Introduction to Tropical Design in the South-east Asian countries
In architectural terms, one of the differences between the beginnings of modernity in Southeast Asia when compared with contemporaneous developments in Europe, North America and Australia is that (with the exception of Thailand) the region’s modernity was largely shaped by colonial regimes where colonists were greatly outnumbered by native inhabitants. As a result, individual works of architecture that express early twentieth-century idioms of technological and spatial progress have to be considered within this context. This begs the question of how the putative ideals of these architectural expressions might be reconciled with the power structures and manifest inequalities of the colonial encounter in Southeast Asia.
