"The book captures the life of Singapore’s modernist developments through 32 essays, each covering various typologies, which fills a gap in documentation on them."
— The Straits Times
“The story of Tan Boon Liat Building is one of 32 essays in Everyday Modernism that gives readers an insight into Singapore’s development through its architecture, not only seen through buildings but also in everyday or more mundane structures such as overhead bridges and city council pools. . . . [The essays] make for easy reading and provide context on Singapore's development from post-independence to the 1980s.”
— The Business Times (Singapore)
"Everyday Modernism is the first comprehensive documentation of Singapore’s modern built environment. Through a lens of social and architectural histories, the book uncovers the many untold stories of the Southeast Asian city-state’s modernization, from the rise of heroic skyscrapers to the spread of utilitarian typologies like the multi-storey car park. It investigates how modernism, through both form and function, radically transformed Singapore and made its inhabitants into modern citizens."
— Asian Review of Books
"Most importantly, [the book] shows that modernist architecture in Singapore is not just a collection of beautiful built structures that look nice in photographs but actual places where people eat, stay, live, find, and achieve a better way of life over time... readers can enjoy Darren Soh’s incredible photographs, which range from large-scale structures to playground equipment, as well as old images and drawings that illustrate the lifecycle of each built structure.”
— art4d
"In Everyday Modernism, the authors examine the beginnings of modernization in the city-state, from the rise of heroic skyscrapers, to the spread of utilitarian typologies like multi-story car parks. The title encapsulates not simply the physical environment, but also the social, political, economic and cultural processes of nation building, approaching this by reworking and reframing existing urban theories. Tracing the histories of iconic structures such as People’s Park Complex and the National Theatre, the book equally sheds much-needed light on public housing, libraries, community centers, and other buildings that make up the fabric of the city yet are seldom lauded. Instead of referring to these through conventional architectural types, they are divided into six key verbs—live, play, work, connect, travel and pray –to fully illustrate the complex interplay between form and use."
— Southeast Asia Building
“The history of the modern global built environment, a landscape made up of unexceptional, everyday buildings, remains largely untold. Everyday Modernism: Architecture & Society in Singapore makes a notable contribution to this elision in historical knowledge about modernist architecture and urban planning. By underscoring the importance of quotidian encounters with modernist architecture, Everyday Modernism not only illuminates a history of modernism in Southeast Asian architecture, it also poses an important challenge to conventional architectural historiography in underscoring the importance of state institutions in the production of modernist architecture…. [this] is a welcome addition to studies of housing and should be required reading in any course on the history of post-World War II modernist architecture and urban planning.”
— Southeast Asian Studies
“Accessibly written and brimming with historical detail informed by local scholarship and archives, especially newspaper sources, the short entries also reproduce rare photographic or documentary material… Bookending the volume’s essays is a striking 100-something page spread of [Darren] Soh’s images, printed in full color, in which apartment blocks, former school buildings, cinema complexes, and children’s play areas alike are portrayed with an aestheticized monumentality.”
— Journal of Architectural Education
