The Modern Touch

Interior Design and Modernisation in Post-Independence Singapore

Bibliographic Data

ID4138927
AuthorsJ M Jacobs (0000-0001-9967-1274, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author), Stephen Cairn, Stephen Cairns (0000-0003-4856-8298, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume40
Issue3
Pages572-595
Publication date2008-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/a39123
OpenAlexW2137074814
LanguageEN
Citations received20
References cited44

The authors take as their focus the advice on interior design and decoration that Singapore's Housing Development Board (HDB) distributed to residents as part of its programme of universal housing provision. Through a series of regular articles appearing in the HDB publication Our Home (1972-1989), readers were presented with stories that showed how selected HDB residents decorated their newly acquired highrise flats. The authors detail the relationship between this design advice and the commitment to modernist design principles, the self-conscious pragmatism of the HDB, and the reliance on a limited market logic ('homeownership'). The HDB's vision of the benefit of its highrise housing programme was, from the outset, complexly entangled with cultivating individual investments in the home by way of interior design and decoration practices. The paper contributes not only to the specific story of Singaporean housing, but also to wider scholarship on modernism, the everyday practices of interior design, and housing consumption

Aesthetics · Architectural engineering · Art · Interior design · Modernization theory · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Engineering · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Mathematics · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · Urban and Rural Development Challenges

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