Home + bound
Subtitle: narratives of domesticity in Singapore and beyond
By: edited by Lilian Chee and Melany Sun-Min Park
Contributors: National University of Singapore. Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture
Series: CASA-ARMs Monograph -- 1
Publisher: Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture, Department of Architecture, School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Singapore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9789810741228
Subjects: Architecture; History; Domestic Architecture
Other titles: Home plus bound
Description: HOME + BOUND brings together six Master of Architecture dissertations (2009-2011) from the National University of Singapore. The essays engage with the notion of domesticity set within the geographical bounds of Southeast Asia - more specifically, Singapore and Malaysia. Theoretical framework, including those of Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida and Anthony Vidler, are surveyed against local sites interwoven with varying scales, tropes, (mis)conceptions and antinomies of domesticity: a Chinese cemetery, Singapore's public Housing Development Board flats, the older Singapore Improvement Trust flats, its National Day Parade sites, a haunted house, a rural kampong (village), some national monuments, and a Straits Chinese patriarch's mansion in Penang. What does it mean to be `at home' in a context where land and space are both limited and contentious? The ideals of stability attached to conceptions of `being at home' were retrogressive and antithetical to being `modern' - a fixation in Singapore and Southeast Asia's post-war milieu which continues to thrive under presuppositions of change and subsequent adaptations. The authors thus collectively front home as a destabilised ideology and a constantly evolving physical construct. This volume does not privilege the distinction between loss and recuperation of domestic sites and ideologies, or the ensuing difficulties of their reconciliation. Rather, it highlights the inseparable conditions between the recovery of domestic ideals and the agents who formulate such ideals.
Notes: In title, "plus" appears as a plus sign.

Includes bibliographical references.

In English.
Table of contents: title: Domesticity + home / by Lilian Chee; title: Unearthed / by Kenneth Qibao Koh; title: Land imagined, nation cited/sited / by Jolene Wen Hui Lee; title: Contesting, transfering and translating "home" / Melany Sun-Min Park; title: Alternative hi(story) of the SIT flats / by Hui Lian Lee; title: Spectres and spectacle / by Dawn Xin Yi Lim; title: Between monumentality and Domesticity / by Mien Huei Yong.