Alumni News: August 2026 Edition
By Tina and Rae, Alumni Relations
6 August 2026
Welcome to the latest edition of Alumni News! Scroll below to check out our latest stories.
From Bhutan to Singapore and across four continents, Kinley has spent her journey exploring the delicate space where tradition meets modern living. Following her studies in Architectural Studies, Kinley was awarded the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship—a global journey that took her through India, Japan, Ecuador, and Indonesia to study vernacular architecture. Below, she reflects on what traditional homes reveal about cultural identity, how her time at UWCSEA shaped her interdisciplinary perspective, and the valuable lessons she learned about honouring heritage while building for the future.
Congratulations on completing your Thomas J. Watson Fellowship! Looking back, how would you describe your project “Vernacular Architecture and Community Identity”, and how did it evolve over the course of your journey?
My Watson journey took me through India, Japan, Ecuador and Indonesia to explore vernacular architecture – the architecture of the people where communities construct for themselves using local materials, oral histories and knowledge passed down over generations, rather than anything designed by trained architects.
When I began my Watson Fellowship, I thought I was studying vernacular architecture—how traditional buildings could integrate modern innovations while preserving cultural identity and responding to climate challenges. But that framing didn’t survive contact with the actual communities I lived in. What I found instead was something closer to an ongoing negotiation – families weighing what they would inherit against what they could afford, what actually performed well against what signalled progress to their neighbours.
Wae Rebo family kitchen in Indonesia.
That shift showed up differently in each place. In Ladakh, I saw how deliberately every part of a house was positioned, nothing arbitrary, right down to how warmth from an animal shed was designed to rise into the family’s living space above it. In Japan, working alongside a master carpenter, I spent my days doing nothing but sharpening tools, which taught me that real craftsmanship often lives in patience, unglamorous preparation rather than in the finished object. In Ecuador, I watched a family keep using their open fire stove long after they had installed a modern gas one, simply because the house didn’t feel like home without it. And in Indonesia, I kept noticing the same thing I'd first noticed back in Ladakh: in house after house, across completely different cultures, the kitchen kept turning out to be the emotional and social centre of the home.
By the end of the year, I stopped asking "how do we preserve these traditions" and started asking a harder question: when people choose one way of building over another, what are they really choosing between? It's rarely just about materials or performance; it's about identity and about what kind of future they're trying to build toward.
During your fellowship, you immersed yourself in places where architecture intertwines with ecology and history. Where did you see the most tension between preserving vernacular traditions and adopting modern, sustainable innovations and how did people navigate those choices?
The most direct version of that tension showed up during a bamboo-building workshop I attended near the end of my fellowship, in Indonesia. Bamboo is often dismissed as a "poor person's material" — something associated with informality or lack of resources, rather than a legitimate building technology. But the people I worked alongside there treated it as anything but simple. Bamboo won't let you impose on it; it bends, it tests your assumptions, and it demands you understand its nature before you can build anything worthwhile with it. Watching architects and builders there push to have it taken seriously as a genuinely sustainable, modern material made the tension clear – the resistance to adopting it isn't really about the material's performance. It's about the meaning people have attached to it. And that stigma is exactly what has to shift before an innovation like this can be adopted at scale.
I saw a related but different kind of tension in Ecuador — not about a sustainable innovation exactly, but about tradition colliding with modernity more broadly. In the village of Atandahua, I stayed in adobe kitchens oriented with real precision — facing east to catch the morning sun when families gathered to cook, with bedrooms facing west to hold the afternoon heat through the night. That layout wasn't designed by an architect; it was knowledge refined over generations. And yet, just outside that same village, concrete was steadily replacing adobe, even though adobe performed better in nearly every practical sense. Concrete wasn't winning because it worked better; it was winning as it represented modernity, arrival, moving forward.
That tension became personal when I stayed with a family who had both a traditional wood-fired stove and a newer gas stove, side by side, and kept using the old one. When I asked the daughter why, she told me the house simply felt incomplete without it. It made me realise that the gas stove could boil water just fine, but it could never replace what the open fire actually gave the family — the smell of burning wood, the visible flame, the simple act of sitting around it together to eat. That's when I understood these choices aren't purely practical; they're deeply emotional, tied to identity and memory in ways that can't be engineered around. People often navigate this tension not by picking a side outright, but by holding both at once — a gas stove next to a wood fire — because the "irrational" choice is frequently the one that keeps a home feeling like itself.
Bamboo construction project in Indonesia.
Open fire stove in Ecuador.
Mixed-material house in Ecuador.
City of Leh in Ladakh.
With your Bachelor's of Arts in Architectural Studies and Watson Fellowship under your belt, how have both experiences shaped your perspective and what is next on the horizon for you?
My degree gave me the technical language and design fundamentals — how to draw, how to think structurally, how to critique a building but the Watson Fellowship gave me something my degree couldn't. A full year of watching architecture actually function inside people's real lives, without a studio brief, a professor, or a client shaping what I was supposed to be looking for.
That shift changed what I think a good design is actually for. I used to think of vernacular architecture as heritage — something valuable mainly because it's inherited and worth protecting. I came away from the fellowship thinking of it as something much more active: a continuous negotiation between what people know, what they can afford, and what they aspire to. That reframing has stayed with me even while moving forward. The role I want to grow into isn't just designing better buildings; it is first to understand the people and materials that shape them, because architecture is never only about what gets built. It's about the stories, knowledge, and relationships that make a place feel alive.
Wae Rebo Village in Indonesia.
Reflecting on your time at UWCSEA, were there particular experiences that sparked your interest in climate, storytelling, or community engagement—and did you see those connections come full circle during your fellowship and beyond?
Carpenter apprenticeship in Japan.
Honestly, I don’t think I can point to one single moment that sparked it all – and the more I sit with the question, the more I think that’s actually the answer. UWCSEA wasn’t a spark in the sense of one class or one day. It was a space. It was the first place that let me exist across disciplines instead of asking me to pick a lane early. To be curious about sustainability and design and people and community all at once, without treating any one of them as more “serious” than the others. That environment is what actually planted the passion, quietly, long before I had a name for it.
A class called Design Technology is the closest thing to a direct line I can trace. That's where I first learned to think seriously about product life cycles, sustainability, and what it takes to bring an idea into something real and physical — a way of thinking I didn't even realise I'd absorbed until I found myself in a workshop in Indonesia years later, learning to build with bamboo. Alongside that, I spent time volunteering at a community centre, AMK MINDS, helping elders with disabilities with simple sports as they trained for the Special Olympics. It had nothing to do with architecture at the time. But it was probably where I first practised showing up for people consistently, and learning to adapt to what a community actually needed rather than what I assumed they needed.
Ecuador family.
The journey from UWCSEA to Watson to what comes next has taught me that growth rarely comes from one defining moment. It comes from being given room, again and again, to ask questions across boundaries instead of staying inside one lane. UWCSEA gave me that room first. Watson gave me a year to take it further, out into other people’s lives and homes, until a personal tension I had carried quietly since Singapore finally had a language and a place to be understood. I set out to study how people build. I came home understanding why they build the way they do and that’s the question I want to keep chasing moving forward.
– Kinley Yangden ‘21
Born during the 2006 crisis in Timor-Leste, Eugenia grew up understanding firsthand both the struggle for survival and the life-changing power of learning. Representing the world's youngest democracy at the 20th International Human Rights Summit, Eugenia took the stage at the United Nations to deliver a moving address on why education must be treated as a human right rather than a privilege.
During her time at UWCSEA, Eugenia championed humanitarian relief efforts and helped lead the Timor-Leste Youth Initiative for Peace, running annual peace camps to teach young people conflict resolution and civic rights. Today, Eugenia is building Teach Forward Timor-Leste, an initiative aimed at training teachers and delivering quality education to children in her home village of Bazar Tete and beyond. Her speech has already reached over 100,000 people across social media, bringing international attention to the need for education reform back home.
I set out to change my life through education, and now it is changing my community," shares Eugenia. "I am proud to be a voice for the youth of Timor-Leste, but the real work starts now.
– Eugenia DSDC Oliveiro ‘25
Listen to her speech via LinkedIn here.
During a recent visit back to Dover Campus for an Alumni Breakfast event, European Commission Policy Officer Cristina took the opportunity to reconnect with not only alumni but students.
During her time on campus, Cristina met with Grade 10 student leader Vaish from Anthropy —a student-led initiative exploring how humanities perspectives are interpreted in a transforming world—for an insightful interview on public health, policy, and human perception.
Drawing from her career in international affairs and inter-institutional relations within Health & Food Safety at the European Commission, Cristina shared critical perspectives with Vaish, including:
- Technical Evidence vs. Perception: Navigating the balance between scientific, epidemiological data and how the public interprets health policies.
- The Power of the Humanities: Why technical solutions alone aren't enough, and how humanities-based thinking brings empathy and nuance to global policy.
- Building Trust: The vital importance of clear communication and fostering genuine connection with communities when driving public health initiatives.
"What an opportunity to go back to UWCSEA in Singapore and meet with Vaish... to discuss the interesting intersection of science, policy, and human perception," Cristina reflected following her visit.
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