Catherine Woo
Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Architecture, Architecture History
Biography
Catherine Woo is a PhD candidate from the Melbourne School of Design, the University of Melbourne, Australia, with a research focus on healthcare architecture history in Malaysia and Singapore. She holds a BEnvs and MArch from the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her past publications include research projects assessing Australian residential aged care and dementia care centres. Her teaching repertoire includes architectural history and theory, environmental building systems, and construction across undergraduate and postgraduate programs.
Thesis
Health, Hygiene & Hospital Design before World War 2: Malaysia & Singapore
This research examines how institutional changes prompted by decolonisation processes impacted hospital design. This inquiry extends to understanding hospitals as urban and architectural institutions servicing multi-racial communities in the colonial to postcolonial context. It compares institutions across three cities and three distinct geographical conditions comprising the Federation of Malaya: Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Kuching.
Contemporary scholarship revisiting colonial period histories position healthcare facilities as a series of institutional systems devised to deliver Eurocentric practices of health, hygiene, and 'sanitation'; practices that informed urban and institutional developments in British colonies like Malaya and Singapore - now known as Malaysia and Singapore. Although the persisting discourse is technocentric, there are few explorations of the socio-political influences of the built environment designed to facilitate such healthcare practices.
Catherine's thesis utilises medicalised spaces as the institutional lens to trace and observe the decolonisation process in Borneo, Malaya and Singapore during the Independence Period. This period includes transitioning from the late colonial contributions established and endured through the Second World War to the post-independence era (1945 to the 1980s). This period is one of significant sociopolitical changes marked by the departure of the colonial administrators, thereby allowing different stakeholders to take on governing and administrative roles in the British colonies. The outcomes of this research aim to reveal the changing attitudes of a developing nation through hospital architecture, which is not typically spotlighted in the process of 'nation-building'.
This research is supported by the Research Training Program Scholarship from the Australian Commonwealth Government (2022), the M. A. Bartlett Research Scholarship (2023), the Norman Macgeorge Scholarship (2023), and the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning PhD Fieldwork Grant (2023), Graduate Research Conference Presentation Grant (2024), and Melbourne Abroad Travelling Scholarship (2024) from the University of Melbourne