The thesis considers the agency of a banyan tree in reclaiming and reshaping the culturally mediated landscape of a heritage district, Kampong Gelam. Designated as the heritage district for ethnic Malay and Muslim culture in Singapore, its role as a barometer of ethnic identity is complicated due to a flattening of cultural narratives which favours commodified agents. An inadvertent victim to this is the banyan tree itself. It used to stand as one of a pair of trees signifying the entrance to the alun-alun or the royal square. It now stands alone at Sultan Gate after its twin was lost to make way for a basketball court; but like its namesake (beringin), to be banyan is to be in a state of longing.

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Using the ethnomedical term ‘semangat’ as an anchor, To The Roots That Bind imagines an alternative approach to remembering through making visible the semangat of Kampong Gelam in these instances: the everyday semangat of community and rituals, and the semangat of festivities and commerce. Architectural implements informed by bonsai techniques allow for the reconstitution of the site through powers both human and banyan, figuring as an act of reclaiming space by both the banyan that has lost its twin, as well as those that have been “othered” by a mainstream retelling of Malay culture which has always been syncretic. The thesis not only offers an architectural intervention, but not only marks a culturally reifying effect on the district but also brings back echoes of the royal power which used to manifest in the area. A project like Kampong Gelam, is now animated with its names, its people, and the shade of a banyan tree.

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Tutor's Notes // To the Roots that Bind contends with the complexities of Malay culture and its oversimplification in architectural representation. Interceding on behalf of the banyan tree which stands guard before the Istana Kampong Gelam, previously a royal palace of the Malay kings and their descendants, this thesis is located at the cusp of binaries: architectural order and spontaneous ficus spread, culture and nature, human and nonhuman, architecture and its Other. Nabilah’s thesis challenges a consumerist mode of heritage by proposing a sometimes unwieldy, but always interconnected architectural fabric, co-created with the banyan tree. The banyan (ficus benghalensis) known anecdotally as ‘the tree that walks’ because of its prolific terrain-searching aerial roots, has mythical and phantasmic presence in Southeast Asian culture. It is a tree aligned to more-than-human dimensions. Resurfacing the rich and entangled Malay archipelago histories linked to mercantile cosmopolitan trade, To the Roots that Bind contests the sanitised, non-polemical models of Malay culture. It endeavours to accommodate syncretic historical subcultures which are increasingly subsumed by dominant heritage voices. Chief amongst the thesis’ conceptual frame is the folk concept of semangat — the coming together of kinship bonds enmeshed within metaphysical dimensions of place. This thesis offers an understanding of heritage encapsulated in a (super)natural world. Heritage, it tells us, is made and remade relationally through place attachments to myths and spirits, as well as our ever-changing stories and encounters with these.