ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Singaporean literature raises new architectural readings and figures, emerging patterns of spatial relationships and embedded desires or biases. It brings these aspects to bear upon public housing's architectural effects, forms and surfaces. The chapter argues that literary vitality is important for any architectural critique because it offers an imaginative dimension, an aspect eluded by an architectural pragmatism that dominates a developmentalist economy like Singapore. It attempts to trace how Singaporean literature critically enacts the abstract and impersonal architecture of public housing through a peripheral constellation of domestic objects, household practices and embodied occupancies. Embedded in a network of fiscal, social, political, architectural, ideological and legal threads, public housing architecture is commissioned and administered by the Housing and Development Board (HDB), a state-regulated body which has managed public housing on the island since its inception in 1960.
