The Singapore Improvement Trust built Tiong Bahru between 1936 and 1941: four-storey walk-ups in whitewashed rendered concrete, with cantilevered balconies rounded at both ends, projecting horizontal fins, porthole windows and external spiral stairs painted orange. It is Streamline Moderne rebuilt for the tropics, where air-wells, pre-cast ventilation blocks and green mild-steel casements do the work glass never could.

This system takes the estate literally. Everything runs horizontal and banded, corners are radiused rather than cut, and the palette stays on lime render until one green window frame or one orange stair does the accenting. Twenty blocks were gazetted in 2003 and still read as drawn — that restraint is the design.