ABSTRACT
The earliest architectural historical accounts of colonial architecture in Singapore are those written by T. H. H. Hancock, a Senior Architect with the colonial Public Works Department (PWD), during the 1950s on the early nineteenth-century buildings erected by George Doumgold Coleman, purportedly the first architect of Singapore.1 Hancock was involved in the mid-twentieth-century remodeling of the Legislative Assembly building, which was previously Maxwell House designed by Coleman.2 That undertaking might have led him to research on Coleman and his works. With the research, Hancock argued that Coleman was central to the creation of a “tropical Colonial style.”3 In an exhibition catalogue on what was probably the first architectural exhibition in Singapore, Hancock summarizes the “tropical Colonial style” in the following manner:
Coleman and his immediate successors skillfully adapted the Palladian manner to
suit the tropics. These early architects, skilled in classical proportions, developed a
Colonial classic idiom with the solidity of the Doric order, with deep and wide
verandas and hooded openings for shade, single room thickness for through
ventilation and louvred windows to give light, yet reducing glare, and for
protection from sudden heavy rain storms.4
