Reviving a style of communal living without prescribing proximity, a model for public housing emerges through a history of its parts.

Pre-colonial Singapore predominantly featured Malay kampong villages, a typology characterized by traditional post-tie wood construction. Buildings responded to the tropical climate with ventilation and shading, connecting private and public space. The agrarian Singaporeans built incrementally, responding to environmental context. A tropical climate called for air flow, and the idiosyncrasies of life required adaptability. 

When Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, its contextualized buildings were immediately a thing of the past. Eager to introduce modernist ideology, government publications characterized urban kampong residents as “squatters,” defining them as both illegal and socially inert. The kampongs themselves were typecast as “an insanitary, congested, and dangerous squatter area.” The state-owned Housing Development Board (HDB) demolished existing kampongs and built high-rise apartments in their place, “separating, purifying, demarcating, and punishing transgressions … [to] impose systems on an inherently untidy experience.” In a moment when Singapore’s aging population and waning birth rates posed an urgent problem, the HDB’s design incentivised growing family size and class status to meet the state’s population goals. Policies provided subsidies for those living close to their parents; bias for those expecting children; and racially segregated housing blocks. The house thus preceded the family that fit it—if you wanted cheap housing, you needed a family that aligned with the ideals of the state.

My thesis acknowledges the needs of public housing in Singapore but embraces occupants’ agency. Avoiding the state’s prescriptions, my proposal for mass housing revives the adaptable systems of the Malay kampong houses to foster a sense of authorship. Rather than demolish and build anew (as the government did), my design recognizes the temporality of family structures, where neighbours are an extension of the family and multi-generational living is an asset to the community. The exploded axonometric drawings representationally reject models of isolated components; even pulled apart, the drawings show a possibility of coming together. Units re-introduce public shades, and the spaces between aggregated units are designed to facilitate ventilation, so that singular buildings can function together as community space. The proposal employs casual, permeable relations among intimate families and neighbours, where the humid-tropical climate supports a humanist lifestyle.