The City Hall Chamber
A. Gordon and F. D. Meadows (architects) · 1926 to 1929
A high, handsome room with a coffered ceiling, timber panelling and tall windows onto the Padang forms the heart of the City Hall wing. It was built as the council chamber of the Municipal Building, completed in 1929, and it is the room in which the modern history of Singapore was decided twice. On the twelfth of September 1945 Lord Louis Mountbatten received the surrender of the Japanese forces in Southeast Asia here, ending three and a half years of occupation. On the fifth of June 1959 Lee Kuan Yew was sworn in here as the first prime minister of a self-governing Singapore, and the first cabinet took their oaths in the same room.
The chamber has been restored to its late 1930s appearance. Look at the wooden gallery, the panelled walls and the marble floor, and at the dais where the mayor and, later, the council sat. The proportions are meant to impress: this is one of the largest rooms in the building, and it was deliberately sited so that the windows look straight out over the Padang, where the surrender ceremony's military parade took place and where the National Day parades have been held since independence.
The City Hall, with its eighteen Corinthian columns across the front, was the first of the two buildings and was designed by the municipal architects Alexander Gordon and Frank Dorrington Meadows. It served as the town hall, as the seat of the government after 1959 and then as offices until 2008. In the gallery's conversion the chamber became an events space and a stop on the architecture tours, and it is often open to visitors between functions. Stand at the window for a moment and picture the crowds on the green below in 1945 and 1959.
Did You Know? Both the Japanese surrender of 1945 and the swearing-in of Singapore's first prime minister in 1959 took place in this room.
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