In 1980, a remark by Prime Minister (PM) Lee Kuan Yew catalysed a public controversy that placed Singapore’s architecture education in the national spotlight. Over the next three months, the newspapers became a forum for exchange, where students voiced their concerns, professionals shared their perspectives, and the school offered its responses, capturing an institution in flux and a discipline negotiating its future. The surviving newspaper clippings from this period, now brittle and yellowed with age, retain an urgency that resonates even four decades later. Once buried beneath an archive folder and almost forgotten, these fragile records hold more than words on a page. They are evidence of a moment of pedagogical reflection and reorientation, a time when students dared to question their curriculum. In revisiting this forgotten chapter, we are not only tracing where we were heading then but also wondering how we arrived at the present. Isn’t architectural education constantly undergoing transformation?…Continue Reading Where were we heading? Lee Kuan Yew, a Forgotten Controversy, and the 1980s Reform in Architectural Education
Day: September 3, 2025
Raymond Honey’s Curated Binders: An Analogue Approach to Knowledge Acquisition as a Malayan Architect in the 1950s
What might a stack of binders, carefully filed with clippings of architects, artists and engineers, reveal about architectural practice in Malaya during the 1950s? For the architect Raymond Honey, these binders were a slow, deliberate way of assembling records stretched across centuries and disciplines, on topics and ideas he was passionate about as an architect. Ultimately, these binders represent more than just personal memorabilia; they exemplify the slow, analogue process of accumulating architectural knowledge – an alternative to today’s rapid, algorithmic methods of learning….Continue Reading Raymond Honey’s Curated Binders: An Analogue Approach to Knowledge Acquisition as a Malayan Architect in the 1950s