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2022:
Please Give Gong Gong A Call: A Neurodiverse Lens to Care in Public Housing
by LIM Kun Yi James
Please Give Gong Gong A Call emerged from visual studies into the subjective experience of Lewy Body Dementia against a paucity of care spaces within Singaporean public housing.
Maintenance for the body revolves around a series of complex discrete tasks—dressing, grooming, cleansing, drying, excreting and nourishing the body. Yet the space in which the public housing flat affords these imaginative acts are oft-tucked into highly functional hermetic rooms to contain and conceal their expressions. The collapse of these familiar and intimate spaces becomes further exacerbated and defamiliarised by age, difference and neurological decline, whilst the fixity of its technologies render the body far more disabled than need be.
How does one tell a body is vulnerable if not told? Traces of corporeal function provide a means to read a body, whose stories are held near and dear by other caring bodies. The thesis reimagines a cluster of eight adjacent flats as it assumes an instrument for sensing and amplifying presence—holding varying intimacies for caregiving—from mealtime flaneur to discretely monitoring sounds and silhouettes of bathing rituals.
Embracing a series of intimate exchanges between eight leaky households and their inhabitants, the thesis asks to reconsider our repression towards bodily seepages and the allure of an atomic home, by positioning leaky domesticity as an alternative form of capitalist logistics for mutual efficiencies of collective care.
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Tutor's Notes // Derived from intimate knowledge of his own grandfather’s Lewy Body Dementia, James’ thesis follows a precarious path of parsing out personal and emotional experience from general information about a fluctuating, and often debilitating neurological condition. Thinking through his own family’s difficulty in caring for his Gong Gong, the thesis weaves together three key threads which persistently challenge architecture — ageing, difference (or the neurodivergent occupant), and collective care — into the neutral (or neurotypical) fabric of Singapore’s highly lauded public housing flats. Designed at the scale of the Housing Development Board (HDB) unit, the project is structured around Gong Gong’s strict routines, and his “magical” worldview. From greeting the sun, to bath time, to cooking together, to saying goodnight to the neighbours, Please Give Gong Gong A Call is a poignant and moving speculation about collective caregiving in an atomistic but also increasingly frail and dependent community. It investigates what might happen to architecture (at what cost? what might care take place?), and what might happen to the occupants (what is the trade off?) when we commit to caring deeply for someone in need, beyond the walls of our individual flats. The surprise is that perhaps seeing the world awash with the neurodivergent person might invigorate the ways we live, emote, and think.
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Board for Architects Prize and Medal for Best student in the MArch Examinations 2023
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