Swan & Maclaren

Swan and Maclaren Architects is the oldest architectural firm in Singapore. Formerly known as Swan and Maclaren, it was the most prominent architectural firm in Singapore when Singapore was a British colony in the early 20th century.

The company began as Swan and Lermit in 1887, a civil engineering firm formed by two surveyor engineers. In 1892, it became Swan and Maclaren, after Lermit withdrew and another surveyor engineer, James Waddell Boyd Maclaren, joined as partner.

In 1897, Regent Alfred John Bidwell joined the firm, arriving in Singapore from England after a short working stint at the Public Works Department in Kuala Lumpur of the Federated Malay States. He was the first professionally trained architect in Singapore since George Drumgoole Coleman had practised in the town in the 1820s and 1830s. Bidwell found an opportunity in Singapore to exercise his knowledge of the full range and variety of Western architectural vocabulary.

Because of Bidwell's talent and reputation for designing handsome government buildings, Swan and Maclaren became the dominant architectural firm in colonial Singapore. Bidwell dominated its work between 1897 and 1911. The firm proceeded to win the most prestigious commissions in Singapore, and many of its early buildings are still extant today. Some of these buildings have been gazetted as national monuments, and these include Raffles Hotel (1899), Teutonia Club (1900, now Goodwood Park Hotel) and Victoria Memorial Hall (1905, now Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall).

The Raffles Hotel was one of the first of the numerous projects by Bidwell under Swan and Maclaren, which was to build a substantial number of buildings in a large variety of architectural styles. The firm was commissioned to rebuild the Teutonia Club in 1900 in its new location on Scotts Road, after it moved from its location near Raffles Hotel on North Bridge Road. Bidwell applied the south German architectural style in his design of the clubhouse. In Singapore's downtown area, Bidwell also designed the three-storey Stamford House (formerly known as the Oranje Building), completed in 1904.

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