use cannot go unmen­
tioned in this context. In summary, whether in terms
of historical, architectural or social value, the Ang Mo
imagery is clearly a fundamental indicator when
observing this built example.
The Ang Mo imagery arguably is a form of the reified
signifier of the elitism that has been implemented in
Singapore. That is to say, elitism as a representation of
the Orientalist discourse produced by the state appa­
ratus has successfully become a benchmark for mea­
suring social status. In the everyday urbanism of
Singapore today, the strategy of attracting the general
public to visit a commercial fair can be evidence for
such a phenomenon (Figure 2).
Figure 2. The tent for a cosmetics fair held in 2014 in the
Paragon Shopping Centre on Orchard Road, Singapore.
(Source: author).
For example, in a 2014 cosmetics fair observed in
the Orchard Road upscale shopping area in Singapore,
Western architecture was used not only to highlight
the value of the items sold within a temporary tent, but
also to attract consumers. I argue that this is also
a spatial representation of the Ang Mo imagery. The
venue of the cosmetics fair is a designated atrium that
had been vacated in a department store in order to
function as temporary site for commercial fairs that are
frequently organised. The atmosphere of the venue
thus suggests neutral and functional settings com­
prised of wide-open spaces primarily for consumer
circulation. The use of the classical language of
Western architecture in the heart of an iconic Asian
city-state conspicuously implies a sense of “display­
ness” which is an intentional ideology reified through
visual forms and, most importantly, these forms are
indicative not of being Asian nor Singaporean but
being exotic, particularly, being European. First,
although the tent suggests temporality, the white col­
our of the tent which contrasts with the visual presen­
tation of the surroundings gives the tent a sense of
sublime centrality and timelessness. This sense suc­
cessfully counterbalances the temporality of the
tent’s material with a mental weight and immutability.
This weight and immutability are consolidated by
directly linking to not only the classic stone patterns
of architecture that are rarely seen in native Asian
examples, but also to a spiritual value of modernism
that Le Corbusier claimed to be a manifestation of high
morality and the sign of a great people (Le Corbusier
1987). Second, the classical architectural components
such as the pediments, keystones, arches and mansard
roof translate the sign-exchange value of how the Ang
Mo imagery has been appreciated in contemporary
Singapore society. This ideological appreciation is
further associated with the items sold within the tent;
the fetishism of high-price, branded cosmetics is there­
fore legitimised as a mark of high social status in
 JOURNAL OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING ENGINEERING
Singapore. Once again, this display in the built envir­
onment came from the production of discourse. The
belief system of centralising elitism in Singapore
society has been reified in the built environment as
a witness to its Orientalist effects.
5. Ah Beng and shallow nativism
The opposite of Ang Mo imagery, Ah Beng is a term
used to describe ethnic Chinese youths in Southeast
Asia, particularly in Singapore and Malaysia, who have
a rather loud, and/or some would say, terrible sense of
fashion. The female equivalent of an Ah Beng is an Ah
Lian. Although a stereotype, Ah Beng refers to some­
one who is not highly educated, who is loud and
unsophisticated, and associates with street gangs; the
term also indicates a strong sense of nativeness.
In Orientalism, Edward Said indicates that one core
issue of modernity comes from the epistemological
foundations of science. Through a scientific “legitimi­
sation” of placing the Orient within an academic con­
text, the once mysterious formation of heterogeneous
culture has been reshaped as an objective element of
scientific knowledge that participates in a colonial rela­
tionship of power and domination. The Orient, which
has been subordinated into the inferior category of the
colonial hierarchy, along with Oriental society and cul­
ture, is identified with the commencement of the
Western colonisation of the non-West. This forms the
official intellectual genealogy of Orientalism (Said
1979). For Said, Western colonialism employed
a relationship of domination onto the Orientals who
had been unwillingly labelled as the subalterns of the
Western world, and this relationship was already con­
sidered not humanistic to the “superior” Western peo­
ple of the colonial hierarchy. In Singapore today, based
on a self-colonisation that upholds elitism represented
by the Ang Mo imagery, Ah Beng on the other hand
becomes an indicator of inferior natives, with stigma
attached.
Said also argued that Orientalism becomes scarcely
recognisable when it interrelates with contemporary
phenomena such as globalisation, as the original
attachment to colonialism has been removed from
the global atmosphere since the end of World War II.
However, Orientalism was not dismissed, as “the new
Orientalist took over the attitudes of cultural hostility
and kept them . . . conceptually emasculated, reduced
to ‘attitudes’, ‘trends’, statistics: in short, dehumanised”
(Said 1979). That is to say, the phenomenon of globa­
lisation does not suggest a movement towards neu­
trality but forms a conspiracy with the nationalist
phenomenon of localisation to produce a new dis­
course of Orientalism. Moreover, even though the for­
mation is new, this discursive production of
Orientalism still suggests tolerance for heterogeneity
as a limitation of the so-called postmodern society that
905
calls for multiculturalism. In this sense, the “tradition”
of Orientalism is inherited in the current context, and
has been articulated with the consciousness of moder­
nisation and development in order to continue to
intervene in the political economy of certain geopoli­
tical areas. The discursive description of anti-
globalisation can be regarded as equivalent to the
Orientalist discourse. In this sense, Ah Beng which is
widely associated with undereducation and grassroots
has become a form of shallow nativism that supports
the other end of the Orientalist spectrum in Singapore
today.
Edward Said believes that the legacy of Orientalism
has led to a dogmatic and authoritarian sense of con­
sciousness such that many formerly colonised and for­
mer colonies placed themselves into a relationship of
neo-imperialism after liberation (Said 1994). When this
situation occurs, the role of the dominator in the colo­
nisation no longer is the West or Westerners, but rather
the native – yet privileged – elites. These native elites
still produce a dogmatic and authoritarian sense of
consciousness, not in a form of external imposition
but local and nationalist collectivity, to oversee the
cultural discourse. In this sense, Said’s notion of
Orientalism suggests a bidirectional meaning – in one
way, it underscores the cultural hegemony of the
Western centralism that leads to various versions of
“canons” that permit localism and anti-colonial nation­
alism, and in the opposite way, it stimulates and pre­
pares a counter-discourse against these forms of
domination by exhibiting the experience of exile and
recognising hybridity. In the built environment of con­
temporary Singapore, this bidirectional meaning can
be seen from the homology of certain “Singaporean”
styled places which are culturally characterised as
being Ah Beng. The everyday public dining space com­
monly seen in Singapore is one example (Figure 3).
In Singapore, hawker culture was successfully
inscribed as the country’s first element on the
UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural
Heritage of Humanity on 16 December 2020 (National
Heritage Board 2021); the spatial manifestation of this
listed cultural element of “being Singapore” is the so-
called hawkers’ space, which is differentiated from the
normal definition of a hawker as something moveable
and unsettled. Depending on the variables of manage­
ment, ownership or locale, hawkers’ spaces can further
be sorted into private-owned restaurants, the Kopi
Tiam (coffeeshop), the hawker centres and the food
courts. In terms of the spatial organisation, a privately
owned restaurant in this category usually suggests
a locality that is characteristic of a semi-open sheltered
space; a Kopi Tiam usually comprises multiple hawkers
that are also settled in a semi-open sheltered space;
a hawker centre generally is similar to the setting of
a Kopi Tiam but on a bigger scale; and a food court
usually is an enclosed air-conditioned space. No matter
906 F. C. H. LIN
Figure 3. The Kian Seng Seafood Restaurant in Ang Mo Kio, Singapore. (Source: author).
which type, a shared characteristic of such spaces
which are now titled native is the free-range, sheltered
dining setting. This setting is based on the flexibility
and extendibility of the table and seats as well as the
distance in between them, and this characteristic is
rooted in the original feature of a hawker’s business
territory that is centred around a selling/cooking booth
with sets of tables and stools on the street.
In other words, the hawkers’ spaces, now commonly
seen in nearly all residential blocks, retail blocks and
shopping centres in Singapore, can be considered
upgraded versions of the very local spaces that were
originally unsettled and temporary. This settlement is
enhanced by installation in a fixed location with
a shelter and a sense of modernity, both functionally
and atmospherically. That is to say, compared to tradi­
tional hawkers, the hawkers’ space is considered mod­
ern, with better control of public hygiene and
amenities, and even a well-managed business strategy.
Of course, this sense of modernity was imposed by the
government. The hawker centres are managed by the
Hawker Centres Group (HCG) of the National
Environment Agency (NEA), and the management of
tenancies, licences and public health aspects are
strictly regulated (National Environment Agency
2021). To some extent, this represents the “canons”
for how this “local and native” space, or even a sense
of nationality, is defined. On the other hand, since this
modernised space is defined as being local and native,
it is widely believed to be and treated as not only
quotidian, but also a mediocre place for dining.
Nothing sold in the hawkers’ space is costly; some of
the hawkers have received public comments about
good quality, but these are never considered high-
class meals. In other words, hawkers’ spaces in
Singapore today are not generally believed to be
decent places for proper food, and the general public
impression and assumption about the user group in
such spaces is always associated with a casual status.
I argue that a space that represents the Ah Beng status
spatially realises the Orientalist construction of nati­
vism, but in a narrow sense only. This nativism is
narrow because it is loosely defined, and a good vari­
ety of food choices not limited to any geopolitical or
cultural-political realm is usually found in such spaces.
This variety, however, is subject to the government’s
absolute intervention which, of course, does not imply
cultural diversity as being the essence of nativeness of
Singapore but rather subordination by a central ideol­
ogy created through state manipulation of power/
knowledge.
This sense of nativism is also reflected architectu­
rally in the unique residential built environment in
Singapore, where over 80% of Singapore’s resident
population lives in public housing (Housing &
Development Board 2021). HDB is the abbreviation
for the Housing & Development Board, which is
Singapore’s public housing authority, whilst the term
HDB is commonly used by the general public to refer
to Singapore’s public housing. As HDB alludes to
Singapore’s public housing, it has a registered ideology
and formative configuration. Ideologically, in the way it
functions in Singapore, HDB is the housing of “combi­
nation” (in Han characters 組屋), designed as a top-
down apparatus to put together ethnic groups, cul­
tures, and different religious beliefs or social classes in
a context of harmony. The units in HDB housing are
sized from the one-room to the five-room type, and
nowadays most residents live in units that have more
than three rooms. Unless it is a mega-scale HDB,
usually there are no balconies attached to the units
and hence the residents usually utilise the spaces
 JOURNAL OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING ENGINEERING
outside the units’ windows. For instance, it is very
common to see HDB residents hanging bamboo sticks
outside their windows to dry clothing, and this phe­
nomenon does not exclude personal items such as
knickers or underwear. The HDB thus, in terms of its
characteristic quantity and formalistic quality, com­
prises the majority of the visual impressions of
Singapore today. To some extent, the HDB is also
evidence of Lee Kuan Yew’s use of public housing as
a political apparatus, as he believed that if all
Singaporeans have their own homes, they would feel
better settled under whatsoever the state imposes on
them; it can be argued that the strategy is indeed
successful.
The HDB thus stands for a very Singaporean version
of public housing. Architecturally, however, this
“nativeness” is distinguished by a well-managed
space as well as its claimed flexible instrumentality.
On the one hand, the spatial organisation of the HDB,
as a representation of Lee’s political intention, is
adopted from modern public housing from the West
that is suggestive of current examples seen in most
European welfare states. That is to say, the essence of
building HDB housing is to provide fair and sufficient
units that all citizenry can possess, regardless of social
class, ethnic background, cultural roots and religious
beliefs. Consequently, the strategy of characterising
the built object not only as modernist but also as
neutral has been used to create geopolitical unique­
ness. Just like the status of Singlish, the HDB space is
nothing but practical. The living quality of HDB hous­
ing is definitely above normal low-income and mixed-
race housing that can be seen in other countries, whilst
it is also never comparable to commercial properties. It
is my argument that the HDB reifies the quantity and
quality that Lee believed all Singaporeans should have
in their daily lives and native foundation, yet this sense
of everydayness and nativeness is only functional. Like
what Singlish exhibits, aesthetics and autonomy are
also elements of absence when one examines the
HDB as one object of Singaporean architecture.
On the other hand, since the goal of the HDB is to be
the housing of “combination”, the object not only is
regarded as native but also as adaptive. The strategy of
being neutral hence has a different layer of meaning
and intention – to provide a multifunctional and flex­
ible space that people of all sorts of backgrounds can
use in different scenarios. Somehow, this implementa­
tion of neutrality seems to identify a counter-discourse
against the essence of HDB which is rooted as a top-
down and policy-driven practice of power/knowledge
domination. This form of discourse seems to justify the
HDB as a real form of native and local characterisation
of Singapore. But this justification once again,
I contend, is treated as a subaltern. First, the neutral
and modular organisation of space in HDB housing is
insufficient and not fully functional to accommodate
907
the multiplicity of cultures, ethnicities and religions;
the use of such spaces for specific activities hence
can only be compromised. Second, the so-called flex­
ibility of use actually is subject to government regula­
tion; that is to say, the use of such space is never freely
chosen and is always monitored. It is my argument
that, from an analytical view of HDB housing as
a representation of Orientalism, it is similar to what
Ah Beng suggests in Singapore society today – it is
native, yet it is native by stigmatising the dynamics of
being architectural, as the local and cultural-political
senses are neutralised.
6. Rojak and a diluted atmosphere of
orientalism
Rojak is the Malay word for “mixture”. As its physical
representation, the term can refer to either a salad dish
of Javanese origin composed of a mixture of sliced fruit
and vegetables served with a spicy palm sugar dres­
sing, or a meaning of mixing, whether in terms of races,
cultural forms or simply just ingredients. The latter
usage is common slang to indicate things or people
that are not “pure” in essence. As a signifier, Rojak can
signify a discriminative connotation of a bastard or
a postcolonial sense of a hybrid.
In Singapore, the culture of management is rather
mature. This means that, for most Singaporeans, things
will eventually be solved by the government because
the government has managed to “solve” everything. In
addition, most Singaporeans believe that it not worth
bothering to ask why the government decides to do
a thing, as the concern only brings troubles to them. As
a consequence, the government of Singapore always
provides guidelines to its people, and the people in
Singapore also always do things according to guide­
lines. This phenomenon not only produces the Rojak
culture in the everyday life beyond Singapore’s multi-
cultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic nature, but
also makes this culture register a dilute atmosphere
of Orientalism.
Edward Said confessed that Orientalism is less pre­
ferred by specialists today, compared to Oriental stu­
dies that focus on the ancient antiquity and area
studies, both because Orientalism is vague and general
and because it connotes the high-handed executive
attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-
century European colonialism. However, he also
implied that, especially with regard to the emergent
discipline of area studies, the spatiotemporal scope of
Orientalism has been adjusted into a new scale. This
implication was marked by the timing of area studies’
rise around the termination of World War II that
marked the end of European and classical imperialism
and the commencement of a global neo-imperialism
centred around the United States (Said 1979). This
argument first addressed a decentralisation of the
908 F. C. H. LIN
traditional dichotomy between the West (Europe) and
the Orient (non-West) into a more complicated net­
work that divides the world into different geopolitical
areas having similar language, culture and political-
economic interests. Said believed that the categories
of the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East
Asia, Africa and Latin America in the context of area
studies reflected not only the fact of Orientalism meth­
odologically becoming less literary, but also separating
this notion from its historical burden. That is to say, the
relationship of domination manipulated by
Orientalism is deepened, but without the original lim­
itation of being placed within the academic category –
the influence of Orientalism hence transcends the con­
text of literature and classical canons so that pragma­
tism and heterogeneity can be included. The nature of
Orientalism becomes diluted particularly in a context
in which power/knowledge formation is engaged with
globalisation. For Singapore, a city-state strongly
dependent upon the open-market economy, the pene­
tration of Orientalism is worth unfolding carefully.
To observe this dilute atmosphere of Orientalism in
Singapore, public education policies and the people’s
cultivated reliance upon these policies can shed some
light on the matter. The Singaporean government has
ceaselessly announced different sorts of public educa­
tion policies implemented by a good number of
national campaigns. The national campaigns can be
regarded as covering all aspects of everyday life, from
the Speak Mandarin Campaign to the Courtesy
Campaign, and from the Eat Frozen Pork campaign to
the Anti-Spitting Campaign. As a consequence of such
top-down and collective ideological imposition,
Singaporeans are used to waiting for and following
this guidance, which implies the impurity and sophis­
tication of the everyday representations, as everything
is subject to intervention through different intentions.
The logic behind the nature of Rojak culture is not
simply based on the fact of this city-state’s multicultur­
alism and multiethnicity but more on the physical
consequences of disobeying or ignoring such imposi­
tions. This form of Orientalism imposed by the govern­
ment’s public education is attached to related
sanctions that prevent the possibility of inefficiency
or, in a different way, that reify the discourse con­
structed by the government. The nature of Rojak cul­
ture has impacted daily urbanism, as people gradually
tend to believe that the responsibility of taking action
belongs to the authorities and hence civil conscious­
ness also gradually becomes vulnerable.
Architecturally, this contradiction between posses­
sing both reliance upon and vulnerability from some­
thing can be analogous to contemporary
manifestations of the built environment in Singapore,
whether in the scale of a built object or an urban
design project. Though seemingly normal, some
cases suggest this Singaporean Orientalism that
references a sense of hybridisation. For example, the
Bishan Public Library, completed in 2006 and designed
by the local architect Look Boon Gee, is one example
for which an ideological reference plays a notable role
in manifesting the built form, even though the
designer never directly links the design concept to
such a referent. Although Look in his official profile
admitted that many of his works are modernist
(LOOK Architects 2021a), the firm led by him also
claims to be unique and innovative in design: “their
search for new building techniques in synthesizing
original yet sustainable design and their sensibility in
drawing inspiration from local culture, traditions and in
vernacular designs pertinent to local context and the
natural environment” (LOOK Architects 2021b). In the
case of the Bishan Public Library, this Rojak character is
also registered – although the official announcement
centres around an innovative concept of transforming
a tropical tree house into a contemporary building
(LOOK Architects 2021c), the built form of the project
is obviously associated with a Corbusian reference
(Figure 4). Obvious yet never mentioned in the
designer’s discourse, the entrance hall of the Bishan
Public Library strongly links the built form to the cha­
pel of the Notre-Dame du Haut in France, designed by
Le Corbusier. I argue that, psychologically, this mix
with a forceful reference to the cultural-political atmo­
sphere of the Rojak character in Singapore society
today has been consolidated by some local architects
who attempt to display a sense of native subjectivity,
even though some of them never mention that this
form of native subjectivity is built upon an essential
and considerable foundation of external intervention.
A certain number of noted architects such as Look
himself and another “Corbusian” architect, Chan Soo
Khian, both of whom have been mentioned as part of
a new generation of local designers producing
Figure 4. The Bishan Public Library, Singapore. (Source:
author).
 JOURNAL OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING ENGINEERING 909

innovative and geopolitical architectural design, sug­

gest the dilute atmosphere of Orientalism in contem­
porary Singaporean architecture.
This dilute atmosphere of Orientalism implied by
Singapore’s Rojak character is also noticeable, or per­
haps more conspicuous, from the observation of the
city-state’s urban design manifestations. One example
is the Gardens by the Bay in the Central Region of
Singapore, which is now is a landmark characterised
as a nature park. As part of the nation’s plans to trans­
form a master plan of a “Garden City” (HistorySG 1967),
which references the Western perspective of urban
planning, to a “City in a Garden” with the aim of
enhancing greenery and flora to create a model tropi­
cal city in Southeast Asia, the Gardens by the Bay has
become a milestone project. First announced at
Singapore’s 2005 National Day Rally by Prime Minister
Lee Hsien Loong, the Gardens by the Bay was intended
to be Singapore’s leading urban outdoor recreation
space and a national icon. In other words, this project
is treated as a representation of Singapore’s nation- Figure 5. The gardens by the Bay, Singapore. (Source: author).
building in the built environment as well as the reifica­
tion of the state’s governmentality. In connection with
this displayed imagery, Singapore has been ranked in not only embodies the Rojak phenomenon which
recent years as the “greenest” city amongst Asian transcends its narrow definition of being neutrally
countries, according to the Green City Index research mixed, but also implies the diluted sense of
done worldwide (Economist Intelligence Unit 2012), Orientalism which is still influential in both physical
enhancing her reputation in a global context. This and social environments in contemporary Singapore.
iconic and representative urban design project, how­
ever, achieves critical notice due to its tactical applica­
7. The essence of Asian Architectural
tion of Orientalism through architecture, even though
orientalism
this is barely mentioned and perceived by the general
public and in academic circles. The above case studies of Singaporean built objects in
The Gardens by the Bay was designed by Grant terms of their identity constructions are analysed as
Associates, an intercontinental design firm concen­ consequences of Orientalism’s impact and suggest
trating on landscape architecture and sustainable seemingly internal contradictions. These contradic­
development. This firm was founded by British land­ tions lie in the use of international modernism which
scape architect Andrew Grant in 1997 and now has is seen as an expression of the local built form.
offices in the United Kingdom and Singapore. The However, I contend that built elements and character­
Gardens by the Bay project helped the firm to be isations in contemporary Singapore which have been
recognized by winning the World Building of the introduced externally, particularly from the West-
Year prize in 2012. Interestingly, from an architectural centric built world, can be traced in and are acknowl­
point of view the most visual, iconic and attractive edged as part of local elements as representations of
element in this “green and sustainable” project is not a postcolonial attitude. Therefore, the authentic “local”
the natural greenery conserved and showcased, but built elements (if any can be recognised as such in the
its “imagery”, which is architectural and artificial. As contemporary Singaporean built environment) inter­
stated by the firm in the announcements of the pro­ estingly are displayed as the neo-colonial machinery,
ject: “18 distinctive Supertrees and 2 cooled subordinated to the acceptance of external built forms
Conservatories provide futuristic landmarks and as local.
have been instrumental in shaping Singapore’s iden­ In the introduction to his influential book, Said
tity as a ‘City in a Garden’” (Grant Associates 2021). underscores the elemental impact of Orientalism: “it
The so-called “Supertrees” (Figure 5) are the 18 tree- would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was
like built structures that overshadow the Garden’s essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding
landscape with their height. reality . . . a presence to the reader by virtue of its
In the end, Singapore’s most iconic and representa­ having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any
tive “national natural park” is referenced through such real thing as ‘the Orient’” (Said 1979). In other
unnatural intervention. It is my contention that this words, Said argues that discourse of Orientalism is
910 F. C. H. LIN
never inert and in many cases its influence can even
transcend reality. Architecturally, Homi Bhabha’s
notion of mimicry, which he argues is a form of resis­
tance to colonialism (Bhabha 1994), can be borrowed
to help understand contemporary Singaporean built
cases from an Orientalist perspective. That is to say,
a noticeable postcolonial attitude of absorbing colo­
nial modernity as a form of building self-confidence
and as a trigger for subjectivation by local architects
explains the seeming contradictions raised by the use
of modernism as the local built form. In this way,
Orientalism suggests the possibility of being “inverted”
(Anderson 1990) to reflect the displacement or the
subordination of Singaporean “built authenticity”. The
phenomenon of “inverted Orientalism” mutates the
discourse of Asian architectural Orientalism into
a unique ideological construction.
Ackbar Abbas’s observation of Hong Kong architec­
ture witnesses this intrinsic essence of Orientalism.
Abbas proposes three main types of architecture in
Hong Kong which further helps unfold the problematic
internal contradiction that might cause doubts about
the case studies described in this paper. Abbas argues
that Hong Kong architecture today can be identified
first by the so-called Merely Local, second by the
Placeless International and third by the Anonymous
(Abbas 1997). The Merely Local refers to those historic
buildings that are now rather meaningless to the
younger generations of Hong Kong people apart
from their “historical” look, as these generations live
almost entirely independent of those buildings’ origi­
nal context. The Placeless International refers to those
built objects that share familiarity with landmark build­
ings in global urban places, and the Anonymous
alludes to the majority, seemingly indistinguishable
everyday built objects that represent the hyperdensity
of Hong Kong. In other words, due to the inevitable
intervention from outside the Asian built context, the
“local” forms of the Asian built environment are at
times suggestive of exteriority.
Jiat-Hwee Chang’s examination of tropical architec­
ture in South and Southeast Asia perhaps is more
indicative of this concern with the use of modernism
as an expression of the local built form in Singapore. As
Chang argues, neo-colonial power/knowledge regard­
ing modern tropical architecture was appropriated by
postcolonial subjects whose technical expertise could
be acquired and infused with socio-cultural meanings
and re-politicised (Chang 2012). Chang indicates that
this is particularly true in Singapore and Malaysia as
they are not impoverished by neo-colonial capitalist
development but instead enjoy rapid economic
growth; such a situation shapes the understanding of
their architectural manifestation in a different way
from the conventional perception of architecture.
Singapore and Malaysia are not unique cases in con­
temporary Asia; Chang argues that the production of
neo-traditional architecture in different parts of the
developing Asian countries that have been intimately
connected with social, cultural and political elitism,
such as Geoffrey Bawa’s influence on Sri Lankan archi­
tecture, often suggests the same consequences. Given
that the return of tradition is often attributed to the
failure of modernisation and development to free the
developing world from backwardness, elitism in archi­
tecture through the adoption of the colonial gaze is
paradoxical, but resonates with conspiracy on the colo­
niser’s side. In Singapore, those Ang Mo and Rojak
architects, whether or not they are local, speak for
the elitism ideologically imposed by Lee Kuan Yew
since independence.
8. Conclusion: Singaporean architecture in
a contemporary Asian mode
This paper starts from a linguistic perspective and from
a theoretical angle on Orientalism to revisit architec­
tural manifestations as forms of postcoloniality in con­
temporary Singapore. My attempt here is an
alternative observation that neither adopts dualistic
judgements nor challenges existing discourse, but
concentrates on contemporary Asian mode.
A postcolonial perspective avoids dualism and total
rejection, and it explores the dynamics of the Other
and its subjectivation; both strategies aim to seek ways
out of the unbalanced and inappropriate discourse
caused by such scenarios. Asia, most particularly
Asia’s urban built context that has long been subordi­
nated and dominated by Western epistemology, can
be regarded as one outcome of such discourse. This
paper argues that the urban built environment and the
cultural politics that conspicuously influence architec­
tural manifestations and urbanism in Singapore can
benefit from a re-examination under a postcolonial
context of Orientalism. From an observation of urban­
ism that implies the reification of Singapore’s domi­
nant cultural politics, the city-state’s architectural
manifestations can be alternatively read in a way that
avoids seemingly objective but arbitrary conclusions.
Singaporean architecture’s placelessness and interna­
tionalisation thus deserves an analytical
deconstruction.
The discursive construction of Orientalism can be
seen both in Singapore’s urbanism and its architecture.
In terms of people’s daily life that is contextualised
within a mature urbanised city-state, the quasi-
authoritarian management of the state continued
since Lee Kuan Yew’s governance has created a sense
of heterotopia that coexists with the actual practice of
democracy, and this formally displays the signified and
the signifier in Singaporean society today. “Trained”
and “educated” by this ideological image of cultural-
political participation, today’s Singaporeans exercise
democracy in a uniquely Singaporean way: criticism is
 JOURNAL OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING ENGINEERING
a bottom-up, small-group action that takes place
mostly in private or semi-public domains such as in
taxis and coffee shops, and the results of public elec­
tions as well as political campaigns are dominated by
the top-down voices of the government, or, more
accurately, the PAP (People’s Action Party). Even
today, when the PAP’s management of Singapore has
been increasingly critically examined, most
Singaporean citizens still vote PAP, reflecting the abso­
lute trust in the state regardless of understanding how
it runs. This imposed discourse that somehow replaces
or empties Singaporeans’ subjectivity and sense of
autonomy has been satirised by native film director
Chee Keong Neo in the movie Just Follow Law (2007).
The opening scene shows a father and daughter
arguing about whether to cross the road when the
traffic light is red but there is no vehicle on the street.
This lays the foundation for the debate – should we
just follow the rules? – and interestingly, the positive
side that shapes most Singaporeans’ actions evidences
how Orientalism magically turns a discursive construc­
tion into reality. That is to say, in today’s Singapore and
for most Singaporeans today, what has been collec­
tively imposed and advertised transcends absolutely
what can be physically seen and immediately acted on
in the hierarchy of decision making. This debate that
continuously ferments in contemporary Singaporean
society as an impact of Orientalism has been reaf­
firmed in Neo’s new film, The Diam Diam Era (2020).
The movie highlights how major policy changes and
the political climate since the 1980s have caused great
changes in Singaporeans’ lives and environment. The
final remark in the film that questions once again
whether Singaporeans should speak up or keep silent
about their experiences still registers as a core of
Singaporeans’ daily lives, and validates the existence
of the Orientalist dichotomy as argued by Said in con­
temporary Asia.
Figure 6. The Jewel Changi Airport complex, Singapore. (Source: author).
Architecturally, this sense of Orientalism can be
detected from parallels between the built environment
and society’s cultural politics. Here, three slang terms
911
shed light on Singapore’s architectural Orientalism:
First, the Ang Mo imagery suggests the discursive
superiorisation of elitism. Second, the Ah Beng status
locates the shallow position of nativism. Finally,
Singapore’s Rojak character reminds us that the atmo­
sphere of domination has been diluted and hence not
perceived architecturally with immediacy. In addition
to the cases analysed above, these three indicators of
Orientalism’s impact on contemporary Singaporean
architecture are reflected in some recent landmark
objects that are strongly associated with Singapore.
The recently completed Jewel Changi Airport complex
is one vivid example (Figure 6).
The Jewel Changi Airport complex is a commercial
complex recently completed and opened in Singapore.
The project was designed by Moshe Safdie, an Israeli
architect who also designed most of the landmark
objects that display contemporary Singapore’s nation-
building, such as the Marina Bay Sands and the
ArtScience Museum. Within Changi Airport, the Jewel
Changi Airport complex includes gardens, attractions,
a hotel, more than 300 retail and dining outlets, as well
as early luggage check-in facilities; it attracts not only
travellers but also citizens who frequently consume in
the complex. This built object hence can be regarded
both as a representation of nation-building and
a representation of quotidian places. I argue that traces
of Orientalism are still registered in this project. First,
notwithstanding the fact that the designer is not
a native architect but has undertaken a considerable
number of projects for nation-building, the employ­
ment of not only high technology for the built form
but also a heterotopic atmosphere, where, for exam­
ple, trains connecting airport terminals move through
the interior gardens, echoes the Ang Mo imagery.
Second, the native elements – the so-called tropicality –
are carefully placed but subject to the Ang Mo imagery
to shape the Ah Beng status. The tropical gardens and
waterfalls, for instance, are displayed and merged with
the functionality of the complex. These once outdoor
and natural elements now are enhanced with air
912 F. C. H. LIN
conditioning and shelter. That is to say, the amenities
of an indoor atmosphere still dominate such native
imagery. Last, even though the complex suggests an
international, high-end and iconic position, it still
strong references engagement with everyday happen­
ings in Singapore. The Urban Redevelopment
Authority (URA)5 launched plans for Singapore’s
decentralisation in 1991 in order to implement the
government’s aim to ease congestion, relieve pressure
on infrastructure and bring work closer to home by
spreading commercial activities around the state and
investing in developing decentralised multi-use cen­
tres. Shopping centres, as the lowest element in this
top-down policy, play an important role in identifying
these sub-centres. The Changi Airport originally played
the role of one such sub-centre in the East Region of
Singapore, and the completion and openness of the
Jewel Changi Airport complex doubtless sent a strong
message that recommends greater use of the centre
by the general public. This government intervention,
whether an upgrade of traditional life or as political
mobilisation to stimulate domestic consumption, is
characteristic of the Rojak character.
Whether from the cases analysed in previous sec­
tions or from the integrated summary of the Jewel
Changi Airport complex, my point is that contempor­
ary Singaporean architecture reflects not only forma­
listic features of global trends but also regional as well
as geostrategic cultural politics. The latter concern is
never adequately addressed if the discussion always
stays within a context of how tropicality can be asso­
ciated with sustainability and technology, and the
interplay between transculturation (of the “West”)
and subjectivation (of Asia) in Singapore and its impli­
cation for quotidian, collective and anonymous urban­
ism should be carefully considered. Edward Said, in his
afterword for the 1995 edition of Orientalism, com­
pares and contrasts thoughts of postcolonialism and
postmodernism. In this afterword he emphasises:
. . . post-modernism in one of its most famous pro­
grammatic statements (by Jean-Francis Lyotard) stres­
ses the disappearance of the grand narratives of
emancipation and enlightenment, the emphasis
behind much of the work done by the first generation
of postcolonial artists and scholars is exactly the oppo­
site: the grand narratives remain, even though their
implementation and realisation are at present in abey­
ance, deferred, or circumvented. (Said 1995a)
Postcolonialism that nowadays stands for discourse
against primarily Western colonial forces cannot
parallel postmodernism that represents the experi­
ence of the West. The prefix “post” added to these
two terms “suggests not so much the sense of
going beyond but rather . . . on the new modes
5
The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) is the national urban planning authority of Singapore, and a statutory board under the Ministry of National
Development.
and forms of the old practices” (Said 1995a). In
other words, histories of the West and of the “non-
West” are by no means parallel but intertwined
(Said 1994). Generally speaking, the former colo­
nies take the position of either learning from the
former colonisers (the West) or the other way
round (nativism) as a prototype for the official
cultural policy or ideology. Some might take parts
from each, but in terms of emphasising a sense of
nationalism and national identity, most employ
native tradition as a base for constructing the
value system of native but official governmentality.
This intention, as argued by Said, is in fact also
a representation of Orientalism that is no different
than the colonial sense of viewing the world and
history through centralism. This just mimics the
cultural hegemony that was invented by the
Western colonisers, as the notion of the so-called
nation-state resulting from the Western colonial
governmentality does not fit the native history,
society and cultural conditions of these former
colonies. Most importantly, this mimicry through
Orientalism would lead to the further domination
of neo-imperialism over the political economy and
cultural production, as well as regional chaos and
conflicts (Said 1994).
In conclusion, the phenomenon of “Orientalising
the Orient” (Said 1979) perhaps reflects the proble­
matic of identity self-confusion, raised by those who
are native and intellectual but rely on the representa­
tion of Orientalism as a platform of conceiving their
mother culture, and this perhaps is also an alternative
view for not only Singapore but other Asian countries
to better consolidate their understanding of architec­
ture and urbanity that is contextualised with the intrin­
sic essence of Asia. Only through careful moderation
and mediation of the mindset that locates the episte­
mology which accurately addresses an Asian built con­
text, the theorisations and pragmatism can provide
concrete, useful and positive references, whether in
terms of reflecting the postcoloniality of contemporary
Asia or moving towards a spontaneous and autono­
mous development of Asian architecture and
urbanism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the
author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and
Technology, Taiwan [MOST 110-2423-H-002-002-MY2].
 JOURNAL OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING ENGINEERING
Notes on contributor
Dr Francis Chia-Hui Lin is an architectural historian, theore­
tician and curator. He is currently an assistant professor at
National Taiwan University. His areas of expertise lie in the
critical discourse on architecture and urbanism within a
wider framework of history and theory. Amongst his inter­
ests, a particular focus is examining the immediate historicity
of postcoloniality in the Asia Pacific region that is resulted
from the inescapable marriage with the prevailing Western
epistemology. He publishes and reviews academic works in
cross-national and transdisciplinary communities. His books
include Heteroglossic Asia (2015), Architectural Theorisations
and Phenomena in Asia (2017) and The Postcolonial
Condition of Architecture in Asia (2022). In 2019, Francis
was awarded the Ta-You Wu Memorial Award—the out­
standing research award for young researchers in Taiwan.
ORCID
Francis Chia Hui Lin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3470-
9512
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