Joshua Tan

Joshua Tan is a doctoral student in the history, theory, and criticism of art and architecture at MIT. His research considers the role of diplomacy and technical exchange on architectural production and labor in East and Southeast Asia. He is interested in how the cultural history of tradition might intersect with the political economy of development. Other scholarly pursuits include a fascination with idleness and a critical stance towards extraction. He was the co-editor of the peer-reviewed Thresholds 53: Idle (MIT Press, 2025), a MIT Presidential Graduate Fellow, and a Young National University of Singapore Fellow. After completing a M.Arch at Yale, Joshua received the Edward P. Bass Fellowship to examine working-class and public housing in London and Singapore at Cambridge University. His research has been published in Modelling Social Housing (Routledge, 2025), Scroope (University of Cambridge, 2025), Burning Farm (EPFL, 2024), Pidgin (Princeton SOA, 2024), Dune (IUAV, 2022), and the Singapore Policy Journal (Harvard, 2020), with upcoming articles in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 36 (2026) and Ars Orientalis 57 (2027).