Jiat-Hwee Chang

Chang Jiat Hwee (PhD, Berkeley) is Associate Professor and Deputy Head (Academic) at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He holds a joint appointment as a Senior Research Fellow with the STS (Science, Technology and Society) Cluster at the Asia Research Institute.

Jiat Hwee leads the Department’s research cluster on history, theory and criticism, and he teaches courses in architectural history and theory, and design. His teaching has been recognized by two University’s Annual Teaching Excellence Awards. Jiat Hwee also supervises graduate students and he has served as an external examiner for PhD thesis at a number of universities internationally.

Jiat Hwee is the author of A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (2016), which is awarded an International Planning History Society Book Prize 2018 and shortlisted for the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies Humanities Book Prize 2017. His new book (co-authored with Justin Zhuang and photographer Darren Soh) Everyday Modernism: Architecture and Society in Singapore is forthcoming in mid-2022. Jiat Hwee is also the co-editor of a few books and special journal issues. His co-authored article “Climate Design and its Others” received the 2022 ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) JAE (Journal of Architectural Education) Best Article Award.

Jiat Hwee’s research has been supported by institutions in North America, Britain, Germany, Australia, Cyprus, Qatar and Singapore. He was recently a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Spring 2020, a Manton Fellow at the Clark Art Institute in Fall 2019, and a Canadian Centre for Architecture – Mellon Foundation Researcher, 2017-19. He currently focuses on two areas of research: transnational histories of the colonial and postcolonial built environment in Asia during the 19th and 20th C, and the socio-cultural histories and techno-politics of air-conditioning and climate change in urban Asia. A book manuscript on the latter area is in the works.

Jiat Hwee also has an abiding interest in local built heritage issues. Besides being a founding executive member of docomomo Singapore Chapter and serving on the advisory board of Preservation of Sites and Monuments, he has also published on built heritage issues in the Straits Times, the Business Times, Zaobao, and the Singapore Architect.

Education

• Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley (2004 — 2009)