Jalan Basar — Kwong Soon & Co Hotel

A Foundry That Looked Like a City

Cavan Road, Jalan Besar, Singapore · 2024

The building at Cavan Road doesn’t look like what it is.

It has an Art Deco facade — grey Shanghai plaster, geometric ornament, the compressed classical references of 1930s Singapore’s most sophisticated architectural moment. From the street, it reads as a civic building, or a prosperous merchant’s premises. Inside, it was a foundry. A working industrial floor where the Ching family built and repaired ship hulls for the better part of seven decades.

The discrepancy is the point. The Cavan Road building is the question this project tried to answer, and the answer is older than we are. Whoever designed this facade in 1933 was already making an argument about what an industrial building could be in a city that was learning, in real time, to take its own architecture seriously. Our job, ninety-one years later, was to recognize the argument they had made and extend it.

A Family Company, A Long Coastline

Kwong Soon & Company Engineering Works was incorporated in 1926. The family’s principal operation ran at Tanjong Rhu — Singapore’s long-standing shipbuilding district, where a marine yard had existed since 1822 — but Cavan Road was the heart of it: the engineering works, the fabrication floor, the foundry that gave the company its industrial capacity. They built the Art Deco building in 1933, at the peak of Singapore’s synthesis of Western modernism with the visual traditions Chinese builders carried from Shanghai.

Kwong Soon kept building. The Tanjong Rhu yards operated until the early 1990s, when Singapore cleared the waterfront for residential development. By 1996 the company had relocated to Tuas — where it briefly made international news after the RV Calypso, Jacques Cousteau’s famous research vessel, sank at their yard following a strike from a runaway barge. A family company from Cavan Road, touching the history of one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated explorers.

That is the kind of fact that tells you what Kwong Soon was. Not a heritage object. A working enterprise embedded in a working city, durable enough that its life intersected with the life of an ocean.

The Industrial Chinese Art Deco Synthesis

The Art Deco shophouse has become Singapore’s most recognized heritage typology — grey plaster, geometric ornament, Chinese iconography compressed into a Western formal vocabulary. The standard heritage account treats this style as a commercial language: the architecture of shopfronts, of street-level retail, of the merchant class projecting confidence in a colonial port city.

What is less often noted is that the same language appears on industrial buildings, not just commercial ones. The Ching family applied it to a foundry.

This is not a small distinction. It tells you something specific about how Singapore’s most distinctive architectural moment actually moved through the city. Art Deco arrived in Southeast Asia through Shanghai — Western modernism filtered through Chinese aesthetic traditions before being carried south along the trade routes that linked the region’s port cities. By the early 1930s, that synthesis had become the architectural common language of an entire community of builders and clients. Chinese, Malay, Indian, Peranakan, European families building in Singapore drew from the same vocabulary because it was the vocabulary of the city, full stop.

A Chinese family enterprise building a foundry in 1933 had no reason to mark its industrial building as anything other than what every prosperous building in the city was at that moment. The grey Shanghai plaster and the streamlined ornament weren’t a costume thrown over a workshop. They were the working architectural language of a city that had not yet decided to separate its civic ambitions from its industrial ones. The Ching family applied that language to their building because there was no other language to apply.

What this means for the project is straightforward. The Cavan Road foundry is not an anomaly to be explained but a quiet correction to a heritage narrative that has paid most of its attention to commercial typologies. An industrial building in the Art Deco vocabulary is an argument the building itself is making — that the line between industrial and civic was never as sharp as later interpretations have wanted it to be.

The Civic Instrument

When we received the brief, the question was a hotel. The underlying question was what this building needs now.

The most honest precedent in Singapore for what we wanted to do is The Warehouse Hotel at Robertson Quay. A former pepper and rubber spice warehouse from 1895, abandoned for nearly two decades, converted in 2017 into a 37-room boutique hotel that retained and amplified the building’s industrial scale — the double-height ceilings, the structural brickwork, the warehouse proportions — and made that industrial character a premium amenity rather than a constraint. The Warehouse Hotel proved a market argument that had been unproven until then: in Singapore’s hospitality sector, industrial authenticity has real commercial value, and the buildings that carry it are not liabilities to be redeveloped but assets whose character justifies its retention.

The Kwong Soon project operates within that logic and extends it in two directions.

First, the building type. The Warehouse Hotel converted a warehouse — a building whose industrial program was always relatively quiet, organized around storage rather than fabrication. The Kwong Soon conversion brings the same thinking to a foundry, which is a more emphatic kind of industrial space. The structural rhythms, the floor-to-ceiling proportions, the directness of the construction system — all of these read more strongly because the original program was more demanding.

Second, the program. The Warehouse Hotel is accommodation-led, organized around the rooms. The Kwong Soon Hotel is activation-led, organized around four food and beverage venues that hold the street and pull the neighborhood inside. This is a deliberate response to the question of what Jalan Besar needs. Cavan Road has always been a working street in a working district. A hotel that turned its back on the street to optimize for guests would have been the wrong building. A hotel that uses the foundry’s ground floor as a civic offering — restaurants, bars, a kind of public living room — is the building that the original Kwong Soon was, returned to the neighborhood in a contemporary form.

That is what we mean when we call it a civic instrument rather than a heritage monument. The distinction matters. A monument freezes the building’s past in place and asks you to look at it. An instrument does the work the building was always meant to do — bringing the neighborhood into itself — and lets the past be the reason the work is convincing.

The Thirty-Year Arc

The Kwong Soon project sits on a longer arc than the building or the brief.

When Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority unveiled its Conservation Master Plan in 1986, it was establishing a principle that would take decades to test: that the right way to manage a historic building is to retain the facade and structural character while allowing the interior program to evolve. The 1989 gazettement of the first seven historic districts — Chinatown, Little India, Kampong Glam, Emerald Hill, Cairnhill, Boat Quay, Clarke Quay — proved the framework on commercial shophouses. Clarke Quay’s 1993 conversion of riverside warehouses into food and beverage destinations proved the economics. By the early 2000s, the framework was being applied to former British military installations at Dempsey Hill and Gillman Barracks. The Warehouse Hotel in 2017 proved that industrial heritage could carry a hospitality program at premium value.

By 2025, more than 7,200 buildings across Singapore are protected under the conservation programme. Roughly 6,500 are shophouses. The remaining 700-plus are the industrial, institutional, and civic typologies that are increasingly the frontier of Singapore’s adaptive reuse practice. The URA’s Draft Master Plan 2025, released in May 2025, proposed five more sites for conservation across exactly these typologies — including the Singapore Badminton Hall, the Jurong Hill Tower, and a former Royal Malayan Navy Administration Block in Woodlands. The programme that began in 1986 as a tool for managing commercial historic districts has become an instrument for managing the architectural inheritance of a working city.

The Kwong Soon project arrives in the middle of that maturation. It is not the first industrial adaptive reuse in Singapore, but it is one of the first to apply the model to a foundry — and one of the first to organize the program around civic activation rather than accommodation. That matters because the arc does not end with Kwong Soon. It points forward.

The Greater Southern Waterfront is the most consequential adaptive reuse opportunity in Singapore’s history. The consolidation of port operations at Tuas — the world’s largest automated terminal, operational in phases from the early 2020s — will return approximately 1,000 hectares of land and 30 kilometers of southern coastline to the city by 2040. Tanjong Pagar Terminal and Brani Terminal are phased out by 2027; Pasir Panjang Terminal follows. The waterfront releases include the Pasir Panjang Power District, where the decommissioned ‘A’ and ‘B’ power station buildings are now in adaptive reuse master planning for mixed hospitality, cultural, and lifestyle uses with public waterfront access.

A 1933 foundry on Cavan Road and a decommissioned power station on the southern coast are not the same kind of project. But they are the same kind of question. What does a city do with the industrial buildings it inherits when the industrial economy has moved on, and the buildings are too good to lose? The answer Singapore has been working toward for thirty-nine years is that you let them keep doing the thing they always did — being civic, being legible, being arguments about belonging — under a different program.

What the Building Has Been Saying Since 1933

The most useful way to think about adaptive reuse is to stop treating it as a category of architectural intervention and start treating it as a way of listening.

The Cavan Road building has been making the same argument for ninety-one years. It said it in 1933, when the Ching family built a foundry that wore the architectural language of a civic building because that was the language the city was speaking. It said it through seven decades of marine engineering, when its industrial floor kept producing the ship hulls that connected the city to the ocean it sits on. It said it across the long quiet after the Tanjong Rhu yards closed, when the building stayed where it was and waited for the city to catch up to what it had always been.

It is saying it now, as a hotel — but the building doesn’t really care what program is inside it. What it cares about, if a building can care about anything, is that it remains the kind of building that takes the street seriously. The grey plaster, the geometric ornament, the foundry proportions inside: these are not the heritage features the project preserved. They are the building’s working language, and the project’s job was to keep it speaking.

The Ching family built something that looked like it belonged in the city. The least we could do was make sure it still does.