Sunday, March 30, 2008

Kuala Lumpur Birds

I am lucky that in Kuala Lumpur, I can wake up to the sound of singing birds. Mainly there is the Common Myna. In Malay it is tiong ‘gembala kerbau’ ( ‘buffalo herder’ tiong).


From redzlan.blogspot.com

There are also the pestilent crows.



“The crow is an aggressive and opportunistic feeder, and has a devastating impact on indigenous bird populations by eating eggs and chicks, and mobbing other birds that might compete with it. It threatens the local wildlife by preying heavily on frogs, lizards, small mammals, fish, crabs and insects. The crow was introduced to Malaysia as a bio-control agent of rhino beetles in oil palm estates. “
From 10000birds.com

But the Mynas seem to be able to work around the nasty habits of their cousin specie.


From redzlan.blogspot.com

This morning after breakfast, I heard the loud whistles of another bird, the Jungle Myna - tiong ‘sawah padi’ (padi fields tiong) . They are less common, black like crows, but had bright bright eyes and yellow beaks. And they were happy whistling away...

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Tessellation Planning

In geometry, to tessellate means to cover a plane with a pattern without having any gap or overlap. For centuries artists and craftsmen have used tessellation as a tool to create visual effects on surfaces. Tiling is the most common form of tessellation, and in its simplest form the tiles are regular polygons.

The Muslim craftsmen in Spain in the 15th century created beautifully complex visual effects by tessellating a small basic tile pattern. Intricate and complex designs can be built up from basic tile patterns in a simple way by this process.





Looking at the example shown above, we may think it a difficult task to lay the multiple shapes of tiles. The nine pointed star, the four pointed, the spear head, the leaf like, etc. But in fact the seemingly complex pattern is built up simply by tiling a single basic square pattern. In tessellation planning this creative power is applied to town planning, where the colours are not merely decorative but represent functional space.

tile from Cordova
Animated gif image

Below is a demonstration how the a house, its front and backyard, and a portion of the road and park fronting it, are represented in a simple triangle (1). This basic triangle comprising the house is tessellated to form a cluster of six houses.

The six houses are in turn arrayed to form a block of of thirty houses. Here, the pattern adjusted to allow for an access road into the central cul-de-sac and for bigger houses at one corner.

honeycomb tiling 1
Animated gif image

This block is further tessellated to form a neighbourhood of 250 houses.

honeycomb tiling 2
Animated gif image

The word geometry comes from the Greek "geometria", which literally means to "earth measurement". Sub-dividing land according to ownership and use was perhaps the first use of geometry, so the application of tessellation in this field is quite apt.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

10,000BC


I took the family out to watch Roland Emmerich’s latest epic – “10,000BC”. Forewarned not to expect accurate history, I found the film quite enjoyable. But after seeing it I was piqued into checking up the facts. So here:

Mammoths became extinct with the passing of the ice age. But there were isolated herds in certain places like Alaska right up to the 10th millennium BC. No, they weren’t used to haul building materials.


Early Egyptian pyramid, Saqqara

The pyramids looked Egyptian, but that civilization only stretches back to 3000BC. The Sumerians also built pyramids; their civilization goes back to 6000BC.

The houses of the black tribesmen that first helped D’Leh, the protagonist and his band of rescuers were rectangular. Dwellings at that time were only just about to make the transition from round to square.


from wikipedia.org

The saber-tooth tiger? Yes it was around in 10,000BC.

The really interesting thing that was happening at that time was the emergence of agriculture and the sedentary lifestyle. This was the time of the Natufian civilization which started from about 12,500BC. Erstwhile hunter-gatherers discovered edible wild grasses and harvested them. They built the first houses, round and partly underground. At first the clusters of houses were probably base-camps, but later they became villages. Harvesters of wild grasses became farmers.


From “Stories From the Stone Age

According to one theory, what nudged this transformation was climate change:

“Researchers now believe a bitterly cold and arid cold snap, called the Younger Dryas, caused the rapid return of the northern Eurasian ice.

The Younger Dryas hit in the middle of the Natufian period and it lasted for nearly 1500 years (11,000BC to 9,500BC), but flipped back almost as suddenly to near today’s climate conditions.

Immediately after good environmental conditions returned, at the end of the Younger Dryas, those Natufian communities who had survived led to a dramatic new development — the sudden appearance of bigger villages, built by communities who were experimenting with cultivation on a much larger scale.

From around 10,000 years ago, in various regions of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, a strong momentum towards permanent settlement and agriculture occurred…”


Quote from “Stories From the Stone Age”, (Roger Scholes, 2003), pdf document 3mb

Student Housing

Not many of my affordable housing projects actually got built, but thankfully, I managed to make a strong case that students should live in apartments rather than hostels. The idea is that students and the facilities manager prefer the combination of privacy, freedom and personal as well collective responsibilty that comes with sharing an apartment with other students.


Movie
More on this later...

Friday, March 21, 2008

Rumoh Aceh

I'm not sure that Acehnese culture can be categorized as "Malay", but there is a section on Aceh in this interesting website: melayuonline.

Malaysia tend to think of the Malaysian peninsula, also called Malaya,as the home of the Malays. Yet it is clear that Malay culture has its roots in the Sri Vijayan culture based in Sumatra in Indonesia. The legacy of that culture is still strong in Indonesia; after all the Indonesian national language is Malay even though ethnic Malays form a very small minority in that country. And melayuonline is based in Indonesia not Malaysia.

This is a replica of the house of Acehnese heroine Cut Nyak Dhien, from the Aceh War. The House was burnt down by the colonial forces but a replica and is now a museum at Lampisang, about six kilometers from Banda Aceh, .


From foodeureka.com

These are examples of more humble traditional Aceh house:


From abuafatah.blogspot.com



Many of these houses were destroyed by the Tsunami of the 26th November, 2004, but this one survived:


From Reconstruction after the Tsunami

There are many similarities between traditional houses in Malaya and Aceh, but the stilts are much more stout in Aceh. The construction has taken account that Aceh, unlike Peninsula Malaysia, is a country of earthquakes and volcanoes.

Further reading: Reconstruction after the Tsunami (pdf download 500kb), and

Thursday, March 20, 2008

The Search for a Low-Cost Housing Solution #2

After several decades of a policy that forces developers in Malaysia to build Low-Cost Housing, problems are becoming obvious:


Very Low-Cost Houses

(First posted July 2006)

In some parts of Malaysia, owning a flat is now extremely affordable. The auction prices come as low as RM 12,000 (about USD 3,500). This is a fraction of the original subsidized selling price (RM 25,000), which is even lower than the construction cost (excluding land cost, about RM 30,000). It might cost more to demolish them!




These are blocks of flats in dormitory suburbs. The bricks and mortar would have met the very stringent design standards set by the government. The provision of roads, drains and other services can be said to be much too generous.

They fail because they are in the wrong location, far from sources of employment, from public transport, devoid of people and life. They were specifically planned to be isolated from the higher income residential zones, rather like leper colonies of yesteryear. Low-cost flats for low-standard people; slums from the day they were first occupied.

Whilst people in the medium or high income group have gained from the generally appreciating value of residential property, most of the buyers of low-cost flats, hold stagnating or depreciating assets.

No wonder low-cost housing is makes up a high percentage unsold property in the country. Developers are being forced to build low-cost houses that people don't really want!


Typical spanking new low cost flat, still many units available on the 3rd floor and above, more than a year after completion

Cheap houses indeed, but not for the buyers who were not able to repay their housing loans.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Low Rise Point Block Apartments



Searching for a solution to Low-Cost housing
back in the mid 1990's, I started out with:
  • low-rise point blocks with a square plan-form, (below),




  • started to arrange them on site in an interlocking arrangement,(above)




  • experimented with an octagonal plan form, (above),


  • laying them out in an interlocking hexagonal layout, below,




This was one of the two routes that led me to tessellation planning. Find out more at Tessellar > Research

Friday, March 14, 2008

Civets in the City #2



After my “Civets in my Attic” post, I received an email from Colin Chua, a fellow Malaysian living just north of Kuala Lumpur. He sent me a couple of photos of the cubs and wrote:

“I have civets living in my attic too. But my closest encounter occurred early yesterday at about 4am. I was rudely awakened when I heard noises at one of my bedroom windows. When I went to investigate, I was startled when I found a family of four civets outside. Two larger civets which I presume to be the adults were on the roof, whilst the other two smaller civets or pups were hanging or playing on the iron grille”.


I'm interested to explore how far wild animals can co-habit our cities and towns. In the countryside, the fox-like civets are considered as pests because they prey on the chickens. I would like to think that there would be less conflict in urban areas – where humans and civets can adapt to each other.



There are worries, as Colin adds:

“But in the urban environment, I am thinking of the potential threats these civet cats can have on our domesticated animals. My concern arises as I have two little dogs, four cats and a sulphur crested cockatoo. Furthermore, civet cats in China are also believed to be carrying a coronavirus that is very similar to the SARS virus in the faeces and secretions. Here is the link.

Thus, could our urban civet cats be carrying some dangerous diseases too? I really do hope not as I find them kind of cute but nevertheless there is a worry as I have found lots of the civet cat's droppings on my roof”.


It appears that the local ‘squirrel’ or ‘tupai’ has adapted very well to urban habitats, but most experts now come to the conclusion that monkeys don't adapt well to human contact. Are there any wildlife experts out there who can tell us on how to best deal with the civets in town areas?

Thank you very much Colin for the email and photos.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Monkey Urbanization

At the fringes of the city where we trek and picnic, we often find groups of monkeys. These are long-tailed macaques. They inhabit a wide range of habitats including primary and secondary forest, mangroves, plantations. They are also quite happy in the outskirts of towns and villages. The macaque has a varied diet - fruits, leaves, small mammals and birds, shellfish and crabs. They also love human food!

But when used to human handouts, the cute monkeys become less pleasant. They stop looking for food in the forest and pester humans instead. The aggressive will snatch food away from children; they can get very aggressive.
From ecologyasia

Feeding also results in an unnaturally large monkey group size. A normal group of monkeys in the wild usually has 15-30 members. Groups that are fed by humans can be twice as big or more. More monkeys in a group mean more conflicts between monkeys".

From
Wild Singapore

Recently in Malaysia, the government is considering a culling exercise to curb monkey overpopulation in town areas. There was a report about some of these animals being infected with tuberculosis and the herpes B virus, but experts say that the infected macaques do not pose a danger to the public.



In Singapore, feeding monkeys is a crime: this year a man was fined 4000 Singapore Dollars (USD2900).

More advice from Wild Singapore
  • Do not offer food to the monkeys.
  • Do not bring food and or eat in forested areas.
  • Avoid carrying plastic bags openly in forested areas.
  • Make sure your children are not eating or holding food near monkeys.
  • Dispose your litter into the monkey-proof bins provided. Better still, take your litter out of forested areas with you.




"Don't feed the monkeys: you will do them more harm than good"

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

In Search of a Solution for Low Cost Housing

Back in 1995, not long after I set up my firm, I decided to focus on designing Low Cost housing. We did not have any clients yet, but I made a bet that the demand for such housing would always be present, and if the designs we came up with were good, then commissions would come. The bet came good: in the following years, the government embarked on a programme to get the public and private sector to build for the low-income.

Previously, private developers were mandated to build low-cost houses in their new housing estates. A minimum of 30% of their total number of units were to be houses priced below RM25,000. This proved to be a burden to developers and had limited output, so the rules were changed to encourage more building: In Johor for instance, the new requirement became:

* 20% low-cost RM25,000 (USD6,300)
* 10% low-medium type 1 RM60,00 (USD18,900)
* 10% low-medium type 2 RM80,000 (USD25,125)

The federal government also introduced a raft of other new measures to boost the building housing for the poor: it offered soft loans to developers of low cost housing; a revolving fund was set up to finance construction. The standard of the low-cost houses were set at improved levels, notably the requirement for 3 bedrooms.
The government entrusted a government owned corporation, TPPT Sdn Bhd, to work with the private sector and State governments to build low-cost housing. The mood of the times is reflected in the book produced by a think-thank which was closely allied to the government : "Low-Cost Housing - A Definitive Study". The problem of housing for the low income was going to be solved!

This provided an opportunity for Arkitek M Ghazali to introduce our ideas for "point blocks": ie 5 storey walk-up blocks with only 4 units to each floor accessible from a single staircase . We found that point blocks were economical: the ratio of saleable area to total area we were able to get was more than 95% , compared to about 85% achieved by the conventional slab blocks which could have up to 16 units per floor accessed from a central corridor.



These point blocks were arranged in a hexagonal formation (the first hint of honeycomb housing). In terms of land-use efficiency, we found this to be as efficient as the conventional rectilinear layout. In addition, the point block concept created "defensible spaces" and I instinctively felt that the clustering of the flats offered a much more community-friendly environment.



The recession of 1997/98 in Asia ended the hope of a boom in low-cost housing.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Tilted Balance

This is not a blog about politics, but elections are important events, and the Malaysian Elections last Saturday was particularly eventful...

Election season in Malaysia can have the look of a carnival with colourful posters, flags and banners put up along the streets. In a tropical country almost uniformly hot and humid all year round - without winter, spring or fall - we manufacture our own seasons to make life less boring. As children my friends and I had our seasons ('musim') for football, badminton, fishing, and so on.



The way party workers compete to dominate the streets with their posters etc, you would think that the candidates are given points for the quality and quantity of their street decorations.

The opposition parties in Malaysia are used to losing. And this year - overall - they lost again, but they lost less badly. The least bad in 50 years!

This has been a cause for celebration for the opposition. The opposition parties - PAS (an Islamic party), the Democratic Action Party (dominated by Chinese), and the National Justice Party - deserve praise for forging a multi-ethnic coalition. They will govern 5 of the 13 States, and I hope they will show that they can co-operate in government as they have out of it.

The sad winners still govern the Federation and have already promised be more mindful of the voters. Next time I expect they will be more careful how they put up the flags of their party symbol: the balance of justice should never be so tilted..

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Rumah Gadang

Rumah Gadang in the Minangkabau Malay dialect means 'big house'. Some of the Minangkabau people of the central highlands of Sumatra live in Rumah Gadang, with several generations living together in these large communal homes. They follow a matrilineal tradition, unique in Indonesia, where ownership of the homes are passed on to female heirs.

Rumah Gadang (1910)


It is said that the Rumah Gadang originated from Tantejo Gurhano from Pariangan, Batusangkar.

Sitinjau Laut


Usually, the Rumah Gadang has three small buildings or 'rangkiang' in front of it, used to store rice:
  1. Sitinjau Laut
  2. Sibayan-Bayan
  3. Sitangka Lapa


The Rumah Gadang has three main areas: immediately after the entrance comes a middle ares (Rumah Tongah), where there is normally a central post; adjoining this the Anjuang, and the bedrooms (Biliak). Opposite the Anjuang is the kitchen and in front of that a large space (Pangkalan), where visitors are received.

The house is largely constructed of wood; an exception being the being the rear longitudinal wall which is a plain lattice woven in a chequered pattern from split bamboo. The roof is of a truss and cross-beam construction, and is typically covered with thatch from the fibre of the sugar palm (ijuk), the toughest thatch material available and said to last a hundred years. The thatch is laid in bundles which can be easily fitted to the curved, multi-gabled roof.

Buffalo horns shape - Rumah Gadang's roof


Roof finials are formed from thatch bound by decorative metal bindings and drawn into points said to resemble buffalo horns - in fact,'Minangkabau' is thought to be derived from 'menang kerbau' or 'win buffalo'.

The roof peaks themselves are built up out of many small battens and rafters.

The External carvings of a Rumah Gadang

Today, Minangkabau people rarely live in Rumah Gadang as they tend to build modern houses. But, there are still some Rumah Gadang preserved by the local government.

Sources:-
- wikipedia.com
- indonesia-tourism.com
- ambig.fotopages.com
- tradiotional houses of Indonesia

Monday, March 3, 2008

Griffins' Canberra



Walter Burley Griffin was named the winner of the competition for the design of Australia's new capital-city in may 1912, but his wife, Marion Mahoney Griffin was a close collaborater. It was she who created the fine artwork that really made their submission stand out.


Kurrajong Hill is at the node in the central axis, at the bottom third of the plan above

Their layout geometry of radial streets and hexagons was overlaid on the existing landscape. The city’s hills became key nodes; the main street of the city ran parallel to the water axis, on the base of the triangle whose apex was Kurrajong Hill.



On it would be the Capital, a ziggurat that was, to Walter Griffin,‘the last word of all the longest lived civilisations’.


Both the Grffins had worked in Frank Lloyd Wright's office

Walter Griffin came to Auatralia to oversee the construction of the capital, but his experience was not happy. Progress was slow and several features of the original design was changed. He gave up in 1920.

All images from The Ideal City

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Templar's Park



I was born in Kuala Lumpur (or KL). Except for the time I was studying in the UK, I have lived in this city my whole life. Many people complain that about life in KL but I love it here. Of course there are many things wrong with it, but let me dwell on one positive aspect: its proximity to nature.





Templar's Park is forest reserve with scenic waterfalls less than an hour (20km) from the centre of the city. When I was a small boy in the 60's, my parents would often take the family out there for picnics. Recently I took my small children there.




Its been a long time since we've last been there, and that was because it had become unkempt and dirty; the park department did'nt do a good job. But I was happy to see that its quite clean now. The small entrance and carparking charge was worth it.



You don't get to see wild animals in Malaysian forests,except monkeys. They like to scrounge food from humans, who often oblige. In another post I'll go into the problems that crop up with this human-animal contact.



You might like to look at previous posts about living in Kuala Lumpur..