Cool high-rise

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 1994

One of the greatest challenges in Southeast Asia is to adapt building types evolved in temperate climates to the rigours of tropical climate. In Ken Yeang' high-rise blocks, lavish vegetation and ingenious geometry reduce artificial energy intake and suggest new forms of expression.

Ask anyone to name the first British colonial settlement in Southeast Asia and its founder, and most people would answer: 'Singapore, founded by Raffles.' The would be wrong. Francis Light got there first in 1786, founding Georgetown, on Penang Island, off the north west coast of what was then Malaya. Singapore followed in 1819, but eventually proved to have the better site and harbour, flourishing accordingly. But Georgetown survived well enough, and is currently enjoying a new lease of life both as a tourist centre and as the regional focal point for new electronics industries and other players in Malaysia's burgeoning development programme.

Much of the original colonial city still exists almost certainly due to its relative lack of growth -- providing clear evidence of the segregated pattern repeated by Raffles in Singapore. The central area with its neo-classical churc and law courts and other government buildings, together with the nearby garden suburbs and their hybrid villas, clearly distinguish the European sector from the Chinese and Indian sectors. Pressures for renewal are nevertheless growing, threatening both the centre of the city already torn by the drastic insertion o a 60-storey office tower -- as well as the low-density villas in their spacious gardens.

In many ways, the challenge to the suburbs is far less potentially damaging tha that aimed at the heart of the city, threatening as it does the intricate and productive networks of small traders and cottage industries which still constitute the life-blood of Georgetown. A decentralised plan concentrating growth in these low-density outlying areas could, it is argued, ease pressure o the city centre and its more fragile population. The largest villas and gardens and hence the most tempting sites, lie along the north-east coast just above Georgetown. These are already giving way to offices and apartment blocks which, despite their increased size, are often built within the original boundary lines. Invariably though, the architecture is undistinguished, and a poor replacement for the eccentric villas in their green settings.

Ken Yeang's recently completed MBF Tower in the same area is a welcome intrusio into this otherwise uninspiring scene. Yeang has already made an international name for himself and his firm, T.R. Hamzah & Yeang, for his radical approach to high-rise design in the tropics. Like other Malaysian architects of his generation who are striving for an authentic expression of tropical architecture, Yeang roots his bioclimatic approach firmly in the natural and cultural ecology. What sets him apart from his compatriots, however, is Yeang's special obsession with the tower type, normally regarded as the most intransigent of international imports. While many Western architects, having despaired of previous efforts, now eschew high-rise building altogether, Yeang eagerly embraces the tower type as a necessary and even potentially exciting component of the tropical verandah city, a concept he has pioneered since the mid-1980s. Taking the terraced shophouses with their shaded 'five-foot-ways' as his model, he advocates a high-density pattern of well-planted terraced structures, interspersed with tropical gardens and colonnaded public open spaces, all interconnected with covered pedestrian routes providing essential protection against the elements. High-rise buildings specially adapted to the regional climate and open-air lifestyle would punctuate the pattern, providing urban landmarks and focal points for more intensive activities.

The precedents for adapting the tower type to location and climate are few and far between, but not without significance in this context. Before air-conditioning became standard, it was common for high-rise buildings in the tropics to be protected by an external sunscreen of some kind, wrapped around a otherwise conventional rectangular block varying only in its proportions. Skidmore Owen and Merrill's 1983 National Commercial Bank in Jedda was the firs to break the standard mould, creating a series of recessed and shaded hanging gardens alternating on different sides of a triangular block in a spiral configuration. Norman Foster's 1985 Hongkong & Shanghai Bank has sunscreens, an recessed terraces originally intended as gardens, but its main innovations are in its expressed steel megastructure, and in its dramatic internal atrium. More recently, Harry Seidler's Capita Centre in Sydney features both sunshades and generous hanging gardens in a spiralling, fragmented configuration, supported b a braced steel frame set, like Foster's structure, in front of the main facades Air-conditioned though these buildings are, the recessed terraces and shaded walls nevertheless afford welcome outside breathing spaces and had the effect o reducing energy loads.