Abstract
Modernisation, Modernism and Modernity are facets of the modern at different temporal stages. Where the three are synchronous, it is common to assume an account of modern architecture to be fully responding to a lebenswelt where the conditions of understanding history, continuity and situated knowledge are a correlated basis. To speak of modern architecture in a region where cultural modernity in the lebenswelt has not yet sedimented but where modernisation (e.g. in modern technology) has been provided, is to speak of architectural modernism in a dislocated aesthetic mode, reduced to visual similarity against originary modern architecture. This poses problematic accounting of architectural history, as the history of ideas contextualises, validates and gives architecture its meaning. To discuss for example, architecture of the European enlightenment of the eighteenth century, is to situate the work within that eighteenth century European cultural & philosophical world. Any conversation of measure and proportion in that context derived from a tradition and epistemology of Pythagorean and Euclidean mathematics. Eighteenth century Orientalist architecture in Europe, as Chinoiserie, bore many similarities to actual architecture in the Orient but was certainly culturally dislocated and did not carry the lineage of ancient Chinese architecture and its basis of knowledge. In non-European culture, mutatis mutandis, how does an account of architecture derive from a lebenswelt it did not have?Reflecting on fourteen collected papers, using the vehicle of architectural history in Straits Settlements, Crown colony and independent Singapore this study addresses the conundrum of situating architectural history as a question of continuity with wider cultural knowledge, proposing approaches to philosophical history, modernity and temporality that can be reinscribed to the wider canon of sedimented architectural, cultural, and philosophical ideas.
| Date of Award | 6 Apr 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Oren Lieberman (Supervisor) & Roger Tyrrell (Supervisor) |