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 the institutional changes prompted by processes of decolonisation impacted hospital design. The inquiry extends to understanding hospitals as urban institutions servicing multi-racial communities in the colonial and postcolonial Malayan context. It compares institutions across three cities and three distinct geographical conditions comprising the Federation of Malaya: Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Kuching.
The COVID-19 pandemic has restimulated a global interest in the role of hospitals and how the institution of medicine embodies the socio-political tensions of its context. 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 - 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 Malaya during the Independence Period. This period includes the transition from the late colonial (the 1880s) to the post-independence era (the 1950s), during which the departure of the colonial administrators allowed different stakeholders to take on governing and administrative roles in the Federation of Malaya in 1957. The outcomes of this research aim to reveal the changing attitudes of a developing nation through architecture that is not typically studied in the process of 'nation-building'.
This research is supported by a Research Training Program Scholarship from the Australian Commonwealth Government and a Melbourne Research Scholarship from the University of Melbourne.