Name: DOA Symposium: Building / Community in the Tropics and Beyond
Start: 2026-01-27T08:00:00+08:00
End: 2026-01-27T18:00:00+08:00
Location: NUS Department of Architecture

$DOA Symposium: Building \/ Community in the Tropics and Beyond$

The principle of site specificity has long guided most works of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. Yet what the “site” means itself remains mutable and contested. Recent design scholarship and practice progressively turn to local, indigenous, and traditional ways of shaping environments as critiques of modernist legacies of uniformity and standardisation. Still, we must remain attentive to how tropical contexts have been shaped by colonialism, resistance, and cultural hybridity. How, then, should the design professions engage with historical conditions that inhabit the present? Who are the communities we work with? For whom do we design? Who constitutes our own communities of practice?
This symposium, entitled ‘Building Communities in the Tropics and Beyond’, probes such questions. It brings together artists, academics, and practitioners to examine how design engages questions of identity, place, and indigeneity. It examines who designers work with and for, how we address displacement and erasure, how we might integrate traditional knowledge without extractive logics within institutional constraints, and who ultimately holds authorship.
Date: 27 January 2026
Time: 8:00 AM–6:00 PM
Venue: SDE3 Exhibition Space