Another new article on DATUM: KL2006

There's something wrong with our blog site and we're having difficulty posting images... But here's another article finished this week, on something I attended in KL 2 weeks ago. This will be published in a magazine next month.

"This year, the theme of PAM’s (Malaysian Institute of Architects) 4th international architecture convention, DATUM: KL 2006, is “About Making.” Held in the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre over 2 days from 7-8 July, it is set to become one of the biggest architectural conventions in the region, attended by more than 700 participants who are mostly architects but which includes developers, academicians and students. Most came for the talks, where each of the invited speakers was given over an hour of lectern time, but there were also concurrent events taking place in the same venue. This includes the KLi.d. Forum 06, with 4 speakers tackling the theme of “Making Design”, and 2 building product exhibitions; DEX06 and ARCHITEX06; spread over the entire ground floor, with a section which showcases recent works by Singapore’s “20 Under 45” architects.

On the face of it, the theme of the convention seems to imply an emphasis on the craft and techniques of construction, but its tagline posits something more general: “Architecture is not only about making tangible things such as drawings and buildings. It is also about making intangible things; making dreams come true, making innovations; making homes and places.” Expressed this way, it is a theme wide-ranging enough to allow its 10 key speakers of both new and established architects a free rein to address a diverse range of issues, with the happy result that their projects and their peculiar context could be discussed in depth. The works are truly global in range, from interiors in New York and London to hotels in Dubai, Bhutan and Kyoto, apartments in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Dhaka, and cultural complexes in Shenzhen and Seoul, and they dealt with the current hot topics of the landscape, sustainability, growth, context, tectonics and art. What is to be lauded is that the focus is very much on design, particularly of the kind by the young vanguards, with the underlying message by PAM’s president, Dr Tan Loke Mun, that good design sells. “Design creates added value,” he said, “and gives an edge to a product or an environment.”

The selection of international speakers reflects this “edge”, with 3 of them the recipients of last year’s Design Vanguard awards chosen by Architectural Record, and 1 of them the prizewinner of last year’s Architectural Review “Emerging Architects” award. (One of the younger speakers, Daniel Rosbottom from the UK, quipped that all the projects he has ever completed could be made to fit inside the auditorium we were seated in.) The ‘senior statesman’ of the group, and its most poetic proponent of making architecture, is Singapore-based Kerry Hill, who anchored the last talk of the conference. With its mixture of youthful vigour and mature excellence, the speakers collectively dole out a sumptuous feast of architecture in all its manifestations.

Kerry Hill was easily the most eloquent of the speakers, as he took his time to reflect on over 25 years of consummate practice. He sees himself as toeing the fine balance between the extremes of regionalism and universalism. Tipping in favour of either could result in a skin-deep parochialism or lost amidst the rootless forces of globalizations. Perhaps conscious of how easily his forte of hotel design can be undervalued as thematic attractions, he took pains to articulate some defining values he works towards for all his designs. “There are 2 qualities I have come to admire in architecture. One is exactitude and the other is authenticity,” he said. An exacting design is one imbued with precision, when no more could be added, and no less taken. And authenticity is linked with the question of “origins”, sought out almost intuitively, and something we “feel comfortable” in. “The uniqueness of a place must be allowed to surface- for architecture involves the actuality of things and speaks to the senses- it cannot rely on image alone.” He offers his work as being contemporary and “current”, but “sieved through tradition.” It is a diverse body of work where the rectilinear plan is the unifying signature, based on the most severe vocabulary of modernism. The test bed appears to have been his houses, of which only 10 have been completed over a 25-year period. In these domestic designs, ideas about materials, textures, the water bodies and the integration of building with nature are fine-tuned in a concentrated way. In glimpses of his works, delegates will perhaps be reminded of what had drawn them to practice and love architecture in the first place; an uncompromising vision in the service of beauty and place.

The sense of place was also the defining theme with Bangladeshi architect Md Rafiq Azam, although it is one filtered with painterly eyes. “Even today, I consider myself a PAINTER by conviction and an ARCHITECT by chance,” he said. “In fact, when we think about landscape, water, climate, culture, and history and human - no matter how we express, it is all about art, if you can look at it that way. It’s all about feelings, the harvest field, water flowing over the breeze, blooming flowers in spring, meadows with downing sun and ruins of memories.” He was particularly inspiring when he set the scene for a project he offered to do in the slums of Dhaka for no fees from the developer on the condition that his design was not to be changed. In a very tight parcel of land, the resulting “Kazedewan Apartment Building” addressed and resolved problems of social spaces at the street level, healthy air flow with elevated planters and water courts, privacy for women-folk in a highly populated area, and even a place to celebrate the rain. Construction materials and technology were also designed to suit the local work culture. It was a demonstration of community architecture and social activism at its best.

Should an award be given for mastery use of limited spaces, it must go to Gary Chang from Hong Kong. It is again a mastery that is the direct result of the context; the suffocating congestion that is Hong Kong. Gary candidly shared about the 4x8m apartment he has lived in all his life, first with his parents and 3 siblings, and then wholly his when they moved out in his 30s. Sleeping in the living room only after everyone else has retired, his childhood obsession was to own a room to call his own. When the apartment was finally all his, he meticulously reorganized every component around it, redefining the basic division of where a space begins and ends according to the frequency of usage, time of day, lighting and movable objects. He became an expert in layering and storing things to the point of their non-existence. These ideas were brought to the fullest realization in the experimental “Suitcase House” built at the Commune by the Great Wall, where every tangible and utilitarian object are stored beneath openable floor panels and completely out-of-sight until they are needed. Beds, bath tub, kitchen counters, and all furniture are sunken beneath unmarked floor boards that close to leave the entire house practically empty for most of the time. The ingenious project is now a part of the permanent collection of the Pompidou Centre.

Unlike Hong Kong, Tokyo has a different kind of chaos that is not entirely the result of density. It was a kind of urban cacophony that Taira Nishizawa used as a frame of reference for his urban projects, allowing a measured degree of messiness while unifying the disparate elements under a larger matrix of grid. It is an approach best typified by the random placement of windows and balconies inserted onto the plain façades of the Chofu Housing projects he completed in Tokyo. The grid was also the principle means of ordering a stunning multi-purpose complex he designed for the Tomochi Forestry Hall. Viewed from the top, it is appears to be a conventional space-framed hall with regular spans. Viewed spatially in its entirety however, and the structure becomes altogether more complex and expressionistic. It is also entirely original, a hybrid structure of light-gauge steel combined with the local cedar and designed to showcase the agile character of the latter. Again, the sense of an ordered kind of disorder underlies its creation.

Perhaps the most prolific of the younger architects is China’s Liu Xiaodu and it is symptomatic of his country’s pace of change that a firm set up a mere 7 years ago could list completed office towers, public parks, large residential developments, art museums and schools in its portfolio. Unlike the self-contained “object” buildings of Nishazawa, the works of Liu’s Urbanus Architecture & Design are often massive interventions in the urban fabric. They have to grapple with the phenomenal growth of Shenzhen, where their office is based, which grew from a fishing town of 50,000 residents a mere 30 years ago, to its population of over 5 million in the central region today. The accompanying problems of rampant redevelopment and break-neck construction, particularly in Shenzhen’s squatter colonies of 10x10m housing blocks, has prompted Liu to self-commission his office to propose rejuvenating masterplans to the government. Even as some of these plans appear fanciful, they are in an enviable position of re-examining and applying the utopian theories of Modernism onto a far-too-real and needy setting. The danger, as cautioned by George Kunihiro, the conference’s moderator from Japan, is one of preserving the quality of output in the midst of a boom-time economy.

Other speakers at the conference were Junsung Kim from Korea, Anthony Piermarinri and Hansy Better Barraza from USA, and Chris Wong and Lim Teng Ngiom from Malaysia. They variously dealt with the theme of “making”, with personal visions that remain on familiar terrain, rather than radical breakthroughs that quake the profession. This is, perhaps, as it should be. So the deepest impression one gleans from the harvest of topics is not any singular agenda but a pleasant plurality of voices, some young and hungry, others pensive and polemical, all enlarging the discourse of making architecture in very specific conditions, while yet retaining the tone and tenor of the larger, well-worn language of Modernism. "

Chup