Open house: a startling interpretation of a traditional building type produces a new way of tropical living.

The shophouse was the predominant building type of Chinese cities in south-east Asia for several centuries. Two or three storeys high, the houses have very long thin plans, with a shop at the front opening onto the five foot way, the arcaded footpath that protects pedestrians from sun and tropical storms. Courtyards penetrate the length of the plan, bringing sunlight and air to the middle of the dwelling areas behind the shop.

A very decayed version of a shophouse on one of the finest old streets in Malacca was bought by a client of SCDA. The client wanted a self-sustaining meditation house on a modest scale, necessitated by his limited budget. (The architects already had experience in long thin shophouse-like buildings, but to a much higher budget--AR July 2001, p50.) As the building was a virtual ruin, with roof and floors collapsed, the architects decided to remove them, and to prevent the party walls from collapsing inwards by using rectangular steel frames formed of U sections welded together longways as hollow sections.

Crisp new boxes made of masonry, steel and timber are inserted into the long plan. The architect says that the spatial strategy is an 'inversion' of the original one, where airwells were carved into the mass of the building. In the reworking of the building, the new volumes provide shade and shelter in the otherwise roofless space. Entrance from the street is through a bamboo planted court in the old shop from where you progress under the meditation box to the pool court and the dining area. The sleeping box hovers overhead. At the back of the site, is a small court with a vegetable garden and orchard, septic tanks and solar panels. Throughout, the architect has emphasized contrasts between old and new, ensuring that the new is clearly new, while old is patently inherited. The two are almost always separated, to the extent that electrical runs are carried in the steel structure to avoid cutting them into the party walls. On these, the patina of age is preserved as carefully as possible. There are traces of Ch inese culture overlaid by Dutch, British and Malay elements: colours, cracked tiles, plaster panels, added during the long lifetime of the shophouse. Even marks caused by vegetation are preserved in a contemporary echo of the traditional Chinese horticultural reverence for the picturesque qualities of decay. Against this backdrop, the new volumes are in complete contrast: sharp, precisely detailed and untouched by time.

The jury was impressed by the moving qualities of this meditation on past and present, and by the way in which materiality, light and climate have been carefully studied.

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Soo Chan of SCDA Architects

Singapore

Engineer

Web Structures

Photographs

Albert Lim