ABSTRACT

To cope with the fast urbanisation and population growth, the public and private sector housing developments in Kuala Lumpur have prioritised the high-rise apartment building. After decades’ massive development, this housing type became the most dominant dwelling form in the city. For centuries, the traditional Malay house has evolved to suit to the vernacular lifestyle, but now the urban life mandates that people adapt themselves to this alien concrete house. This paper investigated the hidden cultural link between these two seemingly different house forms. Using graph-theoretic methods, we traced how old domestic activities were transferred to the modern housing and revealed how the old spatial order of front/back and high/low distinctions could be re-configured inside the high-rise apartment housing in a creative way by Malaysian architects. There have been frictions and compromises between the past and present, but the outcomes of this research clearly indicate that there exists a cultural DNA of Malay housing that guides the whole process of housing evolution.

摘要

为了应对快速的城市化和人口增长，吉隆坡的公共和私营部门住房开发优先考虑高层公寓楼。经过几十年的大规模发展，这种住房类型成为城市中最主要的居住形式。几个世纪以来，传统的马来房屋已经演变为适应当地的生活方式，但现在城市生活要求人们适应这种陌生的混凝土房屋。本文研究了这两种看似不同的房屋形式之间隐藏的文化联系。运用图论的方法，我们追溯了旧的家庭活动如何转移到现代住宅中，并揭示了如何在高层公寓住宅内部创造性地重新配置前/后和高/低区分的旧空间秩序由马来西亚建筑师。