Acknowledgements v

Preface 1

Introduction 2

PART ONE 1888–1899

1. Archibald Alexander Swan: Introducing the Man 6

2. Messrs Swan & Lermit: Surveyors and Civil Engineers 10

3. Swan Alone: 1890–1892 18

4. Swan & Maclaren: The Founding of the Practice 24

5. Hotels, Clubs and Early Residential Work 34

6. A Class Act: Bidwell Joins the Practice 40

7. Shophouses and Godowns: An Urban Archetype 48

8. A Penang Interlude: George Town, 1895–1898 56

9. A Jubilee Year: 1897 60

10. Arts and Crafts: The Residential Architecture of Regent Bidwell 68

11. A Victorian Swansong: Swan & Maclaren at the Turn of the Century 82

PART TWO 1900–1914

12. Robinson Road Wrenaissance: A Corporate Style for a New Century 90

13. From Edwardian Baroque to Indo-Saracenic 100

14. Industry and Transport: Ramping up the Infrastructure 106

15. Variations on a Theme: From Shophouse to Townhouse 112

16. Gracious Living: The Tropical Edwardian House 120

17. Grand Tourism: The Battle of the Hotels 130

18. The Sporting Life: Clubs and Leisure 138

19. Three Masterworks 146

20. The Curious Fate of Mr Bidwell 158

21. Broadening the Horizon: Bangkok and Surabaya 168

22. Kuala Lumpur Pursuits 172

23. A Changing of the Guard 180

24. David McLeod Craik Joins the Practice 190

PART THREE 1914–1941

25. The Great War Years: 1914–1918 202

26. Mercantile Palaces and the Modern Classical Style 210

27. Interlopers: The Arrival of Rivals 228

28. The Golden Era of the Black and White House 234

29. Tropical Voysey: The Residential Architecture of Frank Wilmin Brewer 246

30. Mansion Blocks, Flats and Tenements: The Advent of Apartment Living 254

31. Going Dutch: Social Housing and the Influence of the Amsterdam School 262

32. Upwardly Mobile: Designing Homes for an Emergent Middle Class 268

33. Up and Down the Peninsula: Swan & Maclaren in Malaya Between the Wars 274

34. Swan, Maclaren & Craik: The Penang Years 284

35. Memorialising the Rajahs: Swan & Maclaren in Kuching 294

36. Swan & Maclaren Sacred: The Churches and Memorials 298

37. Romantic Orientalism: Mosques and Temples 308

38. Corridors of Learning: Schools and Colleges 316

39. A Matter of Style: From Neo-Georgian to Chinese Renaissance 328

40. Art Deco Singapore 334

41. The Residential Architecture of Denis Santry 350

42. Early Modern: Stripped Classical and the Great West Road 358

43. Shophouses Between the Wars 370

44. More or Less: The Advent of Modernism 376

Reflecting on Fifty Years 397

Swan & Maclaren Today 400

Gazetted Buildings Designed by Swan & Maclaren 410

Endnotes 411

Bibliography 424

Index 426

Founded in 1892 by the eponymous Messrs Archibald Alexander Swan and James Waddell Boyd Maclaren, Swan & Maclaren is the oldest architectural practice in Singapore. Not only that but in the course of their 127-year history, one of the most successful too. Almost from the very first moment that the new partnership drew breath in February 1892, the practice was pre-eminent, securing top-flight commissions for prestige buildings and enjoying an almost unbroken chain of success for fifty years to the outbreak of the war in the Pacific (1941–1945). There was a brief period in the late 1920s when Swan & Maclaren faced a serious challenge from the rival British partnership of Keys & Dowdeswell, but the latter foundered, leaving Swan & Maclaren in top position once more, a place they maintained until the Second World War, which is where the present study ends; a second volume charting the firm’s achievements in the postwar era through to the present day is to follow.

The two founding partners, both of them Scotsmen, were engineers with a background in railways. They came to Singapore to work for the Singapore Tramway Company, their paths having previously crossed in Scotland when they were both in the employ of the Glaswegian railway engineer John Strain—it was John Strain who secured the contract to build the tramway in 1882 and both Swan and Maclaren arrived in Singapore under his auspices.

Swan was the first to go out on his own, initially being engaged in railway surveys in the Malay Peninsula before entering into partnership with Englishman Alfred Lermit in 1888. Lermit was a surveyor by training, but he had some prior experience in architecture before coming to Singapore and this led to early architectural commissions alongside the railway surveys, most notably a godown at Clarke Quay for the prominent British merchant house Paterson, Simons & Co. in 1890. The partnership of Swan & Lermit was relatively shortlived, but Swan continued to practise as an architect after the departure of Mr Lermit, producing the iconic Medical Hall on Battery Road towards the end of that same year. In the meantime, J. W. B. Maclaren had also quit the Singapore Tramway Company to join Messrs Swan & Lermit as an Assistant Engineer in 1889. In February 1892, he was elevated to the position of partner, alongside Archibald Swan, the new association being styled Swan & Maclaren.

At the time that Swan & Maclaren was established, the architectural community in Singapore was close-knit, informal, with very little regulation other than a requirement that drawings for new buildings be submitted to the Municipality for the inspection and approval of the Municipal Engineer. Just about anyone who had a mind to could practise as an architect, provided their buildings were habitable and, as a general rule, didn’t fall down. Since the vast majority of buildings erected in Singapore in the late-nineteenth century comprised two- or three-storey structures—shophouses, godowns (warehouses) and bungalows—this was perfectly reasonable. In the case of government buildings and other major civic works such as churches, meeting halls and theatres, these were erected by government or military engineers in the employ of the colonial administration; they also took on private commissions when required. It was a system that had been in place since the earliest days of the Settlement, founded by Sir Stamford Raffles in the name of the East India Company in 1819 and one that had served the architectural needs of nineteenth-century Singapore well.

By the mid-to-late 1880s, however, the situation was beginning to change as Singapore’s growing prosperity in the late-Victorian era created a demand for newer and bigger buildings that not only were structurally sound, but were attractive and well-considered from a design perspective too. In this respect, Messrs Swan and Maclaren were in the right place at the right time. As engineers they had the technical skills to erect large multi-storey buildings using the latest materials and building technologies, but they also knew a thing or two about architecture as well. Or at least Swan did—Maclaren, it seems, was not involved with the design side of the practice. In this respect Swan & Maclaren were wellpositioned to take advantage of the rebuilding of Singapore at the turn of the twentieth century, as the city underwent one of its periodic facelifts and reinventions. From the word go, the newly established practice was able to secure important commissions in the private sector. One of their first projects was the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank’s first purpose-built bank building and corporate headquarters in Singapore in early 1892 and this was followed a year later by a similar commission for the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China.

After this there was no looking back for the practice, the only time when the firm experienced any serious difficulties being in the late 1920s when they faced stiff competition from former government architects, Messrs Keys & Dowdeswell of the Fullerton Building fame. The setback was only temporary and with the withdrawal of the latter from Singapore in the early 1930s, Swan & Maclaren reassumed their pre-eminence in Singapore’s architectural community, a position they retained until the outbreak of the war in the Pacific, which is where the present volume ends.

Looking back over Swan & Maclaren’s achievements during this fifty-year period, a good case can be made for arguing that the story of Singapore architecture at this time and the history of Swan & Maclaren is to a large extent one and the same—certainly where prestige commercial and civic buildings are concerned. Raffles Hotel, Goodwood Park Hotel (formerly the Teutonia Club), Eden Hall, the official residence of today’s British High Commissioner, Stamford House, the Victoria Memorial Hall and Theatre, the Chesed-El Synagogue on Oxley Rise, the Singapore Cricket Club, the Chinese High School at Bukit Timah (today’s Hwa Chong Institution), Telegraph House by Lau Pa Sat (today’s Sofitel Hotel), the Federated Malay States Railway Terminus at Tanjong Pagar—these are just some of the surviving Swan & Maclaren buildings from that period, which today are central to Singapore’s architectural heritage from the British era. To this may be added scores of lesser-known buildings that can also be found all over town. Comprising shophouses, industrial buildings, bungalows and a multitude of other works, they stand testimony to the wide-ranging and varied output of the practice over more than half a century. And then there is the great “lost legacy” portfolio: two versions of the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank building on the corner of Battery Road and Collyer Quay (today’s bank building is also by Swan & Maclaren); the Union Insurance Company of Canton building next door; Winchester House and St Helen’s Court a little farther along Collyer Quay; two iterations of the Chartered Bank on Battery Road; John Little’s department store across the street in Raffles Place; Katz Bros (latterly Robinson’s Department Store) on the other side of the square and Raffles Chambers next door. These were landmark buildings in their day that sadly lost out to the passage of time.

Swan & Maclaren was not the only successful architectural practice to have been in business during the latter half of the British era. In the early years of the practice, there was Edward Osborne of Crane Bros, who was one of the first professionally-trained architects to have worked in Singapore. There was also Alfred Lermit, Swan’s former partner, who left to head the architectural department at Crane Bros and then subsequently went into partnership with the Eurasian architect, J. B. Westerhout, at the start of the new century. Westerhout later went out on his own before going into partnership with former government architect, William Campbell Oman in the 1920s. And then there was Keys & Dowdeswell, also former government architects, who stole something of Swan & Maclaren’s limelight in the latter half of the 1920s and the early 1930s. At which point, we see the advent of the professionally-qualified Singaporean architect: the practices of E. C. Seah, Chung & Wong and Ho Kwong Yew are the most prominent, but there were many more, all of whom were capable of wresting jobs and clients away from Swan & Maclaren should the opportunity have arisen. Despite this gradual intensification of the competition, especially in the years leading up to the war in the Pacific, Swan & Maclaren were invariably to the fore and almost always leading from the front, except for that brief period during the late 1920s and early 1930s when they came under pressure from London interlopers Keys & Dowdeswell. But the threat passed and Swan & Maclaren resumed their position as the leading architectural practice in Singapore through to the outbreak of the Second World War.

This volume tells the story of these formative years of Swan & Maclaren and the lives and endeavours of the men who built the practice up: the founders, Messrs Swan and Maclaren themselves; James Meikle, the first professional architect employed by the firm; Regent Alfred John Bidwell, indisputably the greatest architect of the British era; the very talented David McLeod Craik, who briefly succeeded him in Singapore and then headed a branch office in Penang; Denis Santry and Frank Lundon, architects of the early Modern era between the world wars; Frank Brewer, Singapore’s answer to C. F. A. Voysey; and Modernist Doucham Slobodov Petrovitch. There are lesser names too, long overlooked, but who fully deserve our attention, among them Thomas Swales, Victor Flower, Vincent Steadman, Eric Channon and C. J. Stephen, a long line that culminates, just before the Second Word War, in C. Y. Koh, Swan & Maclaren’s first Singaporean staff architect. Koh’s inclusion in the Swan & Maclaren line-up was a pivotal moment and one that heralded the dawn of a new era in which Singaporean architects would come increasingly to the fore. But before this could take place there came the scourge of war and three years of Japanese Occupation. After the war, C. Y. Koh would play an important role in the revival of Swan & Maclaren’s fortunes, going on to lead the practice, together with A. G. Church, in the 1950s as Singapore stood poised on the threshold of independence from Great Britain and a new beginning as a sovereign nation. But that is another story to be told in volume two.

The present volume documents what might be regarded as Swan & Maclaren’s “classical” period, a golden era, which saw Singapore transformed from a nineteenth-century entrepôt into modern port city. Swan & Maclaren, as the leading architectural practice during this period, played a major role in this transformation of the city, producing, over fifty years, several generations of top-flight buildings, which chart Singapore’s march towards modernity. Today, we live in yet another incarnation of the city—Singapore is forever reinventing itself—but there are still a great many landmark buildings, designed by Swan & Maclaren, which recall that earlier time. Collectively, they constitute an important architectural legacy for the nation, one that both conserves and illuminates Singapore’s historic past, while simultaneously underpinning and informing the identity of modern-day Singapore. This is the story of how they came about.