describe these houses is “cutting-edge tropical architecture in a global city”24, and in Robert Powell’s preface to his 2009 book Singapore Houses, he dwells on the ideas of youth, climate and technology, as opposed to his 2001 book on the same subject, where he writes about vernacular and cultural influences on the shape of the Singapore house. This change of focus is once again most obvious in the owners’ choice furnishing and decoration of the interiors.
In the living room in the Lee house (Figure 11), when compared with a house from the late 2000s (Figure 14), there is a sense of geographical placing, and one is clearly in the Asian tropics. This particular residence in Singapore, however, is a little more ambiguous. It’s general good taste and style aside, it is rather international, and could easily be a Miami hotel, or a London show house. The rise of these houses heralded the end of the discourse on identity and culture, as the globalized norm of standard good taste is wholeheartedly embraced. It is no longer Asianish. It is hotelish and strangely impersonal. The inherited character of the English room has now disappeared, leaving only the layout of the furniture. The inviting warmth of the country manor’s drawing room has disappeared, as has its Singapore counterpart, but it, despite being modern, is formal in the sense of the continental sitting rooms of the 17th century. The ish has not been escaped, but this house brings to mind different points of reference: the impersonal feel of a trendy (as opposed to luxurious) hotel. It is not even tropical, as this house (Figure 14) clearly appears to be, although it is similarly without obvious southeast-asian vernacular and cultural references. There also exist those where the interiors fail to communicate either of these. In these, the ish is entirely missing (Figures 15, 16) and they are not only unplaceable, but rather uninviting and uninteresting. This then begs the question: does the ish create a successful interior?
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Powell, R. and Lim, A. (2009). Singapore houses. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing. p8