Architecture and Affect

‘Chee takes us on an encounter-as-detour, tracking spatial stories imbued with affect and haunted by precarious power relations. Undoing the discipline’s instrumental ambitions and revealing the fallacy of its purported autonomy, she asks: If we become better attuned to the micro-politics of radically open-ended affective encounters, can our knowledge practices in architecture be transformed?’

––––– Hélène Frichot, Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, University of Melbourne

'Lilian Chee’s Architecture and Affect is an exceptionally important contribution to the architectural field. It asks a simple but most profound question: how can we account for affective responses to architecture, so often dismissed as incidental yet so vital to lived experience? Chee draws on a series of encounters with spaces in Singapore in order to build a frame through which to incorporate affect into architectural histories, theories, and practices. These encounters immerse readers in residual spaces where scholars still-too-rarely go, from mass housing to cemeteries, and dwell on everyday practices of inhabitation and care, from feeding stray cats to exhuming tombs. A noted filmmaker, architectural designer and feminist theorist, Chee’s original and rooted portrait of architectural affect reflects years of intimate engagement with her sites across many registers. The result is itself a beautiful ‘monument’ – to squinting from blindspots, being captivated by subjects, and never ignoring the tiger under the billiard table.'

––––– Barbara Penner, Professor in Architectural Humanities, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

'With delight and wit, Lilian Chee opens the door of architecture to anecdotes, stories, film, and photography of lives within, on, and around the structures that architects install. She takes on the ideology of social democratic mass housing and its implications for muted subjectivities enmeshed in the discipline of mortgages and home ownership, while at the same time stirring up spectralities of pasts and futures that are ambiguous and compelling. With this book, Chee re-opens a new chapter in Singaporean critical theory.'

––––– Michael M.J. Fischer, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies, MIT

'A dialectical ingenuity, Chee's Architecture and Affect provocatively recasts the role of architectural history and theory as being three things at once: intellectual, affectively lived, and speculative. Giving alternative and intimate insights into Singapore’s spatial politics, this beautifully illustrated and eccentric fly-on-the-wall work is a critical and imaginativeprofundity of lasting memory.’

––––– CJ Lim, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL