In need of preservation: Architecture Inside Out

Kuala Lumpur - PRESERVING traditional architectural heritage is quite the popular cause nowadays, thanks in part to the public‘s increasing awareness about conservation. Our modern architectural heritage, on the other hand, tends to get short shrift and is usually shunned for being bland, “uninteresting”, and undecorated.

But conserving modern built heritage is, I believe, of prime importance in creating a harmonious society. Despite what has been written about how the modern architectural revolution in the West eventually resulted in the ubiquitous “International Style”, the fathers of modernism strongly questioned the validity of aping historical and foreign precedence in architecture.

I refer to the late 19th century discourse on redefining architecture as “a clash of values in architecture” – the moralistic values of Christianity and socialism clashed with the values of scientific technology, economy, and art. Architecture, then, was a product of philosophical discourses and moralistic values.

In Malaysia, despite three decades of such discourse since independence in 1957, we have, in recent years, taken the easy way out by copying rather than critically adopting or rethinking ideas. In the 1960s, when the first generation of Malaysian architects came back from overseas to practice locally and replace expatriate architects, the country‘s leaders called for a national identity in architecture.

The period that gave birth to buildings like Parliament House, the National Mosque, and the Negri Sembilan State Mosque saw a rich experimentation in which modernistic and Malaysian values were shaped by the requirements of the climate, economy, and available technology. These experiments in architectural forms, material assemblage, and expressions were “pure” in the sense that there was not much hindrance from political authoritarianism. These forms reflected an identity that did not play on an obvious and single ethnic reference but used new motifs and responded to the climate with understood technology.

Surely such forms are worth preserving? Yet, as the three cases I will discuss show, this country‘s modern built heritage finds itself in a terrible predicament.

The first case is a war memorial and cemetery for WWII soldiers in Taiping Lake Gardens, Perak.

I remember as a teenager gazing at the quiet majesty of the cemetery‘s architectural composition: rows of regimented white tombstones were set into a flat green meadow with a slight suggestion of a rubble fence and sedate gateway.

Lo and behold, today the Taiping Municipal Council has seen fit to “enliven” the place by adding colourful flowers between the tombstones, guarded by rows of symmetrically planted pompous royal palm trees. What an utter disaster! I have not come across any research yet that looks into the architect‘s or designer‘s intention, but being a designer myself, I would assume – as anybody would! – that the idea was to create a space of quiet contemplation and simple dignity.

The second case is Parliament House. My visit to this building was some years ago during a research trip.

Having been trained in the Modernist ethos and being a student of architectural history, I appreciated the echoes of socialism and non-feudalistic statements made by the building‘s exterior composition. The pristine white and grey language speaks of the 100-year-old revolution against the over-ornamentalised aristocratic architecture of the Ecole de Beaux arts. The Western world‘s political struggle against the chains of feudalism two centuries ago can be felt strongly in this monument to democracy in Malaysia.

But travesty awaited when I stepped inside the building. Parliament was being renovated. And what did I find? Post-Modern monumentalism! Fat classical pillars and ornate moulding now adorned the simple walls and ceilings. To me, it looked like Malaysia was reverting to pre-colonial days of feudalism!

(As with the cemetery in Taiping, there has been no research into the forces that shaped this modern architectural heritage.)

The third illustrative case concerns housing quarters built by the Jabatan Kerja Raya (JKR, or Public Works Department).

Recently, in the course of researching the colonial-Malay hybrid quarters of Taiping, I met up with some of my former students who are now JKR architects. One of them proudly showed me the designs for a medium rise apartment block slated to become Government quarters. I noticed that the design was of the typical modern cluster type with a central stair core and masonry in-fill walls built over a reinforced concrete frame.

I showed him the colonial-Malay hybrid quarters that I was researching as well as pictures of the JKR-built police barracks in Taiping where I used to live. I explained how the past has much to teach us about dealing with our hot climate: the way the barracks and the hybrid quarters used timber louvered panels to ensure good ventilation made better environmental sense than using full masonry walls and non-louvered windows.

The police barracks had two other advantages in that every unit had a storage room on the ground floor to keep bicycles and other things. I warned him that the staircase landings in his quarters would be hazardously filled with bicycles and other items for which his tenants would have no room in their small apartments.

Furthermore – as I mentioned in this column previously when I discussed the advantages of these barracks – the typical long corridor of the JKR‘s police barracks encompassed the idea of the traditional serambi (verandah) in which children can play safely. It is a “defensible space”, something that is becoming more and more important in these times when children can be abducted off the streets. The new design proposed by the JKR architect, however, had each apartment facing each other across just a stair landing with no room for children to play – and plenty of opportunity for havoc when families quarrel!

When I asked him why he seems to have failed to learn from the past, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said that “reinventing the wheel” is how JKR does its work because there is no study and proper documentation done on the modern heritage of this country. Simply put, progress means that anything new must necessarily be good.

Yet, look what the recent past can teach us: Parliament House is a symbol of a progressive culture that respected the values of all ethnicities by refusing to let any one ethnic element dominate; the JKR-built police barracks, probably designed in the late 1960s, is the superb culmination of energy passive design and cultural understanding of the modern Malaysian community; Taiping‘s war memorial was designed – perhaps as a reflection of simpler times – to capture dignity of soldiers who had given their lives for their country.

These (relatively) modern examples of built heritage offer lessons in creating a nation with a single mindset about progress, conservation, and peaceful aspirations. Instead, nowadays, grandiose statements made by totalitarian pillars, feudalistic palm trees and energy guzzling typologies are replacing the products of ingenuity, courage, and democracy.

Source: thestar.com.my (21 Januari 2008)
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