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Images from Penang,Georgetown and
DEMPenang Projects
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As part of a international group of practitioners, it is very easy to lose sight of the local situation. Being global but thinking locally is the principle catch cry of many causes, but can cause difficulties in a context with histories, traditions, climate, specific urban patterns and local regulations which differ from ones own previous experiences and education. An architectural practitioner in a global context procuring buildings for local users needs to balance universal principles with an open mind, suppressed arrogance and attuning sensibilities to what is happening on the ground around them. Ideally this will result in the transference of ideas, the evolution of hybrid solutions and even a fresh perspective as to the valuable assets of a local situation from the perspective of an outsider. The understanding of this process by DEM Penang has in part, led to the evolution of specific architectural strategies that are reinterpreted and refined through each new project. When observing and participating in Penang's daily life, one becomes acutely aware of the vitality and the spontaneity of life occurring in the streets and the pressures that the nature of new development is placing on the public realm. The immediacy of life in the street is by virtue of the acceptance that the street is able to be appropriated by a wider variety of users other than motor vehicles and that the archetypal Chinese shophouse allows for any number of uses due to the generic nature of its configuration. These traditional patterns of generic space and street based activity are being usurped by new forms of generic space, the shopping centre and the stacked office and residential tower. However the desire to control the random associations generated by the shophouse pattern and its use of the street has resulted in turning the public space inwards and designing the street as a connector between centres, gearing the street towards motor vehicle usage. Reconciling the traditional patterns with the natural desire to modernise hence becomes a primary issue lest the valuable assets of a vital street life and public realm are lost from Penang and what makes it unique in the world. As a background to the ambition to reconcile the traditional with the modern, it must be accepted that the two must co-exist. Authenticity that underlies Penang's diversity can be quite easily sanitised or themed in a manner similar to Singapore and thus vitality becomes performance. It must be accepted in addition that the problem is greater than an architect's influence. The will to ensure the existence and evolution of traditional urban patterns must also come from bureaucrats, planners, politicians and business people alike so that the regulations, tenure and economic processes underpinning the patterns are not simply erased. The means of procuring buildings is also changing. The scale of buildings are increasing in order to maximise returns on higher land costs and as a result the archetypal building now requires larger footprints and a greater perimeter of operable facade for light and ventilation. The result is an interpretation of the archetypal modern building that sits as an object in the city, contrasting the dense pattern of low rise shophouses addressing the street. Conceptually, we could draw a comparison and imagine a street of shop-houses as being a high rise building laid on its side; a horizontal skyscraper. Where as similarities between these generic space archetypes can be drawn, the fundamental differences lies in their impact to the public realm and the life of the street. What the generic high rise building offers is internalised and partitioned, where as the generic shophouse projects its life to the public realm of the street. Once the engagement with the street is lost, both the physical enclosure to the street and the use of the street as a interstitial zone of activity also declines. How then, can architects proceed? Colin Rowe in his book Collage City, believes that architects must accept the larger object building as quite simply the typology that is now entrenched in our cities and modes of building procurement. What Rowe suggests is that careful manipulation of the edges and massing of buildings so that they relate to neighbouring buildings in a manner that precludes the design of urban space and not objects distributed in space. Extending Rowe's simple observation, what is needed then, is to ensure that larger scale buildings stitch into the context around them. Issues of the edge of buildings then need to reflect what role that any particular edge must play in context. For example, when an edge relates to a street or to a park, or when it faces West or South, it will impact the nature of that edge. In addition, stitching into the patterns of circulation, both pedestrian and vehicle, as well as responding to proximity's of scale can begin form generation in building even before the configuration of optimal generic plan layouts or site cover formulas are applied. Extensions of this idea lay in the primacy of what is left over space. Modernist dictums held over for decades have taught us that form follows function, and that as a result the form has evolved from within. Hence the resulting space around the building is what is left over from the programme. The primacy of the form based on stitching into urban patterns, mediating scale and the formation of new positive urban space, means that the form is a function of its situation and not its programme. By taking this approach, when stitching into situations in the traditional city, deference to the patterns surrounding it are key use and form generators. The same approach though leads to new positive urban patterns when the situation starts from a state of tabula rasa - that is where no patterns other than natural systems - trees, topography and landscape, precede the building. In these scenarios, typical of the new development on the fringes of Penang's traditional city, means that positive urban space is valued as a precursor to design and not simply the erection of unrelated commodified objects. |
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Examples of this approach applied to the new fringe development
and the traditional city are illustrated best by two of DEM's propositions.
The first of these is a proposition for a mixed use residential and office
development to the south of Penang's
urban centre. The second is a speculative proposition which was submitted for an international ideas competition organised by the UIA (International Union of Architects) which took on the relationship between a shopping centre and a traditional row of shophouses. The first proposition at the Bukit Jambul Indah township, involved the provision of commercial and various residential options. As it was part of a larger development, we could manipulate the forms of other buildings in the precinct, although the scale and plot shapes were previously determined. It was determined that the role of this building would be to terminate and reinforce what was emerging as a rim of buildings around a lake. The wrapping form attempted to end the sequence and allow other buildings around to gain views over the building mass to the hills behind. In part then, the form predetermined the functional layout of the building. The resulting mixture of uses was handled by placing the uses side by side instead of stacking them one on top of the other. Separation was achieved by the wrapping building that formed a captured garden that had views to and from the street. This attempted to gain some continuity of the public space to the heart of the building. What evolved therefore, was a special outdoor space fronted by different users, which almost by default, imparted a sense of urbanity in this fringe community, by virtue of the joining of different user groups sharing the one space. What succeeded therefore was the formation of positive urban space, as well as a sense of the urbane in an internalised fringe community. Our second proposition, a speculative competition entry, focused on reconciling an internalised large shopping complex, KOMTAR, with a traditional row of shophouses which shared a wide busy street. The basic design parti involved re-organising the street to facilitate the shared use by cars and people with the ability to also schedule use of the street by way of movable partitions in the street that could allow on occasions more pedestrian use without necessarily totally restricting traffic flow. In combination with flow controls, we introduced other items of infrastructure that added new layers to the edges of the street. Firstly we brought out another frame out from the edge of the shop houses to imply and facilitate appropriation of the street by the shophouses on occasions. Secondly we reconfigured the edge of the shopping centre in order to bring the inside to the street. We felt that a major difference between the traditional shophouse street and the internalised mall was the control of the entry points. With a typical street you have a row of addresses and activity, with an internalised complex you have one. Our reinvention of the edge of the shopping centre involved the making of a diaphanous edge that facilitated multiple addresses and created an interstitial shaded public zone that moderated the scale of the complex in relation to the shophouses on the other side of the street. The final layer of intervention was to facilitate the 'contemporisation' of the street vendor, by providing plug in points in the street that could provide services such as power, communications, water and sewerage, to ensure that this layer of street life could remain and evolve. As a holistic exercise therefore, the task of procuring buildings sensitive to their current situation and established patterns becomes a difficult exercise. However all attempts must be made to ensure that the vitality, and in a global sense, the uniqueness, of Penang's street life are not dissolved. Being an outsider looking in, the vitality and the richness of the public space of the street and how it enhances peoples experiences cannot be under valued. Hence as a working programme, the concept of stitching, working between scales simultaneously, managing vehicle dominance and using the form and edges of buildings, forms the foundation from which design can evolve.
Michael Dickson
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