story Tan Heng Yeng ’18, Subhas Nair ’17, Lim Se Ern ’18, and John Reid ’17
Excerpted from the Curators of The Legacy Project:
As we celebrate the opening of our beautiful new campus, it is worth taking a moment to reflect on the construction process, a large part of which is unknown to us, and remember the people who made it possible. Millions of labor hours have been put into this campus by engineers, architects, landscapers, structural workers, interior workers, administrative staff, project managers, safety officers and many more. The project in its complexity of technical design and rapid completion timespan involved, at times, the coordination of over 1200 people simultaneously. The construction team was perhaps even more diverse in terms of nationality, language and occupation than we who now live here. The many workers who have spent years on the project perhaps know these spaces more intimately than we ever will. Most of them are anonymous to us. Most have moved on by now. Yet their dedication, inspiration, and hard work live inedibly on in this physical community.
From Oct. 10-13, The Legacy Project presented a public exhibition chronicling the construction process of the campus and the stories of the workers who built the campus.
The curators, Subhas Nair ’17, Tan Heng Yeng ’18, Lim Se Ern ’18, and John Reid ’17 at the exhibition.
Many people who worked on construction of the campus attended the event.
Kapil from Bangladesh has been working for the past 6 years in Singapore.
Mullauddin has been working on the Yale-NUS College campus construction since Day Zero. He is in charge of the electrical workers.
Quddus from Bangladesh has been working in Singapore for five years and works with the painting company.
T.S. Lee is from South Korea and has been working in Singapore for 8.5 years, and has been an engineer for 20 years.
Tai Kee Cheng from Malaysia works in air-conditioning control. He has been in Singapore for 13 years.
Joyan Ong is from the Philippines and has worked in Singapore for 7 years.
Yuan Ye Guang from Henan, China is the “new kid” because he has only been in Singapore for 2.5 years.
Zhou Shui Wen from Zhejiang, China has been in Singapore for 4 years.