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ARTICLE CITATION

Chee, Lilian. "Housing and Domesticity". Architecture and Culture 10, no. 3 (2022): 554–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2022.2121898 

 

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2022:

Housing and Domesticity

housing domesticity 01.png

Architecture is always in the middle of something. In the architectural essay film 03-FLATS (2014), we find public housing caught in a domestic milieu of gendered bodies marked by age, sexuality, ethnicity and class. Conceptualized by Chee and made in collaboration with Singapore filmmaker Lei Yuan Bin, the film is an affective domestic portrait and counter representation of Singaporean public housing which follows the routines of three single women living in flats across the suburbs of Eunos, Queenstown and Sembawang. As single owner-occupants, these women represent a growing segment of the population occupying national infrastructure built and allotted according to policies that are outwardly pro-heteronormative family. Singles may purchase smaller one-bedroom subsidized public housing flats in non-matured estates or resale flats from the open market only upon reaching the age of thirty-five years, coincidentally also the threshold age of diminishing female fertility. Here, the body politic is tightly enmeshed with housing provision. Domesticity is taken as the film’s subject not so much because it is contained in the architecture of public housing but because domesticity gives presence to this architecture. In other words, 03-FLATS makes visible how public housing takes form, what it includes, what it does not and how occupation produces its own spaces engaging with, and sometimes, challenging, housing infrastructure and ideology. The architecture of public housing is portrayed not as anterior to occupation, but as a consequence of, and being continuously formed and re-formed through, domesticity.

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