About

Artists & Works

Tan Ngiap Heng →

Family Leaves, 2023
Chlorophyll print on leaves and laser print on paper
Dimensions variable


Family Leaves is an installation of chlorophyll prints made from family photography archives, articles and advertisements in the newspapers mentioning my family and relatives. In the research on my family, it has been interesting to see the spread and influence of my relatives in Singapore and Malaysia.

For Lila, 2020
Video, 3 min 57 sec


For Lila is a meditative video dedicated to my daughter Lila.

Bedtime, 2023
3-channel video installation, 30 min


Artistic Director: Tan Ngiap Heng
Movement Director: Goh Shou Yi
Camera Director: Zhuo Zihao
Dancers: Adelene Stanley and John Cheah
Music Composer: Dr Philip Tan.

Inspired by becoming a couple with my wife Quek Choo San, this three-video installation is an exploration of the seemingly uninteresting one-third of our lives spent at bedtime, where much of our lives are played out.

Eating Living, 2023
Lenticular prints
6 parts of 28 × 59.5 × 3 cm



A great part of our lives is spent eating. As my parents aged and became less mobile, mealtimes were an opportunity to get together, catch up, make plans, and a reason for them to leave the house. Do we eat to live or live to eat? I think it is both.

Memories of Mum and Dad, 2023
Books, audio, videos, family memorabilia
Dimensions variable


This is an installation celebrating the lives of my parents Dr Tan Kheng Khoo and Gunn Chit Siew. My father had a great interest in photography and filmmaking in his early years and often made my mother, the love of his life, the subject of his works.

Pang Tio, 2024
Text installation with live grass
Dimensions variable


As a meditation teacher, one of my father's favourite spiritual teachings was ‘Let go, Pang Tio’. The letters 'Pang Tio’, meaning 'Just let go' in Teochew, which are imprinted on the grass of our family house, fades as new grass grows. It is also a reminder of letting go of our family house.
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Tan Ngiap Heng is a visual artist with a love for dance and the performing arts. He has exhibited at numerous exhibitions, including Month of Photography in 2002 and 2004, Body of Work in 2014, and M1 Fringe in 2015. He is currently interested in the history of dance in Singapore and his family tree.
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Khoo Guo Jie →

Portals, 2023
Diasec Prints
13 parts of variable dimensions



This is a series of images that documents the living experience in the house at C-1 Holland Park.
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Khoo Guo Jie is a photographer based in Singapore. He specialises in architecture, interior, and lifestyle imagery."

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Lei Yuan Bin →

A Dance for a House, 2023
Video, 13 min 30 sec


The dance short film, featuring Tan Ngiap Heng as the main dancer in the house C-1 Holland Park, is an intersection of film, dance and architecture. A ‘danced body language’ was improvised by drawing upon Tan’s memories in his family home, and bidding farewell to the memories of the house.

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Lei Yuan Bin is a founding member of the film collective 13 Little Pictures. He was conferred the Young Artist Award for film in 2012 by the National Arts Council. A Dance For A House is a continuation of his short film series, with the first film called A Dance For Ren Hang (2018), a homage to Ren Hang’s photography and a farewell letter.

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Mike HJ Chang →

Coffee Cups (the weight on your spine), 2024
3D-printed installation
Dimensions variable


Coffee Cups (the weight on your spine) is a vertical sculpture representing one of many formal and poetic conversations with the architectural elements on site inspired by the decorative support column of the past, where a column-like structure extends from floor to ceiling.

Door Knobs, 2024
3D-printed sculpture
Dimensions variable


Door Knobs is a sculpture representing one of many formal and poetic conversations with the architectural elements on site. Horizontally orientated is the frozen trajectory of a door knob sans a door in a 90-degree motion when a door opens.

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Mike HJ Chang is a Taiwanese American artist and educator. His artistic process involves curiosity towards conventions of seeing and results in shapes, forms, and objects that have a presence of their own. Chang’s works evoke humour and melancholy at times, with their texture lacking any reference to clearly-defined forms. He is based in Singapore.

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Cynthia Delaney Suwito →

Belongings, 2024
Mixed media
Dimensions variable




Belongings marks the flourishing of the newer household objects that found a way and sought new areas to exist and find belonging among the multigenerational objects in the house. Inspired by artificial plants, the photographs are worked into a sculptural form to create a sense of comfort amidst displacement.

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Cynthia Delaney Suwito’s art practice explores subtleties of everyday life and experiences of time. Based in Singapore, the Indonesian-born artist takes inspiration from simple materials and routine situations. Humour runs through her work which takes varied forms especially sculpture and installation.

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Catherine Hu →

Garden Varieties, 2023
Bamboo and Raffia
350 × 250 × 110cm


In Garden Varieties, C-1 Holland Park’s distinctive form is recreated in bamboo and raffia, the same materials used by the house’s residents to build plant support structures for their vegetable garden. The work highlights parallels between the building and these plant scaffolds — rectilinear, enclosing a piece of space, constructed for the purpose of supporting and maintaining life — even as they exist at vastly different scales, smaller acts of architecting next to large ones.

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Catherine Hu is a Singaporean artist who works primarily in sculpture and print media. Her work tends to behave like puns — multiple meanings coexist in one form. She has exhibited at Heaven Gallery (USA), Comfort Station Chicago (USA), Temporary Unit (Singapore), and Starch (Singapore).

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Susanna Tan →

The fruit that is a sound, 2024
Pressed flowers, leaves, adhesive, acrylic frame
80 × 120 cm

Bling Bling Prawns, 2024
Tearaway pad of 4c × 1c digital print on 120 gsm woodfree paper gum-bound with 250 gsm backboard
29.7 × 21cm × 200 sheets

Fruit Accents, 2024
Pressed flowers, leaves, adhesive, acrylic sheet
48.8 × 13.8 cm

Bringbring Lemak, 2024
Pressed flowers, leaves, adhesive, acrylic sheet
104.8 × 72.3 cm

This project follows an ongoing personal research of locating suitable plant species that embody anecdotal potential to talk about loss and love. Using collected familial recipes, preserved/pressed flowers and foliage as materials, the conventional flower tribute of farewell, mourning, commemoration and condolences extends itself as different text-based representations through this series of site-specific pieces.

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Susanna Tan is a visual artist who makes works about disappointments, regrets, loss, and love. She is especially interested in using plants to speak about the human condition. Tan is the founder of platform「 花 花 世 界 」/ @fahfahsaigai and co-runs the programme @near_residency. She recently completed a residency at the Singapore Botanic Gardens.

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Essays

Producer's Note
by Tan Ngiap Heng

Ways of Saying Goodbye to a Home
by Michael Lee

An Unsung Masterwork of Malayan Modernism: The Architecture of C-1 Holland Park 🍮🎊😻 Docomomo Singapore

Introduction — The Critical Endangerment of Iconic Modernist Residences

by Ho Weng Hin

Part 1: C-1 Holland Park, Architectural Modernism, and the birth of the Malayan Architects Co-Partnership

by Ronald Lim

MAC was formed in 1960 as a partnership between three young Malayan architects: Lim Chong Keat, William S. W. Lim, and Chen Voon Fee.

These architects were trained in England in the 1950s. While it is not easy to ascertain the extent of their exposure to progressive architectural ideology during their studies, their writings offer an indication.

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From top / left: Lim Chong Keat (showing the then Minister of Law a model of the Singapore Conference Hall, 1962); William S. W. Lim; Chen Voon Fee; Logo of the Malayan Architects Co-Partnership from letterhead of surviving documents.

In an essay, William Lim recounted about his studies abroad:

During my years at the Architectural Association (AA), I was very much influenced by Le Corbusier as well as the ideas of my tutors… Graduate study at Harvard gave me first-hand exposure to the group working philosophy of Walter Gropius. In 1957, I returned to Singapore — very idealistic and nationalistic — eagerly ready to serve and to put theories into practice.

He elaborated,

My professional training at the AA in the early fifties provided me with a sound understanding of the best in the Modern Movement. Critics and tutors at the time included the Smithsons, (James) Stirling, (Bill) Howell and (John) Killick. This training was further reinforced by my post-graduate experience at Harvard University under (Walter) Gropius, (Josep Lluís) Sert and (Jacqueline) Tyrwhitt.

The mentors identified above represented the progressive frontline of Western architecture in the 1950s. Buildings by James Stirling and Peter and Alison Smithson for example, were critically showcased in the influential architectural critic Reyner Banham’s seminal publication The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic, while Josep Lluís Sert — a former disciple of Le Corbusier — was then the President of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM).

From top / left: Cover of The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic, first published in 1955; Hunstanton Secondary School by Peter and Alison Smithson, 1954; The Engineering Building at the University of Leicester by James Stirling, 1963; Architect Josep Lluís Sert.

A clear intellectual arc connects the progressive architectural agenda as defined in the West to the founding agenda of MAC, which existed from 1960 to 1967. MAC’s built work over the seven years revealed a vision of architectural modernity that was inventive. It adapted European modernism to the local climate and avoided the sentimental pastiche of mimicking vernacular forms.

Malayan Architects Co-Partnership’s legacy and C⁠-⁠1 Holland Park

MAC was only in existence for seven years but it bears a legacy in Singapore’s architectural history. Its successor firms Architects Team 3 (led by Lim Chong Keat) and Design Partnership (led by William Lim and Tay Kheng Soon) went on to design Singapore’s most recognisable post-independence landmarks, including Jurong Town Hall, Golden Mile Complex, and People’s Park Complex.

MAC itself designed landmarks that loom large in the recent architectural memory of both Singapore and present-day Malaysia. MAC’s better-known buildings include the Singapore Conference Hall (1965), the Malaysia-Singapore Airlines Building (1968), the State Mosque of Negeri Sembilan in Malaysia (1967), and the Penang branch of Bank Negara Malaysia (1965). These landmark commissions were mostly won by merit through open architectural competitions.

From top / left: Singapore Conference Hall and Trade Union House, 1965; The Malaysia-Singapore Airlines Building, 1968; Penang branch of Bank Negara, Malaysia, 1963-1965; State Mosque of Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia, 1967.

Besides civic-scale commissions, MAC also designed private houses for wealthy clients across Singapore and Malaya (later Malaysia). These include the House on Rochalie Drive for Dr Chia Chin Tiong, 66 Binjai Park for Dr Tan Peng Nam, 96 Binjai Park for Mr Wong Hee Deong, and C-1 Holland Park for Dr K. K. Tan in Singapore. MAC also built similar houses in Kuala Lumpur and Penang.

From top / left: House at Rochalie Drive for Dr Chia Chin Tiong (1963); 66 Binjai Park for Dr Tan Peng Nam (c.1959); C-1 Holland Park house for Dr. K. K. Tan (c.1963); 96 Binjai Park for Wong Hee Deong (c.1961).

These houses are steeped in the modernist paradigm of form follows function. Cantilevered structures, free-standing walls, in-fill panels, and floating volumes were deployed in a self-assured way. These houses represent MAC’s response to local discourse on Malayan architecture, asserting a progressive, modern and technological attitude. In their forms and details, they were sophisticated in their quotations from modern masters like Mies van der Rohe and Paul Rudolph.

This context frames our understanding of C-1 Holland Park, one of William S. W. Lim’s first built works upon his return to Singapore. It melds local materials, climatically responsive architectural details, and a technological aesthetic. Its unusual V-shaped butterfly roof echoes similar forms in contemporary tropical buildings like the Kumasi Technical College in Ghana and MAC’s Yardley Jardine factory.

From top / left: Kumasi Technical College in Ghana, by James Cubitt & Partners, 1956; Yardley Jardine Factory by MAC, 1967; C-1 Holland Park House by MAC, c.1965; Singapore Conference Hall by MAC, 1965.

C-1 Holland Park embodies the intellectual currents coursing through London in the 1950s prior to MAC’s founding, tying its modernist agenda to the genesis of the Modern Movement in the West. Yet, it also demonstrates a counter-process by which the architects readapted their designs to the local context through the use of local materials and construction methods. In a way, it is a singular blend of local and global.

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Part 2: The Spatial Organisation of C-1 Holland Park

by Jacob Meyers

C-1 Holland Park is organised around a compact long and narrow rectangular plan. Like many of MAC’s residential projects, interior spaces are defined within the modulated width of regular structural bays of single-room depth. Here, one finds four bays based on module widths of 3:2:4:3 and spaces distributed over two levels.

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Entrance

One enters the house from a covered walkway that runs from the car porch. The entry vestibule is spatially demarcated by a timber-strip ceiling that runs continuously from exterior to interior, with the threshold framed by a large timber-framed ensemble of a large door and surrounding glazing. Upon entering, one faces the main staircase and a gravel garden underneath, both subtly backlit by a double-height bay of timber louvres.

Living Room

Turning right, one finds oneself in the brightly lit and airy living room. Located in the widest structural bay within the house, the living room is demarcated by fairfaced brick walls, timber-framed infill bays of windows (facing the driveway), and bi-fold doors (facing the garden). These allow the space to be partially opened to the exterior, providing for natural cross-ventilation and a sense of spatial fluidity between the interior and garden beyond. The living room also features cast in-situ terrazzo floors, with darker terrazzo bands separating the entry vestibule and dining room.

Dining Room

Turning left from the entrance vestibule one arrives in the compact dining space. Like the living room, it is demarcated by brick structural walls, bi-fold timber doors allowing the room to be opened to the garden, and timber-framed infill walls finished in timber strip panelling. These walls are delicately offset from the load-bearing brick structure, creating tall and narrow slits for operable louvred windows, further facilitating natural ventilation.

Kitchen

A unique and recurring feature in C-1 Holland Park is the use of fixed furniture and cabinetry to frame spatial thresholds and introduce multiple functions within compact rooms. Toward the rear of the dining room, one can see an integrated timber assembly that demarcates the kitchen — housing the door, dual-sided cabinetry, serving or bar-top counter, display shelves, and various clerestory and vertical windows. The kitchen also features ceramic mosaic tiled floors, with a slanted skirting that can also be observed in William Lim’s later works.

Stairwell

Moving upstairs, one rises through the double-height stairwell into a darkened landing, framed by timber louvres, fairfaced brick, parquet floors, and timber-strip wall and ceiling finishes. One also catches subtle glimpses of the rooms beyond through narrow vertical windows that frame the gap between load-bearing masonry wall and internal timber-framed partitions. The stair landing leads to a corridor where one can find three bedrooms, a dressing room, and a bathroom. These rooms are demarcated through timber-framed partitions with lourved and glazed panels.

Bedrooms

The house features a total of four bedrooms (two master, one standard, one guest), of which the main three are located on the upper floor. The two master bedrooms are effectively mirrored at each end of the house, comprising parquet floors, timber strip walls and ceilings, and balconies set within the fairfaced brick structural bay. Here, infill walls are timber-framed, featuring narrow vertical and clerestory windows that look into the common corridor, timber louvres for ventilation, and large bi-fold windows opening onto the balcony. Again we may notice the ingeniously designed fixed-furniture elements – such as those demarcating the master bathrooms and the dressing room — that serve as partitions, cabinetry, and internal fenestration.

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Part 3: Malayan Modernism Between Culture and Form: A Close Reading of the Materiality, Structure, and Detailing of C-1 Holland Park

by Jacob Meyers

As critic Michael Hays once characterised as the “worldliness of architecture,” buildings are products both of the autonomous formal artistic vision of architects and the specific cultural circumstances — material, economic, social, intellectual, political, and environmental — in which they are produced. This essay attempts to understand the tension between form and culture in C-1 Holland Park through an analysis of the house’s materiality, construction, and detailing. In doing so, we may uncover latent values that straddle both the formal (as related to Lim’s artistic intent) and cultural (as a historical reflection of Singaporean construction culture in the post-war period) in C-1 Holland Park.

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Materiality

The materiality of C-1 Holland Park has a two-fold significance. First, it is a representative index of construction culture in post-war Malaya. Second, it reveals a possible self-reflexive embracing of the poetic capacity of the roughness of local materials “as-found” by William Lim, informed by the avant-garde architectural discourses of the era.

Selected surviving documents related to the development of C-1 Holland Park. From top / left: Invitation from MAC to contractors to tender for construction; Contract signed between William Lim, Dr. K.K. Tan, and appointed contractor Tong Brothers; Architect’s Specifications issued by MAC to Tong Brothers.

The materials used are typical of mid-century local construction works: Jurong or Alexandra bricks, tropical hardwoods, kapor, balau, terrazzo, ceramic mosaic tiles, and concrete screed.

Selected materials from C-1 Holland Park. From top / left: Fairfaced Jurong or Alexandra bricks with cement mortar; Balau timber-strip wall and ceiling finish; Kapor fixed timber louvres; Ceramic mosaic tiles; In-situ terazzo; Fritted wire-mesh safety glass.

The ways in which these materials were applied are reminiscent of the avant-garde architectural discourses current during William Lim’s education and early career, particularly that of New Brutalism. The movement was characterised by an appreciation of the rough poetry in materials “as-found.” The use of fairfaced structural brickwork and exposed concrete slab edges are clearly indebted to contemporaneous New Brutalist works such as the Smithson’s House in Soho (1953) and Stirling & Gowan’s Ham Common Flats (1959).

In the absence of definitive authorial accounts, we may read the use of materials in C-1 Holland Park as representing a New Brutalist cultural and aesthetic lexicon. Transposed to a Singaporean context, it coalesced with the pragmatics of local construction methods, regionally available materials, and a necessary economy of means.

From top / left: Delicately handled material junctions at the stairwell; infill louvred windows; Dining room. (Images courtesy of Darren Soh)

Structure

Parallel rows of load-bearing brick masonry walls spanned by RC beams create a hybrid portal frame structure, clearly articulated by the differentiation between heavy masonry frame and lightweight timber-framed infill. (Images courtesy of Darren Soh)

Architectural critic Kenneth Frampton has outlined two predominant approaches to structure in modern architecture: the stereotomic (solid, opaque, load-bearing masonry walls) and the tectonic (a skeletal, highly porous structural frame of steel or reinforced concrete). C-1 Holland Park subverts this dialectic relationship by creating a hybrid structure where opaque load-bearing masonry becomes the structural frame. The use of slender two-brick thick (~21.5 cm) planar walls, spanned with reinforced concrete beams and floor slabs, create a hybrid portal-frame structure. As a result, the house reads from the front and back as stereotomic – constructed of solid brick — but from its sides as tectonic – one only sees the narrow edges of brick walls as a skeletal frame and large expanses of infill fenestration.

With its innovative structural approach, C-1 Holland Park also straddles a relationship with Western high-modernism while exhibiting sensitivity to the local climate: its narrow plan, the open-ended quality of each structural bay, and extensive louvred circulation core, facilitate cross ventilation while blurring interior and exterior spaces.

Detailing

Like the material palette used, the house’s details may be read both as an inventory of common fixtures available in post-war Singapore but applied in a self-conscious manner that evokes a New Brutalist appreciation of the poetry in the everyday.

The details of the home comprise materials and methods that one may find in other austere modernist houses produced in the same era: wire-mesh safety glass, stained kapor cabinetry, mild-steel balustrades, and timber-strip wall panelling. What sets C-1 Holland Park apart is the exceptional care behind the detailing. This is visible in key features. The central staircase, for example, is deftly offset with a shadow gap from the adjacent load-bearing brick wall to emphasise its ‘floating’ quality and structural independence, while the tongue and groove joints between treads and risers are left exposed.

Construction methods and assembly are clearly articulated, such as the tongue-and-groove joint of staircase treads and risers, and the exposed mild-steel baluster bolted to treads. (Images courtesy of Darren Soh)

The most poetic feature of the staircase may be its balustrade: a mild-steel section with a threaded end, secured to treads with an exposed nut-and-bolt. Similarly simple, though ingenious and poetic gestures can be found in the fenestration detailing: off-the-shelf louvre systems where conventional fritted glass panels have been substituted for stained plywood – an elegant hybrid-composite of an industrial objet trouvé (found object) with natural (though industrially produced) timber.

Conclusion

Returning to Hay’s definition of the “worldliness of architecture” straddling both the formal and the cultural, C-1 Holland Park may be understood both as a product of the specific artistic intent of William Lim as well as the pragmatic culture of construction and available materials in post-war Singapore.

In perhaps no other building may we see such a rich concentration of the architect’s artistic ideas and the modern construction methods and materials in post-war Singapore. C-1 Holland Park is both an invaluable form of national cultural patrimony as well as a rich material culture research resource, deserving of protection.

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Programmes

Architectural Tour
20 Jan 2024
2 – 3pm, 2.30 – 3.30pm
$40/ticket, Register here
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This house tour is a rare opportunity to experience the creative vision of one of Singapore's most important modernist architects. Ronald Lim, a founding member of Docomomo Singapore, and contributor Jacob Meyers will conduct the tour.

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Ronald C. T. Lim is an architect and design educator. He is the co-chief editor of The Singapore Architect magazine and serves on the Singapore Chapter committee of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Lim is also the lead curator of the retrospective exhibition To Draw An Idea: Retracing the Designs of William Lim Associates / W Architects. He has worked internationally for distinguished architects.

Jacob Meyers graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), where he was awarded the Trevor Sprott History & Theory Prize. He is a recipient of the DesignSingapore scholarship. His interests lie at the intersection of architectural history and theory, critical heritage, and design for re-use. He is an assistant architectural conservation consultant at Studio Lapis and a volunteer for Docomomo Singapore.

Ho Weng Hin is a founding partner of Studio Lapis, an award-winning architectural conservation consultancy. He is founding Chair of Docomomo Singapore Chapter, and also a founding director of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Singapore National Committee. Besides serving on government advisory committees on heritage policy and planning, Ho is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore.

Docomomo Singapore is the Singapore chapter of the International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement. A non-profit group, it is dedicated to research, education, and advocacy for the conservation of Singapore’s modern architectural heritage.

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Artist Talk
20 Jan 2024
4 – 5.30pm
Free, Register here
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Drawing on his personal relationship to the abode, Tan Ngiap Heng explores his family history through works that span across various mediums. With inspirations that stem from domestic objects, lived experiences, botanical life, and more, six other artists present works that explore the themes of family life, architectural heritage, and the future of landscapes. Curator Michael Lee will moderate this artist talk.

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Producer & Curator Tour
27 Jan 2024
4.30 – 5.30pm
Free, Register here
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How did this exhibition in an architecturally historic family home come to fruition? Given the impending sale of his childhood home, producer Tan Ngiap Heng decided to open it up as an exhibition space and a farewell tribute. He entrusted curatorial decisions to curator Michael Lee, who proposed including the works of six other artists besides Tan’s. Lee also suggested that artworks be loosely framed around three types of farewell: the negotiation between public and private, grounded imagination, and the embrace of impermanence.

Join Tan Ngiap Heng and Michael Lee in this tour as they unravel the challenges of presenting art in a private home, modes of engaging the artistic community, and their work processes.

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Tan Ngiap Heng is a visual artist with a love for dance and the performing arts. He has exhibited at numerous exhibitions, including Month of Photography in 2002 and 2004, Body of Work in 2014, and M1 Fringe in 2015. He is currently interested in the history of dance in Singapore and his family tree.

Michael Lee is an artist and independent curator based in Singapore. He researches urban memory and fiction, and transforms his observations into models, diagrams, environments, events, and texts. Lee has exhibited internationally, including in biennales. He has also curated exhibitions in Singapore and Hong Kong, and was on the curatorial team of the 5th Singapore Biennale 2016.

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Private dining by Quek Choo San
27 & 28 Jan 2024
7 – 9pm
$100/pax, Register here
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Food binds many families together, and in this dining experience, you will get a taste of dishes that are significant to the Tan family. The menu is based on heirloom recipes passed down from Madam Gunn Chit Siew and her maternal family, and five courses will be served in an intimate dinner setting.

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Quek Choo San is an avid self-taught cook. She enjoys exploring heirloom recipes and cooking for loved ones. She previously owned Qi Philosophy Café and promoted a holistic approach to health and wellness.

Team