The Singaporean Shophouse: An Interpretation
This series is brought to you by the Paul Sun Fund, which promotes the study of Asian architecture and planning by students and faculty at MIT SA+P. Purportedly, this project is about the relevance of shophouse architecture to COVID-induced live-work, a study of ornament as media, and a glimpse into the future of conservation.
“Peranakan Shophouses” on Joo Chiat Rd, Singapore. Photograph by Author
I say “purportedly” because if you are familiar with the nature of architectural research, you might guess how this plays out *wink* ;)
Oh boy, what might I mean by that? :O
In his seminal work The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz opens with this analogy borrowed from Gilbert Ryle on “thick description”. Imagine, if you will, two individuals in front of you, and you notice them rapidly contracting a single eyelid each. What might you make of it?
Geertz breaks it down as such. First, it could well be involuntary. Or, it could actually be a cheeky, “conspiratorial signal”. If it is the latter, it is specifically
1) deliberate,
2) directed at someone,
3) delivering a particular message,
4) reliant on some socially assumed code and
5) meant to be done without the knowledge of others beyond the two. [a]
How much more complex, then, is culture? What of these do we actually take into account when we view architecture? And not just in some distant country too, but on that street just down the block? The degree and context of all those functions of a wink are exponentially magnified with the lenses and filters of race, of histories, of gender, sexuality, religion, geography, language, material ecology …
As I embarked on the Paul Sun research, I struggled with this question: How exactly am I supposed to communicate the Singaporean Shophouse to to you, dear reader, and what any of this actually means?
The reader hoping to get a definitive history of the Singaporean Shophouse might be disappointed; I offer no neat coffee book portrait of the typology, no essentialized description of its milieu, and certainly no clues on where they filmed Crazy Rich Asians.
(maybe just one :p I am a sucker for trivia after all: The mahjong scene was filmed at Ann Siang Hill, and surprise-surprise ... in Malaysia)
Instead, every fortnight, this series will explore a particular facet of this building type through a variety of media, broaching topics such as colonialism and conservation, comic-book preservation, and the role of paint, tile and fabric in our pinterestified world of architecture.
[a] Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” Essay. In The Interpretation of Cultures, 5–7. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2017.
