TESSELLAR > Blog

Solar lamp - the story of an idea

2011-12-06T07:15:00.001+08:00

It was a really clever and simple invention. In 2002, during a long electrical shortage, at Uberaba, São Paulo, Brasil, Mr Alfredo Moser discovered a way to gather sun light in the house through plastic bottles hanging from the roof. The bottle is just refracting sunlight very effectively and produces an equivalent light power compared to a 50/60W lamp. It even works on a rainy day.

Apparently, it was reported on the Globo reporter in 2007, and later picked up by social entrepreneur, Illac Diaz, in the Philippines. There 15,000 solar lamps have already been installed earlier this year and Illac's "MyShelter Foundation" is pushing for a million lamps over 12 months. In packed Manila slums, where many rooms are windowless, the solar lamps have been reported to cut electricity costs by half.

Now, what began as a small-scale effort in a Manila slum, has quickly spread throughout the Philippines and even into impoverished communities as far away as Colombia, India and Vanuatu. Illac puts down this success to a Youtube clip and Facebook.

Diaz, who oversees a permanent staff of just a dozen people, says: "This is all part of us becoming an NGO 2.0 - helping a million people without being a multi-million-dollar foundation."

See this clip from cntv:http://wimp.com/lightenup/

References:
Wattwatt:the community for individuals interested in electrical energy efficiency Philippine solar light bottles offer hopeBy Karl Malakunas, AFP

Cars, trains and planes

2011-11-22T09:46:00.001+08:00

In three slides, my friend Mohd. Peter Davis makes a case against our reliance on cars from a safety point of view.

Frugal Innovation

2011-11-09T10:43:00.000+08:00

I was first introduced to the term Frugal Innovation reading Pralahad's "The Fortune at The Bottom of the Pyramid". I was reacquanted recently by a TED talk video by Ragunath Malshekar, "Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products", If you can't spare the 20 minutes, this is what I learned from it:

Frugal innovation is about radical, really radical, reductions in prices that is able to deliver important things to the bottom 4 billion of people in the world who earn less than USD2 per day. I suggest architects move on from the old arguments about Form vs Function - "Less is More", blah, blah...

2011-11-07T11:42:00.000+08:00

I'd like to recommend this conference in Penang next year Saturday March 3rd to Monday 5th. I've signed up and I'm looking forward to it.

Welcome to ICSAUD2012

Monday, 03 January 2011 03:52 Ahmad Sanusi Hassan

CONFERENCE THEME

Intervention: Reaching Out to the Bottom Billion

VENUE at Berjaya Hotel Penang (Please Click): http://berjayahotel.com/penang/

IMPORTANT DATES

• Early Bird Registration Fee Payment Deadline: Before 10th November 2011 • Full paper Submission Deadline (After Review): 1st November 2011

• Late Registration Fee Payment Deadline: After 10th November 2011

INTRODUCTION

Globalisation with all its positive effects however, has left the bottom billion behind. The United Nation Millennium Goal of eradicating poverty by halve; fights hunger and disease; and provision of basic amenities to the poor by 2015 requires aggressive and collaborative efforts from the world community for it to be successfully achieved. The conference showcases trends and practices in the development of sustainable architecture and urban design and set a platform for the fraternity to take up the moral challenges in addressing the bottom billion. Themed “Sustainable Architecture and Urban Design Intervention: Reaching Out to the Bottom Billion”, it invites practitioners and academicians alike to share insights into the complexities faced when working to improve the quality of process and physical place for the use of the urban and rural poor. The conference intends to highlight new ideas and fresh approaches to enhance the living standards of the bottom billion and find ways to articulate effective strategies to narrow the gap between the have and the have not.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this conference is to provide a platform to academicians, researchers, urban planners, architects, engineers, post-graduates, and those involved in housing, building and planning industries to discuss and share issues in relation to the conference theme.

DISCUSSION TOPICS

Technology for buiding design solutions

Rediscovering traditional design for the alternative solution
Smart and k-city
Vehicle-free city concept
Heritage Buildings
Indoor Environmental Quality

Site Planning
Building materials and construction

Energy efficiency in built environment
Renewable energy
Computer Aided Building and Urban Design
Planning design
Water efficiency
Passive design
Issues in hill cuttings and land reclamation
Autonomous buildings
Holistic construction
Culture landscape and agro-tourism Liveable City

Crime prevention

Human and social factors

Education in built environment

Maintenance and repair technique

This the link

Why do terrace houses in Malaysia have back lanes?

2011-11-06T12:06:00.000+08:00

Why do we have to have back lanes at the back of terrace houses? Underused and hardly maintained they become a favourite access route for thieves.

Many people say that it's a fire requirement -as access for fire fighting equipment. But if you look up the bye laws you will not find any clause that says so. Fire fighting access is from the main road and that's where thehydtants are located.

Alternatively, people may say that theFire Department requires the rear escape routes as an alternative to escape via the front door. This too is not true. Fire bye laws allow even 5 storey flats to hVe only one escape routes. The same for apartments above shops, which often can carry quite high fire risks,

Another excuse is that the rear lane required to drain surface water and sewerage from the houses. But surface water from the back garden can also be easily piped to the drains in front of the house.

And sewer from the toilets can be easily piped to go to main sewers on the main road as in the case of detached or semi detached houses.

This last answer though, provides a clue. Have a look at this clip from self-styled hero Huang's adventures in a back lane in"Nasi Lemak 2.0":
Walking down a Malaysian back lane - notice the doors...

The fact is sewer lines became common only in the second half of the 20th Century. Before that there was another system which served the terrace houses well enough. If you look at old prewar terrace or shophouses you will see that the toilets were built on high platforms located at the rear. The wc would be a simply a hole above a bucket. Every night, a "night soil" workers would remove the day's deposits and transport them out for recycling (I am told) in gardens that produce sumptuous vegetables.

Many young people of course haven't even heard of the term "night soil", and this sewer system has long been abandoned. But sadly, the practice of building back lanes still persist as if it was still something we cannot do without. You know In the UK there is no tradition or compulsory requirement for backlanes. And, closer to home, there are also non in the Brunei. Why? Well because they are just simply not practically necessary and just waste space. And, of course, they didn't have a "night soil" disposal system.

So in Malaysia, backlanes are an anachronism. Well, at least that's what I think.

Confessions of a Low Cost Architect

2011-11-04T15:51:00.000+08:00

I think it was Mark Twain who said something like: "...confession may be good for the soul, but it does hell to your reputation."

So it is with some trepidation that I'm preparing for a talk that I'm to give in another 8 days. This is the flyer for it:

If you're in Kuala Lumpur Saturday 12th and you're free, please come...

Download the Registration Form

SQUARES AT HULU SELANGOR #4

2011-10-30T22:32:00.000+08:00

These are not quadruplex or cluster houses that look like semi-D's. These are the real ones!

They are located at the edges of the site accessed from cul-de-sacs within the site, and with the dining rooms at the rear looking onto the main road or a neighbouring land.

Like the other houses, each Type C Semi D house has a spacious 42' x 20' front garden with a porch for at least 2 cars.

But the Semi D lots are slightly bigger - 42' x 45' (ratehr than 42' x 42') such that the house is 32' wide and 25' deep.

From Pekanbaru to Siak Seri Inderapura and the past Sultanate of Siak

2011-10-28T23:16:00.000+08:00

The boat passed under an attractive slender bridge. Here a modern highway crossed over a much, much older one. Early Malay civilization was based along coastlines and navigable rivers, but I had never experienced this in a personal way until today. I'm on a 90 km river trip down the Siak River in the Riau Province of Sumatra, from Pekanbaru (literal translation: “new town”) to Siak Sri Inderapura, once the seat of the Siak Sultanate.

Roads in Sumatra are notoriously bad. The boat I was on sped by a regular succession of not only wooden jetties, outhouses, and houses on stilts, but also concrete docks with gantries, silos, gas tanks, containers and tall piles of timber. There are occasional signs of decay - abandoned warehouses, rusty cranes on decrepit timber docks. It is said that cheap air travel has largely killed the passenger traffic between peninsula Malaysia, Singapore and Pekanbaru. But for now at least, this old river route still has life in it.

The landscape is familiar -mangrove and thick jungle line the banks, rubber and oil palm, just behind. The country here flat; just outside Pekanbaru it was undulating but since then I hardly seen a hill. There are also timber plantations. In a few places, I saw tall closely planted trees in rows of varying maturity and heights. I found out later at Universitas Lancang Kuning back in Pekanbaru. that they were gum trees - aparently, a local specie of the eucalyptus.

Two hours from Pekanbaru, we reached Siak Sri Inderapura, the centre of the old Siak Sultanate which started at the turn of the 18th Century with the murder of Sultan Mahmud Shah II of Johor (a descendant of the Melaka Sultans). His wife, Encik Pong, ran away to Singapore, then Jambi, and whilst on the run, gave birth to Raja Kecik, later to become Sultan Abdul Jalil Rahmat Syah.

Raja Kecik did try to reclaim the Johor throne but without success. He then retired to the Buantan region of the Siak river. Thus a new kingdom was established with Senapelan (now Pekanbaru), Kota Tinggi, Mempura Kecil and Siak Seri Inderapura being some of settlements in it.

It was the 11th Sultan, Syarif Hasyim, who built the palace in Siak Sri Inderapura, which stands just a short distance away from the town jetty where I disembarked.

Designed by a German architect in a style that blended Indian, Arab and European influences, it may be grand but not big. It has one big hall in the middle - a sort of throne room - and smaller galleries on all sides. In the front was a reception hall and to one side was the dining. Two ornamental spiral staircases are placed in the room just behind the throne room. Upstairs were four rooms for guests. The Sultan and his family stayed in a modest bungalow next to the main palace.

Nearby, is the Sultan's mosque; next to it, the tomb of Sultan Syarif Qasyim, the 12th Sultan of Siak. He was an ardent supporter of Soekarno and declared his Kingdom to be a part of the Republic of Indonesia. He did not have any children. He died in 1968 leaving two wives, but no heir to the throne.

In 1997, the Republic declared the last Sultan of Siak as a National Warrior.

Squares Housing at Hulu Selangor #3

2011-10-24T11:10:00.000+08:00

Cluster House Type A
In addition to the type C house, there is this smaller and cheaper alternative.

Like the Type C clustre house, each residential block is composed of four houses. These houses are clustered around pocket parks, creating a collection of "Village Squares" throughout the development.

The houses proposed have large front yards. Each lot is 42’x 42’ such that the house can be 32’ wide and 22’ deep.

Each house has a spacious 42’ x 20’ front garden with a porch for at least 2 cars. The front elevation portrays the look of a 40’ x 80’ high end semi-detached house.

Unlike terrace houses, the 'Squares' house is not confined by their neighbours on each side. Every unit is a corner unit with more visible external walls for windows to provide light and ventilation.

2011-10-23T18:50:00.001+08:00

Last week, Wednesday evening, I attended a talk by Malaysia's "Condo King" held by PAM (the Malaysian Institute of Architects).

Dato' Tong studied architecture in Australia, came back in the sixties just in time to experience the economic slowdown of 1964, brought about by "konfontasi"- between Indonesia and the newly formed Malaysia. His first job was with DBKL on a year to year contract. When his time was up, he set up a small consultancy doing unglamorous jobs to survive.

After some time he thought, "instead of working to help other people make money, why don't I make money for myself". In 1968, Sunrise Properties, his famous development company was born. However, success had to wait with a return of hard times. This time it was the "13th May" incident in 1969. But not too long later Sunrise started with a few shop houses, terrace houses and other small schemes, mainly in his hometown of Klang. Then he started with terrace factories, and with this high margin product, he made his first fortune.

Next, he got involved with politics, spending the next 10 years in politics, (he appears to recount this period with a tinge of regret) became a State Assemblyman, but in the 1982 elections, he lost his seat! Returning to Sunrise, he found that it had hardly advanced since he left. And for some reason, it was now involved with, of all possible ventures, gold-mining. It took 3 years for Sunrise to extricate itself from this venture. But what came next made it all worthwhile.

In 1984, Sunrise started on it's first condominium - O.G. Heights. The company had somehow acquired a 10 acre site adjacent mainly vacant bungalow lots. Instead of terrace houses, Dato' Tong bet on high rise apartments. It wasn't easy. Nearby terrace houses were selling for about RM130,000 and the project's apartments were going for between RM70,000 to RM130,000. This was in the midst of a recession; it took a lot to get customers interested.

OG Heights fromIproperty.com

The project was launched in the old Kimisawa supermarket in nearby OUG Heights, with the Mayor in attendance. He set up teams of dedicated salesmen, knocking on doors. He held concerts, with songstress, Elaine Kang wooing in the crowds. And during the concert evenings, he had the contractors work overtime to impress the people who came. Building skywards, freed up land for landscaping and recreational facilities. The project boasted of not one, but two swimming pools, multiple tennis courts, squash courts and children's playground. This was not just apartments, this was a new category in the property market - the condominium!

OG Heights became a hit and the subsequent phase sold very well. Undertaking it taught Dato' Tong most of what he needed to know to make a the mark he was to make in the history of property development in Malaysia. He had bought, reluctantly at first, a ten acre plot of land in Segambut. Despite it unglamourous location and its lack of an actual road frontage, Dato' Tong could see that this land was in a strategic location. He found that there was an unmade access reserve leading to the land, he bought more land off this access reserve, and he got an agreement with the City Hall that he would build the road at his own cost. If developers of neighbouring land also wanted to use that road, they would have to contribute a share of the cost. And the name Segambut wouldn't do; the new area was given anew name: "Mont Kiara".

Mont Kiara Astana from montkiara.org

This was the 90's and Sunrise rode the boom market for as long as it last lasted. He was introduced to aluminum formwork, adopted it, and got it working so well that he was building condos faster than City Hall could approve them. He could afford mistakes, In the case of "Sophia", the condos were initially meant for silver haired retirees (only for +50 year olds). But they soon needed a severe re-marketing. Eventually, it sold off without too much damage to the bottom line.

Fast, fluid and flexible. These words weren't invented by Dato', but when he first heard them uttered, he recognized instantly that this was his motto.

Mont Kiara Sophia fom iproperty.com

By 1996, at the age of 62, Dato' Tong decided to retire. He took a lucrative offer and sold Sunrise. The timing was good: two years later came the Asian Financial crisis. But Sunrise is still doing well. The purchasers of his condominiums, from OG Heights through to his Mont Kiara projects, have all done well, becoming very profitable investments.As it turned out, Dato' Tong's "retirement" turned out to be an extended golfing holiday. He's now back with his new vehicle - Bukit Kiara Properties - which he describes as a boutique developer. At the young age of 77, there's no clue at all as to when he will finally call it quits.

Dato' Tong' s lecture offered several lessons for would be developers. One is the inevitability of hard times. He has a keen memory of the economic recessions: in 1964 (konfrontatasi), 1969 (13th May), 1984 (the worst recession, he says), 1998 (Asian financial crisis), 2008 (US and Europe still not recovered). So be careful! Yet taking risk is a necessity for developers - being fast, fluid and flexible helps. Even so, defeat or loss is often inevitable. Then, the ability to bounce back comes into play: the loss of his job at DBKL, led to better one, and then led to his own consultancy. The loss of an election led him to his real calling - the business of property development. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

Another lesson he offered was to beware of bankers - especially when times are good. Study the small print, especially where it says that the loan will be subject to annual review. He also had a specific advice for budding architect-turned-developers: when you become a developer, think like a developer, not like an architect!

I asked him after the lecture the one thing about regulations on housing that he would like changed. His answer came without hesitation - it was to discourage low density terrace housing. He was initially pushed into high rise high density housing by economic and commercial factors, but he now sees low density terrace housing as creating an unsustainable sprawl. Ha,ha,ha (...LOL to younger folks). His response touched a raw nerve - I felt like Dato' Tong (without knowing about me and my work) had challenged me to show how Tessellation planning can be applied to high density development – the very issue that is preoccupying me now.

Squares Housing, Hulu Selangor #2

2011-10-18T00:56:00.000+08:00

TYPE C QUADRUPLEX

In this development are quadruplex and duplex units. Below is one of the quadruplex housetypes.

The proposed quadruplexes have large front yards. Each lot is 42’x 42’ such that the house can be 32’ wide.and 22’ deep

Unlike terrace houses, the 'Squares' house is not confined by their neighbours on each side. Every unit is a corner unit with more visible external walls for windows to provide light and ventilation.

The 'Square' layout is based on a patent pending concept of a cluster layout design which creates a neighbourhood that is:

safe
friendly, and
green

This is the layout for the following Phase 4B

This is the area breakdown for this housetype:

Squares Housing in Hulu Selangor

2011-10-15T14:21:00.000+08:00

Work is currently being carried out on a new housing scheme in Hulu Bernam in the north of Selangor, just across the border from Tanjung Malim in neighbouring state of Perak. This is my first opportunity to showcase a rectilinear version of my original Honeycomb layout.

This idea came about in response to objections from builders who would only be comfortable with rectangular shapes and 90degree angles. But it is also an attempt to find an acceptable form of the Honeycomb cul-de-sac layout that is acceptable to the conservative section of the the Chinese community. Here,

there are no dead-ends
all houses and rooms are rectangular
the overall lot sizes are square
the houses have a wide frontage

The 'Squares' housing concept aims to improve the external environment of a housing neighbourhood and at the same time increase green area by reducing the area of surfaced roads whilst reducing traffic to ensure a safer residential area for children, cyclists and pedestrians.

Each house is designed to be acceptably cool without air-conditioning. The houses would face a small community park with small birds and large shady rainforest trees, providing a safe playground for young children and encourage sociable neighbourhoods.

This housing concept has been recently adopted by PKNS (Selagor State Economic Development Corpration). This project will offer a variety of affordable alternatives to terrace houses normally available to Malaysians - from RM210,000 (USD70,000) to RM300,000 (USD100,000).

8 to 22 houses are arranged around a courtyard, essentially like friends sitting around a table, forming a “Village Square”. There are numerous places for children to play. A place friendly to children is friendly to all. The residents would know their neighbours and strangers stand out. Cars automatically slow down in the cul-de-sacs and through traffic is eliminated.

Each house faces a park planted with giant, wide canopy trees that cools the external environment and provides food and habitat for birds and small animals.

The courtyards are linked by footpaths that encourage residents to walk. The proximity of such a pleasant social space to every resident – young, old or disabled – is conducive in fostering a sense of community in this housing scheme.

Have a look at the layout. You will find quadruplex and duplex units mainly arranged around courtyards:

Small neighbourhoods and appropriate infrastructure solutions

2011-02-24T08:11:00.002+08:00

The Mumbai Conference's Theme was "Appropriate Transportation and Infrastructural Development for Evolving Sustainable Humane Habitats". My paper was not so much about transport, but touched on infrastructure. It argues that the small neighbourhoods that I envisage open the way for small scale solution to "soft" and "hard" infrastructural needs.

Mazlin - Small Urban Neighbour Hoods

Beauty and Sustainable Architecture

2011-02-06T02:24:00.003+08:00

Another highlight in the conference was the lecture by Frank Lyons that argued for "beauty" to be one of the defining characteristics of Sustainable Architecture. It was a persuasive argument, but not one easy to recall and report on. Lyons definition of beauty was not straightforward or narrow. he included in his idea of beauty were examples in nature, art, music and mathematics. You get beauty, he says, when a genius discovers unity in dissimilar patterns.

I don't have the text of his talk (yet), but here is a teaser - an essay I got from his website. I've put in italics the part where he touched on geometry. Very interesting...

Vulnerability and Architecture: The Humane Architecture position on Architecture

We see ourselves as standing within the 'Tradition of the Modern Movement in Architecture', but that tradition has now reached a very pluralist phase and has several threads and branches. The position that we take is most closely aligned with the tradition that acknowledges what we would call the vulnerability of the human condition.

The potential ecological crisis that we face stands as a stark reminder of the huge
consequences of continuing to live within the reductive modernist worldview and this crisis,
in a very overt sense, marks our vulnerability. The role that architecture can play within the ecological debate is significant and there are many now addressing these issues in architecture, including ourselves at Humane Architecture. However we would like to examine the idea of vulnerability more thoroughly, hence we would like to introduce five related and overlapping ideas that define what we mean by vulnerability in architecture.

Ordinariness
As a concept ordinariness is difficult to talk about as it is so obvious that it is sometimes difficult to see it, rather like trying to look at your own eye. It is about accepting life as we find it, and working with it. If we can get inside Louis Kahn's idea that we should 'let a building be what it wants to be', then we are getting close to this idea of ordinariness. It is of course to do with function and use, but also to do with listening to the context and site and seeking reciprocity between the two sets of conditions. Though being ordinary may sound boring, when well considered, it is actually the most fruitful architecture because it is rooted in the ground of reality. If contemporary architecture is to remain vital, it must avoid the need to be different for differences sake and grow from the ordinariness of human
need.

By way of example we can cite the work of Van Gogh, who dedicated his life to celebrating the ordinariness of peasant workers. His work displays great compassion for the workers, but almost imperceptibly it also shows similar respect and care for the objects that they use and wear. This can be a great lesson for us, because the table and cupboard are not too far removed from our own discipline, and perhaps Van Gogh's love and care for these artefacts shows us a way into architecture. The 'Arts and Crafts' movement in England was contemporary with Van Gogh's work on the continent, and similarly shows us a way of caring for the ordinary well crafted object, such that the ordinary in some instances becomes extra-ordinary. Although this sounds easy, it seems to us that accepting the ordinary is sometimes difficult for us, because in a certain sense to accept the ordinary reveals part of our vulnerability.

Good Gestalt and Geometry
Vulnerability can also be displayed in the architectural forms we choose. Certain
architectural languages have a very masculine quality and can be very assertive and
unforgiving. They speak of certainty, sometimes even of indifference and unconcern. The Cartesian grid has been one of the dominant symbols of the modern era. The very character of the grid is one that fixes and controls the terrain that it covers, giving no hint of the vulnerability of the human condition. As a concept it is also infinite, extending potentially to the horizons in each direction and to the heavens vertically. Such geometries speak of an ideal and unobtainable world and the geometry itself speaks of only perfect form.

Geometries are of course comfortable to work with, in that they lend themselves to the coherent organised wholes. In the early decades of the twentieth century a group of perceptual psychologists working in Austria and southern Germany identified a perceptual phenomenon which they called "Good Gestalt". Their work helped us to realise that a grid does not need to be perfectly regular to have organising power, objects do not have to be identical to set up relationships with each other, a form does not have to be perfectly circular to generate the gathering function of a circle, nor does it even need to be complete,and a line does not have to be straight to create a coherent link between two objects or places. Good Gestalt therefore includes the forms of pure geometry, but they also include the more relaxed forms that we find in nature, and in our view give us a way of expressing more easily the vulnerability of the human condition

Being Centred: Endings and Beginnings
This third point is about being precisely where you are. It is related to the concept of ordinariness discussed earlier in that it is about accepting the given circumstance. It is about having a place and being centred there. It is not therefore only about describing that centre but also the thresholds between that centre and the surrounding environs. Those thresholds mark the beginnings and endings to a scheme and thus locate it in its context.
Such a position contrasts with the endless Cartesian Grid discussed earlier that conceptually promotes buildings that are like extrusions extending conceptually forever.

Experiential and Sensual Architecture
The fourth aspect of what we are calling a vulnerable architecture is concerned with the acceptance and celebration of the experiential and sensual dimension of architecture. It is the materiality of the building that defines the building's character and mood, and accepting its materiality grounds the building in reality. This position stands in contradistinction to architecture that remains almost totally within the conceptual realm, in which surfaces are conceptual planes defined for their cerebral qualities, rather than in terms of the materials that comprise them. Celebrating the sensual dimension of architecture brings the building towards the user, calling on them to use all their senses and not just the sense of sight that has so dominated recent decades.

Human Error and Human Perfection
In one sense as humans we must be perfect in that we are part of the created world. Having said that, if we are perfect, part of that perfection is our ability to err. These may sound contradictory; however the human being simply needs error to function perfectly. In this sense we are not very different from the rest of the natural world. Nature reveals constant variety and variability within an ordered framework.

In the natural world and within humanity we do not find perfectly replicable components, so in what way does such a component based architecture represent the human condition? In giving expression to the human condition in our work as architects it seems to us that it is important to try to symbolise this contradictory condition. What we have seen in the examples already cited is that some of the dominant trends in the modern movement have focussed on symbolising only half of that polarity. The perfect grid, the tower block, perfect geometries and perfect conceptual surfaces seem to seek to represent what could be called the masculine side of humanity which clings to the rational, tidy and reductive aspects of the human condition.

Although we agree with and wish to celebrate those qualities, it seems important that the softer, more feminine, less certain, intuitive and the more feeling side of humanity be represented too. We believe that to truly represent humanity we have to simultaneously symbolise these two dimensions of our collective personality. In other words we have to try to symbolise the contradiction and that we believe calls for us as architects to accept our vulnerability.

Vulnerability in Architecture
So in summary it could be argued that accepting our vulnerability is good for our general health? To be vulnerable means that one may be wounded, it means that we are willing to reveal our weak spots our soft underbelly or our Achilles heel. These qualities do not seem to belong to the strong architecture of Modernity, but they certainly are part of our humanity. It is our belief at ‘Humane Architecture’ that the modern world generally
speaking denies us the right to be vulnerable, and in making this denial limits and diminishes our humanity. The strong architecture of modernism has and to some extent continues to be dominant in our cities, which increasingly feels uncomfortable for many people. So long as we cannot be weak, we cannot be completely ourselves, we cannot be whole and
healthy, we cannot be completely loved and we consequently cannot be fully human. So in our view there is a need to create a more humane architecture that seeks to reconcile the strong and the weak, the masculine and the feminine, the arrogant and the vulnerable, in order to create an architecture that includes the wounded dimensions of ourselves and to thus represent in our architecture the full dignity of the human condition as we enter the
twenty first century.

Frank Lyons

Bus Stop, Ahmedabad

2011-02-02T22:51:00.008+08:00

Another speaker was Meghal Arya who presented the building designs for Ahmedabad's successful BRT System.

From Welcome to Ahmedabad.com

Unlike most minimalist designs adorning architectural magazines, this bus stop is not just a retro-modernist expression. Certainly not a couple of architects who whimsically decided that their design would be in a style that recalls the modernist era.

From urban-research.blogspot.com

It's a design by Vijay and Meghal Arya, professors from CEPT University, where form follows function in the true spirit of modern architecture.

From Skyscrapercity.com

According to Prajna Rao

"The station consists of two bays in each direction servicing 200 to 5,000 passengers per day. Built at a height to match the floor of the buses, the station offers level boarding, making it easy for the elderly, children and the physically challenged. Tactile floor tiles also support use of the system by the visually impaired.

The floor and roof are finished with form concrete while tensile ropes and wooden cylinders form the wall-screen. The stations are thus open and airy, making it climatically suitable for Ahmedabad. It also brings down operational costs, reducing the need for fans and other mechanical ventilation devices. Seating is inbuilt and can accommodate 15 to 20 passengers at a time. In some parts of the city, the transit station extends to offer seating and landscaping for people to read, relax and mingle. Such activities around the station enlarge its scope from being a transit stop to an enlivened public space in the city."

From Wikipedia

Mumbai!

2011-01-29T12:09:00.006+08:00

I'm in Mumbai for a conference:

A very interesting lecture was given by Prof. Geetam Tiwari, TRIPP Chair, IIT Delhi, who talked about transporting solutions that takes into account the majority of the city dwellers - the poor, the majority of them working in the informal sector. This is her on YouTube;

Her work, especially her support for the Bus Rapid Transport System, is quite controversial. In particular, the Dehli BRT System is under intense criticism from car users who complain that the dedicated bus lanes have deprived them of valuable road capacity and have exarcebated the already bad level of congestion. In defense a supporter of Prof Geetham, Ar Faizan characterized the allocation of the exclusive bus lanes as being a more democratic allocation when taking into account the number of people in the buses compared with the people in cars.

A later presentation by an architect involved in the BRT System in Ahmedabad - a much smaller city - supports the BRT, but not one give nby Prof SM Akhtar. I'm sure this controversy will rage on.

These are links to two of her papers:
1. Public Transport Research Challenges in India
2. Towards a Sustainable Urban Transport System : Planning for Non-Motorized Vehicles in Cities

Project at Hulu Bernam

2010-09-30T00:40:00.000+08:00

Chou's Bricks - just like LEGO!

2009-07-08T23:43:00.006+08:00

In addition to his load bearing tongue and groove blocks and his pre-stressed slabs, now he has an interesting new product - fairfaced cement bricks that have the same tongue and grooves.

These bricks are smaller lighter than the blocks, and much easier to work with. They also include special blocks that have voids for services that run horizontally and vertically.

These blocks are ideal for anyone who wants to build their own brick fencing. Chou tells me that they are non load-bearing, but still you could put in steel reinforced concrete in the voids, and they can also be combined with the thicker and stouter blocks.

All that's needed now is a someone prettier than Chou to lay the bricks.

Movie on Youtube

Architect vs "Feng Shui Master"

2009-06-18T11:39:00.005+08:00

“I won’t believe in feng shui any more after what had happened”, says an architect afflicted with particularly negative elements! This story is yesterday's The Star:

Luck runs out for architect
By YAZREEN HARON

KUALA LUMPUR: He was looking at feng shui to change his luck but the reversal of fortune not only left him RM29,260 poorer but without a girlfriend as well.

When the 36-year-old architect, known only as Ong, bought a house at Lakefield, Sungai Besi, his girlfriend recommended that he consult her feng shui master.

Ong went along with her wishes and soon met the feng shui master who told him that he had a spell of bad luck. The “master” promised to turn his luck around for a fee.

Ong promptly issued a cheque for RM29,260 to cover the feng shui expenses of the “master” who claimed that his services were sought worldwide.

After conducting some rituals at Ong’s new house at 10pm, the “master” told him not to speak of the session to anyone and not to sell the house for the next three years.

The “master” later demanded RM15,000 for an amulet to “protect” Ong and his girlfriend.

But before even receiving the amulet, Ong’s girlfriend told him that it was broken and RM30,000 was needed to replace it.

Feeling suspicious and believing that he had been cheated by the “master” and his girlfriend, Ong refused to pay and soon separated from his girlfriend of five years.

“I won’t believe in feng shui any more after what had happened,” Ong told a press conference organised by MCA Public Services and Complaints Department head Datuk Michael Chong.

“The police will be looking into Ong’s case,” said Chong.

Tata's Nano Homes

2009-06-14T23:44:00.006+08:00

We all know about the world's cheapest car from Tata Motors, which sells for less than USD2 500. Well Tata also dabbles in cheap, affordable homes!

These images are from their Shubh Griha project near Boisar in Maharahtra State, just over 100km north of Mumbai.

View in Google Map

The homes start from about USD8 200 for a very small 283sf studio unit, go up to USD10 600 for a 345sf studio, and USD14 300 for a 465 single bedroom unit. Tata is building 1,300 basic units at Boisar, and they are already oversubscribed.

283sf Studio

360sf Studio

465sf One Bedroom Flat

This is according to an article in the current edition of The Economist. Quoting from this article:

"India’s cities need at least 25m more homes, according to report from McKinsey, a consultancy, and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce. In Mumbai, the commercial capital, more than 8m people now live in shantytowns, often paying substantial rent for the privilege. But buying a home of their own is way out of reach for most of them: a 70-square-metre flat in the centre of the city costs $500,000 or so.

The cost is being kept low chiefly because the flats are being built outside big cities, where land is much cheaper. Owners are expected to commute. The units are also very small and spartan. The simplest consist of a single room with a sink in the corner and a toilet behind a partition. They are in buildings of no more than three storeys, so there is no need for expensive structural works. Instead of bricks, lightweight moulded concrete blocks are used for the walls. The concrete is often made with foam, fly-ash or other waste materials to make it lighter as well as cheaper. There are no lifts and just one staircase per block. All this means that the homes can be built very quickly and with unskilled labour.

The developers say the potential for very cheap housing in India is huge. Many of those living in slums today are employed as drivers, factory workers or tailors, with incomes of around 90,000 rupees a year—easily enough to afford a flat which costs 200,000-400,000 rupees. According to Ashish Karamchandani of Monitor Group, another consulting firm, India has 23m urban families with incomes of 60,000-130,000 rupees a year. Including rural areas, Tata Housing sees an even larger market of 180m households earning between 90,000 and 200,000 rupees.

Until very recently one of the biggest hurdles was finance. Banks were unwilling to lend money to people without credit histories or proof of permanent residence. But two government-owned banks — the National Housing Bank and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development — have agreed to provide funds to finance companies so that they can offer mortgages to such buyers. To reduce risk, buyers must put down at least a quarter of the purchase price and employers must confirm their income. Borrowers are then charged little more interest than those with an established credit history."

All images are from Tata's project website.

An Interruption...

2009-05-31T14:15:00.004+08:00

I’ve too busy this last two weeks and have not been posting!

My 75 year old father-in-law had to go into hospital. Mr. Ghazali (by coincidence we share the same name) had had a long history of high blood pressure and asthma, and for a couple of weeks beforehand, suffered from, what were to me, vague symptoms - anxiety, shallow breathing, water retention in the legs, sleepiness...

When finally it was decided to take him to hospital, he fell asleep on the way, and finally when he arrived at the hospital, did not wake up. By then his fingers had turned blue.

The immediate cause of the passing out was the high level of carbon dioxide in the blood. This showed in blood tests; drowsiness and bluishness in fingers and toes are common symptoms of CO2 poisoning.

He was put onto a ventilator to help with his breathing.

His other main symptom was difficulty in passing water, coupled with water retention (or oedema). So the doctors put on a catheter to drain away the urine and excess fluids from the body.

Ghazali’s condition looked bleak on the Saturday he was admitted. He was unconscious, was on a ventilator, and his whole body was swollen with oedema. But he responded to the most immediate treatment – the blood CO2 level came down and his swelling subsided and you could see his face and hands becoming wrinkly again. He could have woken up earlier but the doctors thought it better to keep him sedated – the ventilator worked better with the patient in this condition.

By Tuesday he was allowed to wake up and had a brain scan. They found that he had had a stroke!

But in the few days that followed it became apparent that the effects are turning out to be relatively minor. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of incapacity – my father-in-law can still speak and easily move both sides of his face and limbs. This is not what happens in severe cases of stroke. Thank God!

Ghazali can count himself lucky and he can look forward to coming back to our home. But his chronic high blood pressure stays with him. The latest reading was something like 167/65 (against 120/80 normal count). Such a big difference in the systolic (upper) and diastolic (lower) figures is symptomatic of hardened arteries. My wife has high blood pressure too, so I’m pestering her to get it down with diet and exercise, or else she should take medication.

This isn’t architectural blogging as usual, but often life (and death) has a way of intruding.

How much Families Earn and the Houses they can Afford

2009-05-17T21:41:00.003+08:00

This is a picture of Household Incomes in Malaysia:

This chart was based on figures given by a Minister in July 2008 in Parliament. It shows what educated middle-class people living in the capital city sometimes forget (that’s me specifically) – that many of our countrymen are still poor. I can’t quite imagine how families (8.6% of households) can survive on less than RM1000 (USD280) a month. According to these figures, more than a third of households earn less than RM2000 a month. From another report, the average household income is RM3686.

My friend Peter Davis at UPM had written on Housing Affordability - using a 3-year income rule of thumb to gauge affordability. He did not have the household income figures at the time, so he made an estimate based on per capita GDP, and average family income came to only RM2000 per year and the average affordable house, RM72 000. We both agreed that this figure seemed too low – perhaps the statisticians were not able to capture the informal income that sustained the poor. Perhaps the statisticians put in more resources to get accurate figures for higher (and taxable) income groups!

So I updated Peter’s picture of Affordable Houses and compared it with our “opportunity surveys" in Pekan, Sungei Petani and Kuantan. This is it:

The figures from our narrow, non-random opportunity surveys were not bad. We can understand why we got lower figures for the cheapest homes – maybe for the poorest families actually owning a house is not realistic or is even a priority (the really important thing would be to secure better income); maybe, as Peter suspected, their informal sources income has not been taken into account.

We can also understand why we didn’t pick up the demand for houses in the high end. The simple reason was that we there are not many rich people milling around Government offices – civil servants are not exorbitantly paid, and the wealthy can delegate the chores that require going to these offices.

Anyway, imperfect as it may be, this is our view at the sort of house prices Malaysian families can afford. But what are developers are bringing on to the market? That is for the next post...

The Honeycomb Townhouse as a cheaper alternative to the Single-Storey Terrace House

2009-05-13T23:02:00.005+08:00

Single storey terrace houses were the most common house-type for rural areas and small towns. In urban areas where land has become expensive, single storey houses are not common any more for new developments. Typically they occupied 20’X70’ plots of land and a few years ago would be priced at RM110,000 and below. However, they are expensive to build with a big area for footings and roof, a large party wall, and low density. Worse, they are perceived as less prestigious than two storey houses.

The Single storey terrace House: “IRIS GARDEN” priced about RM149,000 per unit at Bandar Saujana Putra in Selangor; from LBS Bina website

Now with building costs much higher than a few years ago, even developers in rural areas are shunning the single storey houses. The ones that get launched are also getting more expensive, leaving a gap in the supply of new houses in the RM80,000 to RM130,000 price range that used to be served by the single storey terrace houses.

There is a type of residential unit in Malaysia which is called a “townhouse”. Introduced in the 1980’s, it is actually a large terrace house with different owners on the ground and the first floors. This relatively new building type, is for people who can’t quite afford a terrace house, but do not want to live in flats.

The Terrace Townhouse: Townhouse at Bayu Permai in Rawang; from from GM Build website

We decided to come up with a Honeycomb version of the townhouse. What used to be a sextuplex house was divided into upstairs and downstairs units. These townhouses can fill an important niche in the market: while the usual kinds landed property – terrace, semi-detached and detached houses – are becoming more unaffordable for many people, they are not yet ready to accept living in apartments. At about 900sf built-up area, these can be an acceptable substitute for single–storey terrace houses. They are cheaper to build than single storey houses because they have more shared walls, floors and roof, and each unit takes up a smaller piece of land. I believe that they should be priced 10% cheaper than single storey houses.

The new Honeycomb Townhouse designs are an improvement on the terrace townhouses now already found in city areas. The terrace townhouses usually have only 22’ or 24’ frontages and this is too tight. The street fronting the townhouses has gate after gate along it: there is no space at all along the street for a second car, or indeed for any visitors. There is also too little external walls for proper ventilation and lighting for the rooms within them: the room layout gets very contorted as the various rooms compete for space for windows.

The Honeycomb Townhouse

The Honeycomb Townhouse has the advantage of being a corner unit with a garden to the side. There is more space for windows, and this makes the layout easier – there are enough external walls to provide windows for all the rooms. The Honeycomb Townhouse also has at least 30’ frontage. This means that after providing for the gates to the car-porches of the lower and upper floor units, there is still another 10’ to the side. In addition, the Honeycomb courtyard would mix quadruplex and sextuplex units, but only the sextuplex units are suitable for conversion to Townhouses (the quadruplex units have frontages which are too narrow). So the mixture of quadruplex and Townhouses becomes less crowded than a street of terrace townhouses.

There is another important advantage – the terrace townhouse has a rear garden for the ground floor unit but none at all for the first floor unit. But the Honeycomb Townhouse has a front garden for the upper floor unit and a rear garden for the lower ground unit!

Note for readers on Internet Explorer:
Sorry, my images did not appear in most of my posts: the images are now ok. To the person who complained - thanks very much!

Homes that more people can afford

2009-05-09T09:07:00.006+08:00

In last week's "Housing in Hard Times", I suggested that there are some things that we in the housing industry can do - one is to study the supply side and see how to reduce costs: and we looked at Chou's wall and floor building system. The other is to examine the demand side. An important consideration must be to study what customers can afford.

Affordability is something that professional economists study and the most common measure of it relates the cost of housing to income.

from http://www.realtor.org/research/research/housinginx

The current measure in the US shows that though house prices are tumbling down fast, people's income (at least in aggregate) are still holding steady. So there is a silver lining to the current recession: housing in the US has become so much more affordable.

My friends at UPM and I took another view; and we came upon it almost by accident. It was a by-product of work we were doing with consumer preference surveys. Our aim was to gauge consumer acceptance of our new Honeycomb houses, and we were comparing it with conventional terrace houses.

At first we just compared a single type of house, but eventually we developed a wider range of Honeycomb house types including Honeycomb flats to compare with conventional products.

With a choice of houses that people could look at, we started by asking a simple, very direct question - what sort of house can you afford? Respondents were given a choice of answers: apartments from RM40 000, townhouses from RM80 000, double storey houses from RM 110 000, and so on.

With the answer given, the enumerator would show the brochures of the relevant Honeycomb and conventional house type, and then would go on with questions on the preferences of the respondent.

Beyond the issue of Honeycomb versus conventional houses, it was interesting to just look at what people said they could afford. These are the results from two surveys done in 2007 in district towns in Sungei Petani in the State of Kedah and Pekan in Pahang:

This sort of information should be useful for developers. Yet for a variety of reasons, this is not what developers are providing. They tend to be building houses that cost more than RM170 000. On top of that they build low cost houses that sell between RM35 000 to RM65 000 that Government rules require them to build. We will be looking at this situation later.

Kuala Lumpur's Commercial Area: Past and Future

2009-05-05T22:19:00.004+08:00

This is Kuala Lumpur (KL) towards the end of the 19th Century when it was just a small town with not that many blocks of shop houses.

The main roads led north to Rawang, South-West to Klang, to South-East to Cheras, and West to Ampang.

According to Mr. Ho Chin Soon, "Pudu Village" was so far out of town that civil-servants going there could claim outstation allowance! Of course, Pudu is now considered as part of the inner-city.

The city's commercial activities expanded mainly along the trunk roads towards the North, South_West and South East. The corridor West towards Ampang grew mainly as a residential area.

That is until the 70's (when I was still in school), when private developers turned it into a high-rise commercial district - aptly called the "Golden Triangle". It's pretty built-up now.

As for the future, Ho mapped out the impediments to growth - the swathes of entrenched residential areas, Government owned land and reserves for cemeteries, parks, etc. And the areas left over are the likeliest places for the Golden Triangle to spill over to.

The maps are Ho Chin Soon's, see his excellent website at www.hochinsoon.com/

A Cheaper Way to Build

2009-05-03T14:47:00.004+08:00

As an architect, I have been familiar with Industrialized Building systems since 1985. The promoters of the many systems all claim their particular method of construction to be superior in terms of cost, speed and quality. And I have learned to be sceptical.

But the system that most impressed me is based on a very simple concept and it was invented by a fellow Malaysian. I first used Chou Kan Yin’s system of tongue and groove blocks for Staff Housing in Universiti Industri Selangor, and the project was completed in 2003. The results were impressive!

Chou’s concrete blocks slide neatly into each other to form straight walls – something that our workers cannot do with bricks and mortar.

Steel bars for beams, stiffeners and lintels run through the hollows found in the block. Similarly, the wiring and pipes can be put in place without hacking, plus power point casings and water pipe outlets are pre-installed into special blocks at the factory.

With drawings that describe the location of every block, complete with the running of steel bars, wiring and concealed plumbing, building a house is like playing with Lego!

Chou has improved on wall system by adding a simple method for constructing upper floors without formwork. He is now manufacturing 2 inch thick planks that use pre-stressed concrete which use much less steel. These planks are craned into position before being topped up with another layer of reinforced concrete that is poured on site.

No formwork is required, and the floors become waterproof as the wet concrete seals the gaps between the planks.

Together, the wall and floor system produces an accurate building structure without mess. The walls and ceilings only need a thin layer of skim-coating to give a smooth finish. Tiles can also be easily laid on the floors or walls without having to repair the underlying surfaces.

Oh yes, about costs...

Compared to using reinforced concrete columns and beams, the most common method of construction in Malaysia, Chou's block system uses some 60% less steel. As for the slabs, overall his prestressed concrete planks, plus the lightly reinforced concrete topping, uses 40% less steel compared to normal reinforced concrete slabs.

Many system builders claim their system to be cheaper because their system is in some way involves a more efficient process. But its very difficult to quantify this sort of cost saving. In the case of Chou's building system, the savings are much easier to analyse: he just uses less steel.

Mostly, Industrialized Building Systems are used in big projects to take advantage of economies of scale. But the special thing about Chou’s system is that it can be used for even a small bungalow!

He calls his system CKY IBS... this is his website:
http://www.ckyibs.com/

Housing in Hard Times

2009-04-29T21:59:00.008+08:00

Mr. Ho Chin Soon talked mainly about the slowing, but not (yet?) collapsing demand for houses. But what about supply?

He did produce an interesting slide about oil prices last year.

The sharp spike in oil prices brought with it steep increases in building materials.

This was a bewildering time for developers, quantity surveyors and, yes, architects - we had never seen prices go haywire before.

The problem of building costs going up hurts most when it costs more to put up a new building compared to just buying an existing one available in the market; at that point, the cost of building new houses exceeded the market price of existing houses, and there was no shortage of properties for sale as highlighted in Mr. Ho's talk. No surprise - projects for new housing slowed down or simply stalled.

One year on, this problem has persisted although circumstances has changed. The price of building materials have come down, following the plummet in oil prices, but demand has dipped too.

Thestar online

By my own (unprofessional economist) reckoning, the cost of building new houses is still above what similar properties, already built, can be bought for. It is generally true in Malaysia, and probably true all round the world.

Is there hope?

The overall picture is dire, but here and there, some are able to do better than others. Sime Darby Properties launched anaggressive sales campaign. They started with clearing out their existing inventory of unsold properties, but from the latest reports, they are selling newly launched projects too.

Thestar online

It helps that houses are not a commodity; savvy developers market them as highly differentiated products, very much unlike whatever else there is on the market. They compete on location, some design feature, brand name, and so on, not just on price.

As someone promoting Tessellation Planning, it helps that the Honeycomb houses – the sextuplex, quadruplex and duplex units – are genuinely unlike anything else that is currently available on the market. We will soon see when the Maran and Nongchik projects finally get launched in a few months!

Another thing that can help is technology - a cheaper and better way to build. A friend of mine, Chou Kan Yin has developed a building system for walls and floors that doing that will be the subject of my next post...

Prospects for property in Malaysia

2009-04-26T19:45:00.003+08:00

I love maps, but there is another Malaysian who loves them even more. That person is Ho Chin Soon. A valuer by profession, he has made maps his business. But more of that in a later post.

In March , I had the chance tom see him speak at a property exhibition in the Mid Valley Mall in Kuala Lumpur. He talked about the prospect for property market in Malaysia during this global recession.

His message was very simple:

Yes, times are bad in the States with the financial crisis. There is usually a six month delay between happens in the real economy in the US and Malaysia. Seeing that a large part of the crisis in the States has stemmed from a property bubble, how will Malaysia be affected?

In his opinion, the property in Malaysia has been largely flat since the last recession in 1998.He suggests that the local events in the past couple of years had kept down the values of stocks and properties, whilst Singapore and many other countries enjoyed a boom.

He pointedly drew contrast the large rises in the rents and prices of properties in Singapore in the last decade and the measly increases here.

There are exceptions of course, and the development around KLCC is one. There is at least least one project where work has been deferred indefinitely.

“No bubble here” is his conclusion. That is not to say that we are immune to financial stress; certainly the reduction in export incomes will affect the economy. The level of bank’s non-performing loans has not shown a substantial increase. Nor has he noticed an increase in properties for auction. Both these things will take time to work through the system. Prices will fall, but not as much as has fallen in Singapore.

Meanwhile, the main bargains to be had are those on offer from big developers who are keen to unload their unsold properties.

Starting again

2009-04-23T12:20:00.005+08:00

I started using Google blogger in March, 2007 and spent about three months feverishly building up a series of ‘blogs’ on “Tessellation Planning”. They were not really blogs, but websites about different aspects tessellation planning and some of the on-going projects that just happened to be set up using the blogger tool. I was able to link them all together under a single title, “Tessellar”, a navigation bar and a uniform look.

I then discovered that my websites weren’t really attracting many people! It is something that hits any beginner.

So I started blogging as a way to get more readers. I picked “vernacular architecture” as a theme. This was a topic that interested me. But also I was keen to pick up readers from as many countries as possible, and I hypothesized that if I wrote about say, mud-huts in Africa, I might pick up interest from Africans. As it turned out, I picked up readers from all over the world.

But putting up two to four posts each week was very time-consuming. By May 2008, I stopped.

Economists in the US now trace the beginning of the current recession to the 4th quarter of 2007, but most people got its first inkling only in September, 2008 when the US government let Lehman Brothers go belly-up. Here in Malaysia, people in the housing industry got our first wind of bad, bad times in early 2008 when building prices went haywire. Construction costs seemed to be going up and up with no end in sight, and developers just stopped in their tracks. Work for architects and town-planners started to dry up, and practices like mine have had to hunker down and wait till the storm blows over.

Many on my staff left to further their studies, a few others resigned, and the ones still with the firm understand that times are hard. Happily for me, in the past year I had been able to grow lean without too much heartache. The storm is still not over yet, but I see specks of light in the far horizon: architects like me are in the futures business.

It’s time to start blogging again!

The Best Lamp Posts in Malaysia

2008-11-23T02:47:00.004+08:00

Reissued with Google Map

libromanic.com

The most beautiful lamp posts in Malaysia can be said to be found in the new administrative capital of Putrajaya. It appears as if every road there must have lamp posts with its own distinctive design.

polytikus.com

But the signature lamp posts along with the signature bridges and buildings, do not make this new city a place that I would like to live in (even if I could afford to buy a decent house there)!

www.daylife.com

For me, the most interesting lamposts are along the Middle Ring Road, alongside Taman Melawati.

View Larger Map

On my way home from monthly trips to Kuantan, usually just before dusk, I always look out for big birds that like to perch on the lamp posts along a 2 to 3 kilometer stretch of this road. And I've wondered about them for a long time...

Ani Mardiastuti

Yesterday was Labour Day holiday. On a family outing to the zoo, I've discovered that they are Milky Storks or 'Burung Upeh Botak' (bald upeh bird). There was a large flock of them on an island in the zoo's lake. They are not fenced in, so sometimes they fly out.

"The globally threatened Milky Stork 'Mycteria cinerea' faces extinction in the wild in Malaysia, according to Yeap Chin Aik of the Malaysian Nature Society.
The species is a predominantly a coastal resident in Indonesia and Malaysia, inhabiting mangroves and adjacent swamps.....(but) these tidal forests are threatened by agricultural conversion and development schemes, particularly large-scale fish farms, tidal rice cultivation, logging and related disturbance".

www.birdlife.org

This bit of information makes me more eager to look out for these birds anytime I'm in the neighbourhood!

Circular and Hexagonal Farms

2008-08-04T22:44:00.004+08:00

I found this spectacular view of irrigated farms in Libya from deputydog

"Center pivot irrigation is basically a method of agricultural irrigation which results in a circular field of crops. a huge column of sprinklers, fixed to the ground at one end, slowly travels around in a circle whilst spraying the crops below. you can see the sprinkler arms, some of which can reach a kilometre in length".

The hexagonal forms look like they are made up of clusters of houses in the middle and farmland radiating out.

View Larger Map

Re-inventing the Cul-de-sac

2008-07-01T23:02:00.005+08:00

I've been really busy this last few months: it's hard work trying to get the honeycomb projects moving. And so blogging has been getting more difficult.

But i've only noticed that the Honeycomb concept was featured in Tree Hugger in a feature titled "re-inventing the cul-de-sac" posted by Lloyd Alter.

So thanks Lloyd!

The post attracted 15 comments, and I'm reproducing them here. I'm grateful for the positive comments, but even the critical ones are useful.

Chris H. said:

I like the idea of higher density, but it seems to me that there are still the issues of car dependence and that it doesn't lend itself to redevelopment and change. I still don't know what's wrong with the grid system, especially when the terrain lends itself to it. There aren't any commercial amenities nearby to anyone such as groceries, restaurants, or entertainment venues so the automobile is still going to be the main blight... er... source of transportation

I guess what it boils down to for me is that high density sprawl is still sprawl, and therefore still the problem. I appreciate what he is trying to do, but as gas prices continue to rise for most of the world, the cul-de-sac just seems like the wrong thing to encourage.

April 7, 2008 1:22 PM

Kearns said:

I'd live there.

Wonder if my boss would let me work remote from Malaysia?

April 7, 2008 2:52 PM

nobody's perfect said:

I still disagree with the usage of cul-de-sac being propagated here. A cul-de-sac is simply the end of street circle. You can have higher density townhomes on cul-de-sacs, or even an apartment building.

April 7, 2008 4:45 PM

Damon said:

@ nobody's perfect: you can, but how often do you? And like Chris mentioned, low density is not the only problem of this layout.

April 7, 2008 8:35 PM

Roland said:

There's a type of dutch street called a woonerf, that has all the benefits of a cul-de-sac (slowed traffic and...well that's it isn't it?) plus more. The idea is to put obstacles in the path of the cars to slow them down to below 20 mph. This allows pedestrians and bicyclists to share the street with the cars. The street then becomes a social space rather than a highway. They haven't caught on in the US, because drivers don't like the idea of slowing down that much. But, ironically, that is exactly what the beloved cul-de sacs do. They slow drivers down, which increases safety.
April 7, 2008 8:45 PM

Dan said:

See, now these are the types of grids I always wanted to make in SimCity. I imagined hexagonal residential spaces like these with commercially zoned triangles between them. Damn those square grid limitations.

April 8, 2008 12:15 AM

Nathan Blair said:

I love the idea, but I don't see why it would eliminate the need for cars, or reduce sprawl. It looks cool though, and I'd have no problem moving to a subdivision like that.
April 8, 2008 2:00 AM

I don't understand why you think cul-de-sac has to mean car dependency and sprawl. But then not being American I don't see the square grid as being "normal".

Surely in a grid, having roads on all sides and greater road access, promotes car use. I think you are connecting the layout with other aspects of the situation in which it is normally used (in your experience). So, I don't see it is the street pattern that influences it - it is the nearness to facilities, the size of plots, etc.

The layout is surely not the key to what happens - whather grid, dead-end or the normal for Europe (wiggly roads and odd angles, some dead-end, some through).

April 8, 2008 11:35 AM

anonymous said

The point of buying a house on a cul-de-sac is that you get a larger yard and less traffic. If you increase the housing density then appeal is gone. Nobody wants to live at the end of the road because it's the end of the road. Just think of trying to find a house in that maze!

My parents live on a cul-de-sac. A lot of their traffic is kids on skates and bikes.

April 8, 2008 12:15 PM

Josh said:

The reason why cul-de-sacs translate into car dependency and sprawl is a lack of connectivity. Compare the ratio of legs (raod segments) to nodes (intesections). Connected landscapes will have more nodes per leg while disconnected landscapes will have fewer nodes per leg. Disconnected landscapes mean that people will often have to travel further (by the way the ant walks) to reach their destinations. This translates into using a car more often. On the other hand, connected landscapes make the trips shorter and promote walking. (Remember how roads are used by both cars and pedestrians, as well as bicycles, etc.)
The first cul-de-sacs had meaningful destinations within them (such as small grocery stores and other services); modern cul-de-sacs do not. In order to reinvent the cul-de-sac and make it meaningful as a small enclave of a community, we must remember that a community invilves more than just residences.

April 8, 2008 1:20 PM

Anonymous sustainable coward said:

mmm... I find this 'planned' geometric format as distasteful as the grid system that has propogated over the US. The proposition that 'environmentalists dislike cul-de-sac's' an absurd generalisation. I live in a cul-de-sac, in a village in Europe where the streets evolved in line with the local geography, not due to some artificial town planners lego-set.

I cycle everywhere, and get the train to the local town if I need to. I don't have a car. My life is not more energy intensive or car dependent. The vegetables and fruit I grow in my garden are distinctly low-carbon (or is that 'energy secure'?)

Please think a little about context before committing to large sweeping generalisations based on US car loving lifestyles. I do like the 'green spaces' idea though. I find that we interact with our neighbours and share much more because we all look out for one another - stick that in your high rise city boxes and smoke it.

The 'city bias' in Treehugger can be quite unimaginative at times.

c'mon guys... your're better than this.

April 8, 2008 1:27 PM

dan rossini, Diocese of LaCrosse said:

Each post gets a certain number of ad dollars for each viewing. The more viewers per page, the more $$ for Treehugger.com.

Therefore, since the previous post was so popular, they will continue to talk about this silly subject and roll in the cash. Because I think 95% of us readers can agree that this is pretty much a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream to get builders to modify current modern building techniques like cul-de-sacs with this website. But it will generate views, that's for sure.

I fell for it. Count me in for adding a few extra dollars to Treehugger.com's profits... that is Discovery Communications, the cable programming giant's pockets. Cha-ching!

April 8, 2008 1:49 PM

Mayyie said:

I like his use of the tesselar hexagon.
April 9, 2008 1:05 AM

dyspeptic said:

I still want to know what type of housing the writer lives in.

Minimizing paved surface is a good idea. It is at odds with this connectivity idea, though. That geometric grid has more paved area per living unity than any cul-de-sac arrangement I've ever seen. Why aren't we greening the car instead of shortening drives?

My observation of planned co-housing communities is that they are just cul-de-sacs with more fences, not less, and just as many cars. But one is cool and the other is not. It is all class signalling - 100%.

LA: the writer of this post (not the original writer at the Star) lives in a detached house, downtown, on a 30 foot wide lot, on a street that is part of the urban grid. My mother in law lives on a cul-de-sac and my wife tells me that it was an absolutely wonderful place to grow up. My mother-in-law is now old and has to maintain a car because there is not a single store within walking distance. Where we live, there are three large grocery stores and more variety stores than you can count within a ten minute walking radius, and half the people on the street don't have cars. the cul-de-sac is lovely, fun, great for kids but is simply not sustainable.

April 11, 2008 6:55 PM

The end of the coin-operated laundry?

2008-06-14T11:22:00.003+08:00

"Sure, saving water is great and all, and everybody loves the environment, but a new technology coming out of Leeds University might allow for millions of apartment dwellers to finally have their own washing machine and dryer.

I don't know about the U.K., but here in the States, I've found many apartments simply are not set up for installing a washer and dryer. Landlords typically pay the water bill, so even if the infrastructure is there, the enthusiasm for laundry capabilities usually is not".

"All that is set to change if this new washing machine works as well as it claims. Users would simply insert some detergent and only one cup of water. A cartridge delivers thousands of small, reusable plastic chips (or granules) that would then absorb the dirt and water. Not only does the technology promise to clean your clothes, but also at the end of the cycle the load would be "virtually dry", eliminating the need for a separate dryer.

It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to see the potential for this new spin on an old chore. The technology, dubbed Xeros, is already being compared to the Dyson bagless vacuum cleaner, which revolutionized the home cleaning industry when it was first released in the mid-1990s. The inventor, Professor Stephen Burkinshaw, is already in talks with commercial partners and hopes to see his idea become commercially viable as soon as next year. It would seem that for space-challenged apartment dwellers the future finally looks bright--without having to lug a closet full of laundry down the street".

Source: The end of the coin-operated laundry? | Appliances and Kitchen Gadgets - CNET Blogs

Igloos - an Inspiration

2008-05-26T21:31:00.003+08:00

The igloo could be earliest form of the monolithic dome. It is an efficient structure - with the spherical section you get to enclose the home with the minimum amount of material. The natural strength of the arc carries the roof.

And it makes use of a material that is easily found.

wikimedia.org

The Mellon Arena is an indoor arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is also informally known as ‘The Igloo’. This arena has a special dome where 6 stainless steel arc panels retract to form an outdoor venue.

www.alongdrive.com

Another example is Our Lady of Victory Roman Catholic Church also known as the ‘Igloo Church’ in Inuvik, Canada. The church is built on permafrost and in order to avoid the layer of ice from melting, a double layer shell is placed on top of a gravel-filled saucer-like structure that is set into the ground.

Contributed by Kim Casey

Inside the Igloo

2008-05-21T22:56:00.007+08:00

As a snow storm rages outside, the Inuits stay warm and cozy in an igloo. This remarkable phenomenon is due to the way the igloo was built. An igloo can be divided into 3 levels which are the floor level, the subterranean level and an iqliq which is a raised platform of same width with the dome of the igloo.

A tunnel is made accessible to the inside of an igloo and must be lower than the floor level. This is because the cold air that enters the tunnel will stay in the tunnel and will not be able to enter the igloo as cold air sinks and hot air rises. Sometimes, the tunnel entrance may be accessed by a subterranean channel or by an angled tunnel. The opening however is ensured to be small to reduce the possibility of cold air from entering once the snow block or bear-skin door is opened.

To keep warm, some Inuit groups line the inside of the igloo with caribou hides for better heat insulation. With the addition of blubber lamps, bodyheat and a stove for making tea, the internal temperature of an igloo can hit 15.5°C or more even though the outside temperature may be -40°C.

Paul Oliver

In order to avoid the cold, the Inuit family will sit on the iqliq with their backs to the wall and legs extended but not overhanging. This platform will also be covered with moss and sealskins or hides to ensure warmth.

Contributed by Kim Casey
Reference: Paul Oliver, "Dwellings", Phaidon Press, 2003

The Inuit Igloo

2008-05-18T00:09:00.004+08:00

www.alaska-in-pictures.com

The igloo is an intriguing structure made from thick slabs of tightly packed, dry snow. It forms the shape of a dome that, amazingly, is able to stand without additional support or the probability of caving in. It is a normal dwelling place of the Inuits during the winter season. The building of an igloo requires skill, a lot of energy and a large knife or a snow saw, known as an orsulung. It can be built from the outside but is said to be preferred form the inside, especially during a blizzard. A snow slab varies in measurements, depending on the size of the igloo.

wikipedia.org

First, a few snow blocks similar in size are arranged in a circle with enough space for habitation and a gap for the entrance. The first layer is then cut in a slight upward and inward curve to enable a continuous build of a dome shape. The last block, also known as the key block, which would be placed on top of the igloo, must initially be larger than the hole for it to be placed topside down. The completed igloo is powdered with snow to seal any gaps and a few ventilation holes are made. Inside the igloo, a lower level and a tunnel is cut out to prevent the cold air from entering.

Paul Oliver, "Dwellings", Phaidon Press, 2003

The thawing and freezing of the snow on the igloo will form a smooth layer of ice, making the structure stronger.

Contributed by Kim Casey

The Interior Design of a Quadruplex House

2008-05-09T23:18:00.006+08:00

This is an early proposal by my colleague Zaman. It is the quadruplex at the hillside Honeycomb project in Johor Baru.

SLIDESHOW

What do you think?

An Escher Tessellation

2008-05-08T23:31:00.004+08:00

This is a detail copied from a print by Dutch artist M.C.Escher. It's an interlocking pattern of the weird shapes of a fish and a bird. Looks like a complicated creation, doesn't it?

Yet you can also see it a regular pattern of diamond shaped polygons (or trapeziums). And there are two basic patterns: one dominated by the black fish pattern, and the other dominated by the image of the white bird (or is it a fish with wings?).

Each of these patterns can be thought of as a tile; the complete images of the bird or fish are formed only when the tiles are placed next to each other.

The effect of arranging these tiles together is shown here. This process is called tiling, or tessellation.

Thanks to my son, Nazri, who produced the GIF images

Lamp Posts in Malaysia

2008-05-01T23:28:00.010+08:00

libromanic.com

The most beautiful lamp posts in Malaysia can be said to be found in the new administrative capital of Putrajaya. It appears as if every road there must have lamp posts with its own distinctive design.

polytikus.com

But the signature lamp posts along with the signature bridges and buildings, do not make this new city a place that I would like to live in (even if I could afford to buy a decent house there)!

www.daylife.com

For me, the most interesting lamposts are along the Middle Ring Road, alongside Taman Melawati.

On my way home from monthly trips to Kuantan, usually just before dusk, I always look out for big birds that like to perch on the lamp posts along a 2 to 3 kilometer stretch of this road. And I've wondered about them for a long time...

Ani Mardiastuti

Yesterday was Labour Day holiday. On a family outing to the zoo, I've discovered that they are Milky Storks or 'Burung Upeh Botak' (bald upeh bird). There was a large flock of them on an island in the zoo's lake. They are not fenced in, so sometimes they fly out.

"The globally threatened Milky Stork 'Mycteria cinerea' faces extinction in the wild in Malaysia, according to Yeap Chin Aik of the Malaysian Nature Society.
The species is a predominantly a coastal resident in Indonesia and Malaysia, inhabiting mangroves and adjacent swamps.....(but) these tidal forests are threatened by agricultural conversion and development schemes, particularly large-scale fish farms, tidal rice cultivation, logging and related disturbance".

www.birdlife.org

This bit of information makes me more eager to look out for these birds anytime I'm in the neighbourhood!

Detached Honeycomb Houses

2008-05-01T22:22:00.003+08:00

Detached houses (Single Family Homes in the US, bungalows in Malaysia) can be arranged in hexagonal grids too. The basic module is a triangle comprising a private garden in the backyard, the house itself with agarage at the side, the driveway and frontyard, the pedestrian footpath, the road and a small public green area.

These houses have narrow fronts, but have wide backyards. All houses face a courtyard with a small green area in the middle - small but big enough for a large tree.

Four houses are arranged around each courtyard; the courtyards are then layed out on a triangular grid to create a neighbourhoods.

The houses here are quite small. The building setbacks are below Malaysian standards for individual land titles, but they're ok for group or 'strata' titles.

History of Nong Chik

2008-04-21T00:00:00.002+08:00

The hillside Honeycomb project in Johor Bahru is in an old part of the city. Old government quarters will be demolished to make way for new housing. Not everyone looks forward to the change: there are memories here...

So I did a little research.

Syed Muhammad Alsagoff (1836- 1906) and Maharaja (later Sultan) Abu Bakar of Johor (reigned 1862-95)

Syed Muhammd Alsagoff, also known as Nong Chik, obtained concession land in Johor Bahru and gave his name to the kampong that he established. He was the grandson of Tuan Syed Abdul Rahman Alsagoff, an Arab businessman from Hadramaut in Yemen who came to the new British colony of Singapore with his son, Syed Ahmad, in 1824.

Syed Abdul Rahman established Alsagoff & Company in Singapore in 1848 which traded in spices, rubber, sago, coffee, coco, pineapples and others.

Apart from trading it also had a plantation, the largest sawmill in the region and the Straits Cycle & Motor Company.

When Syed Abdul Rahman died, all his business were inherited by Syed Ahmad. Syed Ahmad married Raja Siti, the daughter of Hajah Fatimah of Sulawesi who was herself a rich business woman who owned many cargo ships.

When Hajah Fatimah died, her business was run by her son-in-law Syed Ahmad, adding to his wealth.

Syed Ahmad had three girls and one boy. When he died in 1875, the family's wealth was passed down to Syed Muhamad Alsagoff.

Syed Muhammad Alsagoff was close to Sultan Abu Bakar of Johor; apart from the Nong Chik land, he also received a large concession in Kukup. He set Constantinople Estates which grew rubber, sago, cocoa and pepper. He even received permission from the Sultan to issue his own currency at the Costantinople Estate!

One Dollar. Notice the Arabic Chinese and English used on the note!

Source: kukupnet.tripod.com

Visiting Chernobyl

2008-04-14T06:07:00.003+08:00

Mark Resnicoff responded to my post last week:

I personally visited the Chernobyl area for two days in June 2006 with a friend and former resident of Pripyat. We toured the Chernobyl Plant (including the Reactor 4 control room), several of the abandoned villages, and Pripyat. I have posted a photo journal of my trip titled at:

My Journey to Chernobyl: 20 Years After the Disaster

Really worth reading!

Source: Mark Resnicoff

Pripyat near Chernobyl

2008-04-10T11:36:00.001+08:00

The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster of April, 1986 happened towards the end of the Soviet era. You could see the power plant from one roof of one of its apartments. It is now a ghost town that will take centuries to become safe again.

Nuclear energy holds so much potential that many people now see it as essential for the world's future. I think that they are probably right, but sometimes, things go terribly wrong...

Last days of Pripyat

Post apocalyptic winter tour here!
Related post: Ghost Towns

The Mud Fortresses of Ait Benhaddou

2008-04-09T03:37:00.002+08:00

A man’s home is his castle, goes an English saying. But it is in this in traditional Moroccan village where families literally live in their own fortress kasbahs, each stretching some ten metres into the air.

i-cias.com/morocco

Established in the 11th century, it served as a stop for caravans carrying salt south across the Sahara and returning with ivory and gold. This scenic village has been very much favoured by film makers, from David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” to Scott Ridley’s “Gladiator”.

i-cias.com/morocco

leesmethurst

Still the mud houses, which need lots of maintenance after each rainstorm, have been steadily crumbling. Only about 10 families live in there now, the majority preferring to live in a modern village across the river.

leesmethurst

Sources: http://i-cias.com/morocco/ait_benhaddou.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C3%AFt_Benhaddou

Tessellation Planning in India?

2008-04-07T22:18:00.003+08:00

I came to the idea of Tessellation Planning while trying to solve the problem of qiuality, affordable housing in Malaysia. I hope it might also be practical in other countries. Which is why I am very open with my ideas in my blog and website.

A 3rd year architectural student at Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India, sent me drawings her housing project as part of her resumee.

I was very happy that my website had helped her along! I think her work is pretty good. The different types of housing - 150sm detached house, 110sm two storey apartments and 75sm three storey apartments - are nicely blended together.

My thanks to Stuti Bhatnagar.

Kuala Lumpur Birds

2008-03-30T22:32:00.002+08:00

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...

Tessellation Planning

2008-03-29T20:29:00.007+08:00

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.

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.

Animated gif image

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

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.

10,000BC

2008-03-25T23:44:00.003+08:00

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

2008-03-25T00:24:00.003+08:00

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...

Rumoh Aceh

2008-03-21T00:28:00.002+08:00

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

The Search for a Low-Cost Housing Solution #2

2008-03-20T01:23:00.004+08:00

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.

Low Rise Point Block Apartments

2008-03-17T01:18:00.003+08:00

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

Civets in the City #2

2008-03-14T22:16:00.002+08:00

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.

Monkey Urbanization

2008-03-13T23:09:00.006+08:00

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"

In Search of a Solution for Low Cost Housing

2008-03-12T23:08:00.004+08:00

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.

Tilted Balance

2008-03-11T23:48:00.003+08:00

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..

Rumah Gadang

2008-03-04T10:28:00.014+08:00

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:

Sitinjau Laut

Sibayan-Bayan

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

Griffins' Canberra

2008-03-03T23:23:00.005+08:00

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

Templar's Park

2008-03-02T22:24:00.005+08:00

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..

Mexico Loves the Grid

2008-02-29T13:25:00.004+08:00

This country has seen a lot of housing development in the last decade or so. The people have become more prosperous and housing loans have become easier to get. New townships have sprung up. The houses are to a certain extent similar to those in Malaysia, halfway around the world. But there grid layouts are striking in scale.

Yann Arthus Bertrand included this in his book “Earth From Above; 366 Days”:

I picked up these images of Mexico City from “Territoire des Sens” blog. A bit better...

But look at Nezahualcoyotl. The Deputy Dog blog calls it “The Frightening Grid”.

There is a little bit of 'grid versus cul-de-sac' battle in the US. I find the entrenched ideological positions a bit hard to understand. A more important issue is monotony and scale. Both cul-de-sac and grid layouts fail when they are blown up to an inhumane extent.

But there does seem to be a lot of towns built to the iron grid in Mexico. Does anyone know why?

Bali House

2008-02-27T08:54:00.008+08:00

I was reading the ‘Impiana’ magazine (Sept. 2005 edition) when I saw a picture of a Bali house. I’ve never been visiting Bali before, and that was the first time I saw the Balinese architecture. In this magazine, it shows a modern Bali house design which has been blended with some other architecture style. As I read through the article, the urgency to know more about this house has driven me to look for more information on the internet.

The basic concept about Bali architecture is really interesting. They believe that the temple must face the north and east corners as they considered these two areas as holy and sacred spaces. The west and south are the lowest corners for architecture, so mostly houses face these sides (http://www.streetdirectory.com/).

As I browse through the internet, I found this article (http://www.dee-bali.com/) which explains in detail about the Bali House design:-

Here is the description of each number from the picture above:

Family Temple.
The house temple called Sanggah or Merajan, is the place to worship the ancestor and the Hyang Guru. Below is the picture of Sanggah (http://indonezyjski.multiply.com/).
Sleeping Pavilion.
This building usually a large eight-post structure on a high base. A terrace usually attached for receiving guests at family ceremony.
West Pavilion
The west pavilion or Bale dauh, is the workhouse of the compound. Serving the variety of purposes, from gathering place to sleeping quarters. Below is an example of a common Bale Dauh (http://indonezyjski.multiply.com/).
Ceremonial Pavilion
The east pavilion, or bale dangin is the ceremonial pavilion. The place is where the life rites and death rituals occur.
Sakenam
The guest pavilion for relatives and children varies in size and number according to the needs.
Granary
Or the lumbung or jineng is the storage area for rice.
Kitchen
Or paon is in the south because of the association with Brahma (the god of fire) whose place in the south.
Protective Wall
Or aling-aling, most behind the gates to deflect the malign influences. The gate is called angkul-angkul. You can see a small wall called aling-aling in the picture below (http://indonezyjski.multiply.com/).

There is also an article about the history of the Bali House, which you can read here: http://houseofbali.blogspot.com. This article mainly discuss about the Hinduism influence in Balinese architecture.

It is interesting to learn that Bali house actually consists of a few buildings but operate as a single entity. It is like having a private town in your own house. I might consider this design as my dream house in the future.

Jungle Trekking in Kuala Lumpur

2008-02-25T21:29:00.004+08:00

Thank god for the steep hilly areas:land much too steep for rubber or oil-palm plantations, or construction. One of the great things about my home-city is how near it is to waterfalls and jungle treks.

Taman Cuepacs is less than an hour from the city-centre. The housing development there date from the 1970's is rather non-descript: terrace-houses and more terrace houses with some terrace shop-houses for relief. Then there is an imposing high-rise development at a hill-top with some dreamy name like "Venice Hills" or something.

But it is also at the foot of a scrap of hilly forest reserve. The jungle trail here is clearly marked. From a clearing next to a few rows of houses right next to the forest, you first climb up and down a small hill to a little stream. This is stage 1. For Level 2, it gets steep for a good 30 to 45 minute climb. The rest is easier, but I've never gone on past Stage 3. When I brought my family along for a trek it was a bit difficult for the two little girls, age 9 and 10. This is us resting after the steep ascent. Notice that we're not smiling.

But the girls enjoyed it better when we we got back down to the little stream.

Nature-loving city folks have been trekking through these forests for quite a while. Some of them had got together keeping the trails clean, placing signposts on them, put up simple toilets and changing room at a clearing where trekkers can park.

But sometimes, citizen self-organization and people enjoying nature is too much for officialdom. The State Forest Department has recently spent good tax-payers money to put up fence around where trekkers usually start their walks and put up a signboard threatening "3 years jail or RM10,000 (USD 3,000) fine, or both" for tresspassing!

Small Town Development in Maran #2

2008-02-24T22:34:00.003+08:00

More on the Mosaic layout in Maran

LAYOUT CONCEPT

COURTYARD

QUADRUPLEX

QUADRUPLEX GROUND FLOOR

QUADRUPLEX FIRST FLOOR

CORNER QUADRUPLEX

CORNER QUADRUPLEX GROUND FLOOR

CORNER QUADRUPLEX FIRST FLOOR

TOWN HOUSE 'A'

TOWN HOUSE 'A' GROUND FLOOR

TOWN HOUSE 'A' GROUND FLOOR

TOWN HOUSE 'B'

TOWN HOUSE 'B' GROUND FLOOR

TOWN HOUSE 'B' FIRST FLOOR

CORNER TOWN HOUSE 'B'

TOWN HOUSE 'B'

TOWN HOUSE 'B' GROUND FLOOR

TOWN HOUSE 'B' FIRST FLOOR

CORNER TOWN HOUSE 'A'

TOWN HOUSE 'A' GROUND FLOOR

TOWN HOUSE 'A' FIRST FLOOR

Thermal Comfort #3

2008-02-21T21:07:00.000+08:00

Most people would describe Malaysia as a hot country. But it's not that hot really!

Year round temperatures are almost always less than 32 degrees Celsius in the daytime and go down to below 28 degrees at night. That’s rather moderate when compared to summer temperatures of over 40 degrees in continental temperate climates. And bears no comparison to desert climes.

But what is true is that is that almost all houses overheat. Data logs of temperatures in typical houses show that for most of the time it is warmer inside than outside!

What Peter pointed out in the last episode when people here suffer from heat stress, they shouldn’t blame the weather. They should instead blame the defective design of their homes!

Here’s the third episode:

Movie at Screencast.com

Circular Communities

2008-02-20T10:33:00.004+08:00

I was surprised by a HUGE spike in visitors the last two days. It was thanks to the blog "Deputy Dog" , which did a fantastic post on circular communities viewed from the air. It cited my Round vs Rectangular Houses post I wrote earlier this year.

So thanks Deputy Dog!

Thermal Comfort #2

2008-02-19T00:33:00.000+08:00

When Mohd. Peter Davis first settled in Malaysia, he stayed in a traditional kampong house. But when he built his first “Thermal Comfort” home, it looked more like something from Queensland in Australia. And it worked! He calculated that over 25 years he had saved over RM280,000 (USD80,000), which was the construction cost of the house way back in the 1980's.

Still it was rather extravagant. Themain house was on the upper floor and it had verandahs all the way around which doubled the floor-plan area. This was a detached house: not an alternative to the terrace house, which is the most common housetype in the country.

So he studied the terrace houses to see what was wrong with them…

Movie at Screencast.com

Civets in the Attic

2008-02-18T00:51:00.006+08:00

Since many years now, we have occasionally sighted what looked like big cats prowling outside our home in the night. At one time we heard what sounded like a cat-fight on the roof, then suddenly a piece of the ceiling got dislodged what looked like a big cat almost fell down. It was able to hang on to the ceiling joists and scampered away.

The civet must have been about from about 2’ long (600mm) excluding the tail, and it was black like this photo from http://civet.berkeley.edu

The animals are civets! The fox-like civet, or “musang” in Malay, is quite common in rural kampongs. They are regarded as pests, preying on chickens. Over the years, as more and more rural folk moved to towns, so have the civets. Now they’ve come to Kuala Lumpur, and for a while, they made my attic their home!

Civets, like humans are omnivorous. There are not many chickens in our neighbourhood, but lots of fruit trees. There are also the squirrel-like “tupai”. Perhaps food is easier to find here compared to the jungle or kampong!

About a month ago we had another close encounter. We saw 4 or 5 pups wondering around in the front porch, then suddenly the mother climbed down a porch column and took hold of her pups and brought them away to a more secluded part of the garden.

The pups looked like this photo from http://maximuswiser.blogspot.com

A couple of weeks ago we were able to see these nocturnal animals climbing down the mango tree and walking along the fence outside my bedroom window. Bananas left outside in the evening disappeared the next day.

But we haven’t seen them since. This morning the squirrels (“tupai”) came back. Looks like for now it’s safe again for them.

My post about the proliferation of the “tupai” in the city touched on the prospect of having pocket parks with trees that bear fruits and berries in front of every house opening up the possibility of introducing some species of wildlife to the neighbourhood. I wrote: “Get the food-chain set up, perhaps artificially augmented, then more animals can happily live (in the city)”.

Is there also a place for the civet?

A small town development in Maran

2008-02-14T01:18:00.003+08:00

Maran is a small town on the old trunk road from Kuala Lumpur to Kuantan on the east coast of peninsula Malaysia. Using the new expressway, its about two and a half hours from KL, and 45 minutes from Kuantan. It’s the district administrative centre for the district which bears the same name. I was very enthusiastic about this project because it was an opportunity to plan a new neighbourhood with an urban character. This proposal is for the development of of 40 acres of land just adjacent to the existing town. The houses are right next to shops and within walking distance of offices and schools.

Movie of Small Town Development

I’ve adopted a “Mosaic” layout - this uses a tessellation pattern based on the rectangle rather than the hexagon. Tessellation planning here produces the normal quadruplex (quarter-detached) and also the “Corner Quarter-Detached House”. Some of the quadruplexes are then turned into “Garden Townhouses”.

The Mosaic tessellation

The density is quite high: nearly 20 units per acre compared to the normal 12 to 14 units per acre for normal terrace houses. This high density was achieved by introducing the “Garden Townhouse” building type.

Movie of Garden Townhouse

The single-storey terrace house had been the most common building type for developers building in rural small towns. But as the cost of building land has escalated, this type of houses have become more expensive and has left the demand for houses priced less than RM100,000 largely unmet. However, potential housebuyers here, unlike those in urban areas, are not quite ready to accept living in apartments. This is where the “garden townhouse” comes in; an apartment on the first floor sits on another one on the ground floor, but they both have their own access, car porch and little garden. I would expect them to be priced about 10% less than single storey terrace houses.

These townhouses are mixed in with quadruplex houses or, as I call them here – “Quarter-detached Houses”. In particular, have a look at the “corner quadruplex”: four units are linked together , but they are each accessed from different cu-de-sacs. Approaching one of these houses, it looks like a detached houses, because you can’t see any of its neighbours.

Movie of Corner Quadruplex

The planning and design of this new neighbourhood promotes high-density, mixes house-types, affordability categories, and commercial and residential land-use. But its not “New Urbanism” . I rather like like cul-de-sacs: they can provide a sense of privacy, community and security for people living right next to ‘downtown’. New-urbanists instintively hate them! But I think what they really hate are the long, low-density, monotonous dead-ends that are quite common in their suburbs.

Thermal Comfort Housing for the Humid Tropics #1

2008-02-10T00:33:00.000+08:00

In 1984 a molecular biologist, Peter Davis, decided to leave Australia and follow his wife back to her homeland in Malaysia. It must have been a difficult decision. Moving to a new country and culture must have entailed a big change in lifestyle, and personal sacrifices.

But there was one thing about Malaysia that made it particularly difficult: its hot and humid climate. Peter was especially intolerant of heat. So for over 20 years, Peter has made the problem thermal comfort housing into a personal crusade. I reckon that his discomfort was our gain.

Two years ago he came out with the book “Thermal Comfort Honeycomb Housing”, ( I was co- author) which outlined a cheap and energy-efficient solution to the problem.
We are now working together to produce 5 three-minute videos to tell his story. This is the first instalment.

Movie atYouTube

Living in Kuala Lumpur

2008-02-07T15:46:00.000+08:00

Living in the city, you can get easily under people’s noses...

Evening view of the Petronas Twin Towers. Eighty-eight stories high, it is one of the tallest buildings in the world

My wife and I was walking back to our car at the basement of the Petronas Twin Towers. I was absent-mindedly reading some brochures about mobile broadband when Nooreha asked,“have you got the keys?”

I said no, she said yes. As I went to the passenger side of the brown Perodua MyVi , I heard the doors click to unlock.

Perodua MyVi

“There, you see, the car keys are with you!” I opened the door, bent down to move aside a magazine from the seat, then sat down.

“Hello!… Excuse me!” said someone who had come in at the drivers seat. I looked up from the brochures and saw a Chinese lady who was definitely not my wife. Stumped, I could only blurt out: “Hey! Where’s my wife?”

Nooreha in fact was standing in front of the car, looking back at me. I made a quick exit, too embarassed to even say sorry. Her car, in fact, was two rows ahead. We were laughing out loud the next half an hour.

“Keep up your absent-minded ways and one day you’ll get a slap on your face” , my wife warned me.

About that she is right. (But it also turned out she had the keys...)

Tessellation Planning for Arab Lands #1

2008-01-30T21:49:00.000+08:00

Warning! This post needs a bit of patience!

Movie posted at Screencast.com

You might already know that I’m experimenting with flash movies – the banner for Nong Chik Heights in the last post was the first output.

Now I’ve created this movie which started as a powerpoint presentation with animation and video clips already embedded. I then added narrated to it.

Next I used “Camtasia 5” (which you can download for a free trial). I recorded the powerpoint on screen using settings suitable for a blog with the small screen and table of contents that you can see here.

The result is a nifty 15 MB file (down from 132 MB). Still, you need time to download this. With a 1 Mbs broadband connection, it took me:

to get the thumbnail - 1 minute
to download about half before I started watching the movie - 17 minutes
I then watched the movie smoothly play before it stalled after - 12 minutes
I stopped the movie until it got fully loaded after - 8 minutes
.....to watch the final - 4 minutes

This is still much too slow; better perhaps to put it all up as webpages!

I wonder...?

New Project Website

2008-01-28T22:53:00.001+08:00

Flash movies are fun to make at Toufee.com

Flash banner

Friends and regular readers must forgive me for this piece of bling - its a flash banner that I've created thanks to toufee.com. At least its cheaper than bling on buildings (often masquerading as high architecture)!

Again, if you've noticed that my posts have been less frequent... well I've been busy! Have a look-in at the Nong Chik Heights website...

I hope you enjoy the upbeat traditional Malay Music. Its "Cik Minah Jando Kayo" which translate roughly to "Miss Minah wealthy widow" from a local slang.

Nicobar Islands

2008-01-25T21:45:00.000+08:00

Among the first victims of the tsunami of the 26th December, 2004 were the aboriginies of Nicobar Islands, located less than 100 miles (150 km) north of the epicentre. The official death count was 4500 people, but other estimates are much higher.

From The Nicobar Islands: Linking Past and Future by Philipp Steger

the Nicobar Islands comprise 19 islands in the Bay of Bengal and are inhabited by tribal people of Austronesian descent. This means that they are more closely related to the Malays and Indonesians rather than Indians. The various tribes each have different names but outsiders call them Nicobarese. The people there call themselves "Holchu", which means friends.

From www.andaman.org

The typical village consist of round huts with dome roofs clustered around a community centre called “elpanam” where feasts and meetings are held. The houses are on stilts. Access is via ladders and these are brought into the houses at night.

"On the Nicobar Islands, men and women have approximate equal status. The women have a lot to do with their own choice of husbands, and after marriage they are free to live with either of the couples parents. The Nicobarese men value the women economically because they not only take care of household duties, but also tend to the plantations and gardens”.

From www.andaman.org

“Most of the people of the islands are of the Christian religion, which was taught to them by a man named John Richardson who translated the New Testament into Nicobarese. Besides Christianity, other Nicobarese follow the traditional religion of the islands, which is animistic in nature. They believe in spirits, ghosts, and the existence of the soul. A person becomes a ghost after their death when their soul leaves their body and the ghosts of all the Nicobarese are all around the islands. They believe that the spirits are responsible for all of the occurrences on the island, Shaman are called upon to handle to bad spirits”.

“The Nicobarese have a traditionally horticultural economy, they base their monetary existence on the growing of coconuts, pandanus, areca palms, bananas, mangoes, and other fruits. They also hunt, fish, raise pigs, make pottery, and make canoes”.

From www.andaman.org

References

Quotes from www.mnsu.edu
The Nicobar Islands: Linking Past and Future by Philipp Steger, Download 1MB pdf from www.ostina.org

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Wildlife in The City

2008-01-22T23:42:00.000+08:00

I live right at the edge of Kuala Lumpur, a bustling fast-growing city. Yet waking up on lazy Sunday mornings, I might look out of my bedroom and sometimes would be rewarded with a view of a squirrel or two nervously scurrying about under a mango tree just outside. One of the joys of life!

From www.ism.ac.jp

But actually they are not squirrels. An article last Sunday by Mustaffa Babjee in the New Sunday Times put me right. These animals that we call “tupai” in Malay, that have so well adapted to urban life in Kuala Lumpur, are in fact tree shrews. The “tupaia glis” “can be distinguished from the squirrel by its long pointed snout”. They are indigenous to South East Asia. The ones that come around my home look rather thin and scraggy, but I’ve seen chubby ones in a garden next to an oil palm plantation. Perhaps living in the city is not easy for them, but they seem to thrive nevertheless.

From New Sunday Times

“The shrew is a playful little creature which can be fun to watch as it crawl-hops along the top of concrete fence, freezes to stare at you with its relatively big eyes, postures on its haunches with the forelegs held high, as it munches on a fig or small grasshopper”.

With the tessellation idea of the “honeycomb” layout, houses are clustered around courtyards which have small green areas in the middle. These gardens may not be big as far as parks go, but they are big enough to accommodate even the tallest, wide-canopied trees that can be found in Malaysia.

The prospect of having pocket parks with trees that bear fruits and berries in front of every house opened up the possibility of introducing some species of wildlife to the neighbourhood. Get the food-chain set up, perhaps artificially augmented, then more animals like the “tupai” can happily live there.

Wanted – landscape architects for flora and fauna!

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Tessellation Planning for Arab Lands (Preview)

2008-01-21T00:43:00.000+08:00

I'm sorry that my posts are less frequent this year. But I haven't been idle!

This is a preview of a video that I will post soon. It is based on a preliminary proposal to a developer for a projevt in Oman.

It is still early days; the ideas are still tentative. But I'm working on the idea that dwellings and human settlements all round the world are similar in some respects and different in others. There is always a tension between the two - the universal and the particular.

There are not many things more universal than geometry, and what I'm doing is developing an alternative not only to the rectilinear grid, but also to the simulation of "organic" forms.

For a real project, a more thorough understanding of local culture, climate and practices, as well as meaningful local involvement would be required.

Reissue: Quadruple Houses in France

2008-01-16T02:14:00.000+08:00

Mulhouse was a free city until 1798 when it became part of France. It was already celebrated for the manufacture of printed cotton goods, and subsequently became a leading centre of the textile and engineering industries.

It also became a pioneer of the French concept of the "Cite Ouvriere" or "Worker’s City". This originated in 1853 when a company was formed to solve the acute lack of decent and hygienic housing. The scion of the textile industry, Jean Dollfus, gave financial backing. In particular, the company came up with a plan whereby the workers could own their own homes - a predecessor of the modern mortgage home loan.

The architect, Emile Muller, built houses based on models from other European countries, including, most interestingly, cluster houses like those in Shrewsbury and Derbyshire, England introduced by Clarles Bage. Models of these workers' houses in Mulhouse were presented during the World Fair of Paris in 1867.

By 1870 the company had built 3000 houses.

References:
Reinventer l'habitat Intermediaire(pdf)3.2 MB
Cite Manifeste
Cite Ouvriere
Thanks to Jean Piret who pointed out some broken links that I hope are now OK!

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Nong Chik Heights Project # 2

2008-01-13T23:51:00.000+08:00

The hillside Honeycomb project in Johor Bahru is moving along fast.

Watch on YouTube

This video is based on a presentation given about 6 weeks ago.

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The Toda Mund

2008-01-11T00:12:00.000+08:00

From Anthony Walker

The British representative of Coimbatore in the 1820’s, liked the cool climate of the highlands of Nilgiri Hills and bought land from the local inhabitants, often square kilometers of land for the price of a meal! In particular, he bought land from the Toda tribe for the princely sum of one rupee, and on this land was built Ootacamund, which is a popular hill station (in what is now Tamil Nadu) until today.

A Toda Village, from Anthony R. Walker

The Toda people have inhabited the highest parts of Nilgris mountains in Tamil Nadu for a very long time, co-existing with other communities in a loose caste-based relationship. They subsisted on cattle-herding and dairy farming,treating their buffaloes as sacred. The Todas numbered only 700 to 900 in the last century.

A Toda mund, 1869, Samuel Bourne, from Wikimedia

They live in settlements of 3 to 7 huts, or ‘munds’, barrelled-shaped A-frames 3m high 5.5 long 2.7m wide. Bamboo frames sticking out othe ground are lashed together with rattan and thatch with dried grass. At thefront and back are stones, usually, granite. The stones are decorated, with a tiny meter square entrnce to protect against wild animals.

Building a Toda Mund, from Wikimedia

References:

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HONEYCOMB HOUSING
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Round vs Rectangular Houses

2008-01-08T23:57:00.000+08:00

I am myself surprised that there are so many examples of round traditional houses. Round houses will continue to provide a lot of material for this blog. Yet there are few modern examples of circular houses: Buck Fuller’s Dymaxion is a case in point: it is marvel of fantastic ideas, all in one house, but one of its failures is that it just half-tackles the issue fitting in more rooms; and then, it doesn’t try to answer at all how these houses assemble together to form neighbourhoods, towns and cities.

Twin Dymaxion

This is the great advantage of rectangular houses and rectilinear grids: rectangular houses are easily partitioned into smaller rectangular rooms; the house can grow by attaching new rectangular rooms to the existing structures; two rectangular houses can be built next to each other in a regular arrangement. This is the theory as to why the pre-agricultural Natufian civilization, which probably built the world's first houses, moved from circular to rectangular houses.

Urbanization, having high numbers of people living next to each other, meant individuals had to accept greater limits to their freedoms.

When an authoritarian power could decide that a town would have a regular layout, the orderly form of the rectilinear grid proved itself not only amenable to central planning , it was also convenient to the individual householders. This was something they could live with.

In the Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley, the cities were not all laid out in a perfect orthogonal layout. They were not all centrally planned; they have been described as semi-grids. Semi-grids perhaps evolved as a matter of a convenience, where a series of rectangular houses are added on, one by one, along a path. Perhaps Mohenjo Daro’s grid was not imposed by a dictator!

Mohenjo Daro

There have been rulers who imagined and then built for themselves round cities. The structure at the centre of the circle is given prominence. But the houses themselves are not round. In the Round City of Baghdad they were rows of buildings that form a circumference of the circle. Such buildings are inflexible - not easy to plan and build. In Circleville in Ohio, US, the citizens found the shape a nuisance and increasingly ignored it as the town grew.

Round City of Baghdad

In Denmark near Copenhagen is an interesting example of a circular neighbourhood. No round houses here, and furthermore, the neighbourhoods don’t relate to each other in a circular geometry. Not much of an improvement from the Yanomamo.

Brondby, Copenhagen

The Round Yanomamo Communal House

Round houses in a round neighbourhood in a round city in a round planet. This fanciful idea does not work!

But happily, being impractical does not make them less interesting...

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Old Wooden Shophouses in Sungei Petani

2008-01-06T02:33:00.000+08:00

Semeling

What did the first shop houses look like? Travelling to the Sungei Bujang Archaelogical Museum, located in the rural countryside, I took some pictures of simple shop houses in two small towns – Semeling, then Tanjong Dawai on the coast.

Tanjung Dawai

The early shop houses were probably single storey shop houses with large overhanging roofs over a walkway. They would have had attap roofs, but were later superceded by zinc.

Tanjung Dawai

There are also examples of two storey shop timber houses. These were a fire risk and have been discouraged by by-laws since the 19th Century. But you can still find them in out of the way small towns.

Tanjung Dawai

There is also an example of small-town Chinese fishermen terrace houses.

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The First Houses

2008-01-02T23:53:00.000+08:00

These can be found among the pre-agricultural villages of the Near East.

Natufian Sites of the Near East

These houses were part of the first villages, initially only ‘base camps’ for nomads who were making the transition to a more sedentary life. The Natufian culture ( named after a site at Wadi-al Natuf in Israel) started 15,500 to 12,500 BC in an area in Jordan, then extended to cover the Levant, from Euphrates to Sinai between 12,500 to 10,000 BC.

These were the earliest evidence of sedentary communities: pre-agicultural hunters, gatherers and “harvesters of cereals”.

Round Houses in Ain Mallaha

The houses grouped together in clusters of about six , in villages covering about 2,000 square meters. They were partially built into the ground with sides supported by stone walls. The homes had one or two hearths and leave traces of concentric circle of posts, and signs of substantial construction.

Reconstruction of a Semi - Round House in Ain Mallaha

Fine examples of Natufian houses were uncovered in, among others, Ain Mallaha. Every base camp suggests the rebuilding of houses, indicating temporary abandonment of the settlement. Domestic structures were about 3 to 6 m in diameter, with either rounded or squarish fireplaces. A rare case is the semicircular housein Ain Mallaha which is 9 m in diameter, where a series of post holes was preserved.

This was followed by the Khimian Phase around 9,500BC, named after the Khiam site west of the northern end of the Dead Sea. Here the round houses came out of the ground and clay appears to have started to be used as building material.

The next step in the evolution of houses occurred in Mureybetian culture that came about 9500BC, named after the site at Tel Mureybet near the Euphrates in Syria. Here the first rectangular constructions known in the Near East, or in the world first appear (though some houses have rounded corners).

Houses and stores were built out of chalk blocks chipped into cigar shapes and bonded with mortar. The houses are more sophisticated with special raised sleeping spaces, seperate hearths and storage areas. They had flat mud roofs supported by joists.
Between the houses were communal open spaces with several large fire-pits – pebbles stored the heat from the fire lit on its surface but retained the heat and stored it over a longer period. This was where communal cooking done.

The great innovation of the Natufian, Khimian and Mureybetian cultures was sedentary life sustained by the old hunter-gatherer practices, as well as the harvesting of wild cereals. Nomads and hunter-gatherers control their population by weaning the number of children by not weaning them for two years to limit the size of the group which is continually o the move; sedentism allowed the intervals between births to be reduced. The people then went on to unselfconciously ‘selected’ wild cereals which they deemed more suitable.

From Circular to Rectangular Homes

The evolution of the circular houses into rectangular ones with rectangular rooms appear to be a response to to the consequences of sedentary life and farming. There was now more need for storage space , for larger families. There was also greater need to defend their villages now they had more material possessions to protect. Rectangular houses allowed more people to be gathered into small spaces: box-shaped rooms and houses fit together more efficiently, allow more interior rooms, and makes use of more shared walls.

References

Peter Watson, “Ideas: a History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud”, 2005

Images

Ofer Bar-Yosef, “The Natufian Culture in the Levant, Threshold to the Origins of Agriculture”, www.columbia.edu/itc/anthropology/v1007/baryo.pdf

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The Round Tents of Central Asia

2007-12-30T02:03:00.000+08:00

From www.manas.afnews

From the Caspian Sea to Mongolia, Turkomen, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, and Mongolians live in tent dwellings – with single-room circular plan, lattice frame of willow wands that expand to form the wall but which retract to a compact shape, and light poles arc to form the roof structure joining a ring at the crown. Once the structure is up, the structure is covered with woollen felt mats.

From Paul Oliver

The Kyrgyz yurta has the entrance facing south. Inside, one is supposed to move in a clockwise direction . The interior is divided into four sections: one enters at the entrance in the southern quadrant; move left though the male domain with saddles, weapons and hunting gear; then through the north quadrant, where the altar sits facing the entrance and where important guests are received. The quadrant comes next is where women and children sleep.

From Paul Oliver

At the centre, directly below the ring crown/smoke hole, is the hearth.

The spatial organization in the yurta is not only functional but has assumed the trappings of a tradition. Nowadays, most Kyrgyz live in apartments, but they still put up the yurta to celebrate the birthdays of their sons or parents , and invite guests to the dastarkhan, or table for feasting. The Yurta is also the place where the Kyrgyzes gather for the funeral of their relatives.

Building the Yurta

Reference and images from:

Paul Oliver, “Dwellings”, 2003

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Reissue: What Makes a City?

2007-12-28T13:21:00.000+08:00

Images of various historical monuments, signature buildings, great urban spaces or other famous sights are often associated with the idea of a city. But they merely describe the form of the city, not its substance.

Cities are not just the buildings. Remarkably, a city can still survive when its buildings have been gutted. Hiroshima lived though the Bomb. Throughout history, cities have been devastated by natural or human disasters, but they often get rebuilt, when its people chose to do so.

There are places though, complete with buildings and roads, but which are devoid of people. But these are not cities; deserted by their erstwhile inhabitants, they are just ghost-towns.

The most vibrant towns are sometimes over-crowded, squalid and ugly, but despite these disadvantages, they continue to be magnets - drawing people to them.

At about 600 BC, Alcaeus wrote of the cities of Greece:

"Not houses finely roofed nor the stones of walls well built nor canals nor dockyards make the city, but men able to use their opportunity."

Previous Posts:

Hiroshima 6th August, 1945

Rising from the Ashes

Ghost Towns

Slums of Hope

Coming:

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The Early Malays

2007-12-28T01:37:00.000+08:00

The Malays that colonized what is now the Malaysian peninsula at about 1000BC were a sea-faring people. They are a branch of the Austronesian peoples that can be traced back to Southern China who migrated downstream the Chang Jiang (the Yangtze River), and learning how to build their dug-out canoes along the way. They developed sea-faring techniques to move to Taiwan, Phillipines , Borneo and then to Malaysia and elsewhere.

Austronesian migrations

Before the iron age, cutting down the thick jungle would have been an immensely hard task; the humid forest was also very difficult to burn. So they would have worked together in multi-family groups, and travelling up from the river estruaries, would have kept close to the river banks. The jungle and the river provided enough for their sustenance; ‘slash- and-burn’ shifting agriculture had to wait for the ‘parang’ or machete. The technology came from either Central Thailand or North Vietnam, probably by way of Austronesian cousins who settled in South Thailand since 1500BC.

Evolution of the axe and adze

Rice planting came with the introduction of more sophisticated metallic implements from the North, starting from about 300BC in Indonesia.

But the pre-eminent occupation for the early Malays was trade. And the Malay peninsula was located in a strategic position between China and the Spice Islands to the east and India, the Arab lands and Europe to the East. Regular trade contact with India started in the 1st millennium BC; Chinese records of South East Asian ports start from the 1st century AD. The naval Spice Route at that time competed successfully with the Silk Road.

But the source of the earliest Malay civilization did not spring from the peninsula but rather from across the Straits, from the island of Sumatra around the start of the 1st century AD. Palembang and Jambi were two settlements that came together and became the basis of Srivijaya. This was for most of the time a loose confederation of ‘kedatuans’, political entities based in the port-towns, that in addition to Palembang and Jambi in Sumatra, included outposts in Kedah and Langkasuka in the Malay peninsula, Kedu and Borodubor in Java, and Inderapura in present-day Cambodia.

Maximum extent of Srivijayan influence

Srivijaya was a maritime civilization, and its ports received traders from China, India and other parts of the world. The Indian connection was especially strong: Hindu and Buddist beliefs played a major role in the early Malay world. The oldest evidence of the Malay language comes to us in stone inscriptions written using an ancient Indian script. It is a mishmash of Sanskrit and quaint, but recognizable Malay.

Carving of Srivijayan vessel at Borodubor

References and Source of Images

Paul Michel Munoz, "Early Kingdoms of the Indonesian Archipelago and the Malay Peninsula”, 2006

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Reissue: A Short History of the Quadruple House

2007-12-27T13:55:00.000+08:00

Wright's Quadruple concept

The ‘cluster' or quadruple house was conceived as a solution to the housing problems for workers. In Shrewsbury in England, the Cite Ouvriere in Mulhouse in France, and in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, they came as better alternatives to the terrace house and back to back tenements.

In all these instances, the introduction of the quadruple houses can be linked to a wider movement for progressive change: in Shrewsbury, Charles Bage the inventor of the cluster house is more famous for being the designer of the first iron frame building for his textile mill; in Mulhouse, the socially conscious textile mill owners financed a company that introduced the first ‘monthly payment' arrangement that enabled workers to own their own houses - an important precursor to the modern house mortgage loan.

The quadruple house was perhaps the most economical version of the Usonian houses that Frank Lloyd Wright designed during the Great Depression. Later, during the War years, he could have built more than just the two blocks in Pennsylvania, if his plans for Massachusetts were not blocked by parochial sentiments of architects in that state.

But strangely, the quadruple house type remains largely an unusual type of building. Whilst one can easily find various versions of terrace houses or semi-detached houses all round the world, but that is not the case for the quadruple house. Outside of Malaysia and the pioneering examples here, I don't know of any housing scheme that has used this building type. If anyone reading this should know of one in their country, I'd be grateful if you'd email me with information.

In Malaysia, the early cluster houses tended to be low-cost housing for low-income workers, but recently, developers have introduced them as medium-high cost houses that are priced higher than terrace houses but cheaper than semi-detach houses. Below is a typical example in the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, the capital city.

A more prosaic example of the Quadruple House

PREVIOUS POSTS:

Bage: Inventor of the Quadruple House

Frank Lloyd Wright's Quadruple House

Early Quadruple Houses in Malaysia

Source: www.malton.com.my

First Posted on 2nd. September, 2007

If you are interested in the continuing evolution of the Quadruple House, you might want to look at Tessellar > Introduction

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Technorati Tags:Affordable Housing, House Type Tessellation Planning,Town Planning

The Kadazan-Dusun Long House

2007-12-26T00:36:00.000+08:00

The long-houses that represent the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak in Mini-Malaysia in Melaka, stand out from the houses of Peninsula Malaysia. The long-houses represent an earlier version of life in a ‘kampong’ or village. The long-houses are multi-family houses that could make up a whole village unit.

The Kadazan - Dusun peoples that colonized what is now Sabah came before the iron age; cutting down the thick jungle would have been an immensely hard task; the humid forest was also very difficult to burn. So it is not surprising that they lived and worked together in multi-family groups. The jungle and the river provided enough for their sustenance; ‘slash- and-burn’ shifting agriculture had to wait for the ‘parang’ or machete. Sedentary agriculture came even later.

Bamboo for the walls and floors and rough hewn timber for the post and beam structure

Kadazans and Dusuns speak the same language but with differences in dialect. However, Kadazans are mainly found in lowlands farming paddy, while Dusuns are mainly based on the hilly jungles of the interior.

Atap roof, or Nipah palm leaf thatching

But not all Kadazans live long-houses. I think that this suggests that as technology advanced, it became less of a necessity to live in multi-family houses.

Did the early Malays of the Malay peninsula live in long-house too? Very likely, I think.

References:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

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Reissue: Sheds versus Monuments

2007-12-25T00:16:00.000+08:00

Six months and 125 posts ago, I wrote this:

"A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture"

Nikolaus Pevsner

This was the first sentence I found in the "Outline of European Architecture", top of the reading list in my first year doing architecture in University thirty years ago.

This blog is more about the bicycle sheds of this world rather than cathedrals. I am interested in low-cost affordable housing solutions – aesthetics is important, but not really the most important. My belief is that if we work hard to solve the social, environmental and economic problems of housing, the result will not necessarily be ugly.

There is architecture that is created by architects; but also architecture created by non-architects. By ordinary people, all round the world. This is Vernacular architecture, and it is a fascinating study. Buildings built by people for themselves using the materials available to them in the best methods that they knew how, making it suitable their way of life, their needs, culture and climate. They used their limited resources in ingenious ways, achieving functional and beautiful forms. A by-product of this process of folk building through the ages is indeed a distinctive identity that communicates not only a sense of time and of place, but also a sense of beauty - timeless and ethereal.

But I am not an advocate of the “vernacular” style. Copying the look and visual details of houses from the past doesn't necessarily create beautiful homes, let alone solve the other problems of housing today. The lesson that I draw from vernacular architecture is that there is a role for architects that is outside the realm of “iconic” buildings and “signature” landmarks. Outside of working for the few who want to express their wealth and power, there is a place for architects who wish to build for the majority of people. Constrained as they are to limited resources, architects must use available materials and techniques in the best way that we can to create buildings that are functional and relevant to humble but urgent needs.

My conviction is that if we do it in an honest way, expending our best efforts, the architecture that we produce, will over time be recognized as having its own unique identity, rooted in its age and place, communicating its own sense of beauty, at least as meaningful as the palaces and monuments.

Reference

Nikolaus Pevsner, "An outline of European Architecture", Pelican, 1943

First posted 23rd June this year.

Happy Holidays this Christmas and New Year!

The Bujang Valley Archeological Museum

2007-12-22T23:19:00.002+08:00

Another trip I made with my children was to a fast-growing town in the northern State of Kedah. Sungei Petani on first acquantance looks like a sprawling, prosperous but uninteresting town that has been benefitting from the spill-over of economic development in neighbouring Penang, about 30km south. The project that I am involved with as architect seeks to benefit from that growth.

But in fact the town is more than just a would-be suburb of Penang. It is located near the Muda river estuary at the foot of Mount Jerai, which dominates the flat plain that surrounds it. Archeological finds in the Muda river and its tributaries has confirmed the area around Sungei Petani as the site of an ancient Malay port called Kadaram by the Indians and referred to as Ke-da by Chinese Annals.

When I was in school 40 years ago, we learned that the early Malays walked down from an area around South China (the area around present day Kunming) following from the proto-Malays. The first and greatest Malay civilization was in Melaka dating from the 14th Century BC. There has been considerable revision since then.

Kedah preceded Melaka by as much as 14 centuries. Several of the archeological finds have been collected, reconstructed and displayed at the Lembah Bujang Archeological Museum on the foothills of Mount Jerai.

At the entrance of the indoor gallery are what look like dugout canoes, but are believed to have used sails as well. This is the core technology that brought the ancestors of the the Malays from South China to Malaysia by way of the Chang Jiang (the Yangtze River), Taiwan, Phillipines and Borneo. However, the dating of some of these timber boats from the first millenium AD (found on the museum notes) seems a bit incredulous to me!

That is the problem with archaeology in the hot and humid equatorial climate of South East Asia. Timber was the most convenient material for construction, but wood cannot withstand the effects of rot and insect attack. I’ve been told, though, that being submerged in water and in some way deprived of oxygen can preserve some hard-woods.

In the indoor gallery are plenty of beads of stones and glass, and ceramic pots that attest to Kedah as a trading port. There are also bits of shrines - some Hindu, some Bhuddist – stone statues, inscriptions in Indian script, granite column base, column sections, clay roof tiles and stone footings for long disintegrated timber posts.

There is an external gallery where the base of some of the ancient shrines have been reconstructed. Some of these were made with granite and local stone, blending in with the stone boulders and outcrops of Mount Jerai. But others used laterite blocks, a softer and courser material.

One shrine used clay bricks with detailed corbels and recesses. These were believed to have been imported.

Only the base have been rebuilt, not the columns and the roof. But the stone footings for the timber columns have been put in place and you can just about imagine how these shrines could have looked like.

Right next to the museum grounds is a stream that rushes down a stretch of bare stone outcrop. This was where we rested our tired feet. If we had time and energy we could have continued up a trek to the peak of Mount Jerai , but that had to wait until my girls grow up a bit more.

For hotels and other things to do in Kedah, refer to Kedah Hotels

References

George Coedes, "Sriwijaya: History, religion & language of an early Malay polity : collected studies", Monograph of the Malaysian Branch, Royal Asiatic Society.

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Technorati Tags:Malaysian Architect,Malaysian History, Early Malay Civilisation,Lembah Bujang

Kandovan Cave Homes

2007-12-21T23:47:00.000+08:00

From Eliza Tasbihi

In the north east of Iran on the border with Azerbaijan is a mountainous province, called…. Azarbayjan. At the foot of Mount Sahand in Kandovan, the villagers live in cave homes carved out from the volcanic rock.

From Eliza Tasbihi

The houses are of two to four storeys; the ground floor is used for animals, the first and maybe second floor as well, are used as living areas, whilst the top floor is used to store things. Most houses face south so residents enjoy sunlight during the day. The houses have windows with decorative glass. It is said that the houses have an “air circulation system that keeps the homes cool in summer and warm in winter”, but I suspect it is the great thermal capacity of the whole mountain rock that is doing the work. Nowadays the houses have electrical connection, water piped in and even waste plumbing.

From Eliza Tasbihi

The Sahand is well known for its spring-water which is believed to be able to cure diseases. A river runs through the valley in the village, providing water for the agricultural terraces and animal husbandry.

The present inhabitants of Kandovan record its history back to the Mongol invasion of Persia in the 13th century when a group of settlers escaped to the village. But the cave village could have existed even before that time. It could be likely...

“given the complex agricultural terracing which covers the steep-sided valleys around the Mount Sahand. Assyrian war annals of the 8th century BC mention towns in the vicinity of Mount Uash (the Assyrian name for Sahand volcano) and these population centres would have required considerable agricultural produce which must have been eked out of the volcanic soil clinging to the slopes of Sahand.”

David Rohl

Back to the present era, People in Kandovan now “mostly live on their income from selling dairy products, meat, wool, honey, handcrafts and dried vegetables”. About 300,000 people visit the village each year.

A relatively recent addition to the village is a 5-star Cliff Hotel dug out from the rock.

From www.skyscrapercity.com

The name Kandovan comes from the old term "Kandou jan". "Kand" means village and "Jan" means existence. As in other places of outstanding beauty and unique features, the way os sustaining a “village existence” looks set to change.

Thanks to Omid, blogging in Persian at www.youngengineer.blogfa.com for telling me about this wonderful village.

Watch a slideshow of Eliza Tasbihi’s photos at Flikr. Highly Recommended!

Watch a video at National Geographic

References:

Tamara Ebrahimpour, Press TV, Tehran
David Rohl, “The Road to Paradise”

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References

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