Pacific Age vision

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 1994 by Catherine Slessor

Although not purporting to be geographically comprehensive (confined as it is t Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore), this survey of current architecture in Southeast Asia attempts to encompass some of the region's key influences -- notably tradition, culture and climate -- and their effect on built form. But one aspect is clear: the architecture presently emerging from this rapidly developing region cannot be easily classified. Like the culture that produced it, it is a fusion of imported and local elements, informed by a growing concer for ecological principles and an increased awareness of Pacific-wide construction traditions such as timber-framed buildings. The Datai development by Kerry Hill (p36) is just one example. This new resort complex on an luxuriantly forested island owes a clear debt to the kampong, the traditional clustered village form, and tropical building techniques that encourage natural ventilation and harmonise with the existing landscape. Hill's sensitive use of local materials and responsive placemaking limits the potential intrusion of a large tourist complex into a fragile ecosystem. Jimmy Lim's hotel at Pahang (p46) is a scheme on similarly enlightened lines. In this case Lim applies his considerable skills acquired through designing family dwellings (p50) to a larger commercial building type with equally impressive results.

As elsewhere, the private house embodies some of the region's more expressive architectural experiments. In a Singapore suburb, Tan Kay Ngee (p54) provocatively combines Eastern and Western influences to fashionably daring effect -- perhaps the least locally responsive of the projects shown in the issue, but architecturally assured, none the less. At the other end of the scale, Ruslan Khalid's imaginative yet modest transformation of a basic suburba house (p60) uses traditional devices to control and modify the climate. Between these two extremes lies Bedmar & Shi's sumptuous new villa (p57) which draws freely on traditional precedents, but allies them to a generous perception of Modernist spatial values.

The vibrancy of Singapore's multicultural society is reflected in William Lim's community centre (p62) which injects social life and dynamism into one of Singapore's statistically impressive, yet essentially featureless high-rise new town centres. For the time being, high-rise building is an inescapable feature of Southeast Asian architecture, a banal typology in ascendancy because of soaring land values.

Yet there are challenges to this mindless orthodoxy. In his proposal for a condominium (p32), Tang Guan Bee suggests an elegant, ecological prototype for tropical high-rise living that could have wide-ranging future applications. And Ken Yeang's dramatic and sculptural high-rise block (p26) attempts to adapt a building type evolved in temperate climes to the rigours of the tropics. Lavish vegetation and ingenious geometry are used as devices to reduce artificial energy intake and suggest new forms of expression. As Chris Abel, guest editor of this special issue, argues in his introduction (p4) it is this interaction o culture and technology on local and global levels that generates such an inspiring vision for the coming Pacific Age.