prose: the quaint and the bombastic

Dear Pam(ela),
(poster girl for the anti-development coalition)

I have just returned from a very relaxing holiday in Pulau Perhentian. The place was nice, with crystal clear waters and white sands, something of a rarity when the case is water in its natural context.

Our accommodation was a low key, laid-back affair, hut style structures with thatched roofs or ‘touch-the-earth-lightly’ cabin-like structures. In this pristine environment and maybe one of the few surviving earthly paradise such attitudes of not replacing anything, of leaving things as they were, are the most desirable. Such high value is this masterpiece of God, as if a single stroke of men’s brush, no matter how tiny a speck it is, would disrupt the beauty of it.

A different scenario greeted us when we ventured to the other side of the beach. A permanent, heavy, concrete structure stands in all the shallow grandeur of a so-called ‘upper-class’ establishment. This bit of paradise raped by a bulky foreign body. All in the name of ‘development’, or ‘proper design’, or even - ‘design’.

In Petaling Street, Kuala Lumpur the ad-hoc nature of the stalls (though it is dictated by the needs of the hawkers), the myriads of sights and sounds, sometimes pleasant, sometimes repulsive, nevertheless rich, all contributing to the spontaneity and immediacy of the place, which makes it attractive in the first place, is ‘improvised’ by means of a paved walkway and a tensile roof that incidentally veiled a part of the façade, and sometimes can prove to be dauntingly hot.

Another street that has gone through a similar situation is Campbell Street, where the paved street reduces the once bustling thoroughfare (and foreseen by the authorities-that-be to have commercial potential) to a dry environment, where the pedestrian actually seldom walks by anymore, because the seemingly neat paving deters hawkers from doing business there. Thus the street is deprived of pasembor stalls, cendol stalls, cobblers, ottu kedais – street activities that liven up the local streets of Penang. Such delight it is to stumble upon these little treasures when walking in the streets. Besides, they make the streets occupied, a commendable anti-mug device. When they are gone, the streets are a horror to walk.

To top it off, this process of beautification pushed rents up, and many existing tenants are perturbed, as business are also dwindling, for customers that used to park next to the shops for a quick purchase can no longer do so as car access to the paved street is limited. A banner that says ‘No More Campbell Street in Little India’ is a testament of the local’s sentiments of non-approval of what has been done, or, despite what the negative outcome of what has been done, what repetitively would be done elsewhere.

Does ‘improvement’ means beautification? Would an ornate door handle work better than a plain one? Does development means quantity? Would many cars show development instead of a carefully crafted, efficient one? Is ‘development’ equal to grandeur? Is a thatched, indigenous, humble, traditional structure less ‘developed’ than a heavy, off-scaled, bulky, structure?

It has come to me that a ‘proper’ design, or even ‘design’, nowadays means exaggerated forms, flashy materials and quantity. To design is to make something ‘prim and proper’. By ‘prim and proper’ I mean, to have something put up standing. ‘Improvement’ is always gauged by materialistic means.

Let me demonstrate a point. In a brief calling for a ‘pasar malam’ venue, a designer would set up concrete, permanent structures as stalls, where the hawkers would do their business. An absence of anything structurally tangible would mean that the designer hasn’t ‘designed’ anything, thus the allocated commission is not well earned, not worth commissioning a professional architect in the first place.

Responding to a similar brief another designer would just indirectly set up the space as to conjure ‘place’, maybe through mounds suggest territoriality of each stalls (which are to be provided by hawkers themselves, as to promote ‘spontaneity’) and lots of elements that makes up a conducive tropical open-air environment like water features, mists and lush greenery.

But the latter designer, due to the absence of a certain physicality of ‘structure’, is to be deemed ‘not designing’. To find ways of cleaning the Segget, to devise ways that would ensure its perpetual cleanliness, or revamp the city so that it would not pollute the river is seen as ‘not designing’. Designing, it seems to me now, is to build a physical, concrete, mega structure that covers the whole of the unsightly Segget.

It is not to say though, that the architect should not build, for it is what is expected of the architect, it is the job of the architect. Just that, we should build accordingly. Where a ‘no-touch’ approach is desirable, or ‘don’t touch anymore’ approach is desirable, we should oblige accordingly.

If the making of the space has to be realized through concrete mega structures, so be it. If the making of the space requires an evocation of ‘place’, and not necessarily through structures, then likewise, so be it. The problem now is that for every problem the solution that we always took was to build big and bombastically. For instance, to solve traffic jams we build bypasses. To secure an area we build perimeter walls. To clean a dirty market we demolish it and build a new sparkling one.

Development should not be necessarily through state of the art, bulky, grand buildings, but the achievement of certain sophistication as to decide on ‘appropriate building’. On the improvement of quality, rather than an improvement in quantity, in size and shallow grandeur. The quaint, rather than the bombastic.

With warmest regards,
Khairil.