by Lim Poon Thong 1001540025
Form & Function - Petaling Street
There is still many traditional types of shoplots existed around Petaling Street, but most of them are not maintained well. With all the new development keep on flooding Petaling Street, the identity of ‘Chinatown’ is slowing losing, in addition of the large number of tourist and foreign workers. More and more shophouses are starting to be abandoned by all the owners. Without any notification to the local authority, they just leave the shophouse without maintaining it. As time passes by, the shophouses became old and dirty, which results in people not willing to explore the beauty of these traditional shophouses.
Originally, the shophouses are used for business and living place for the owner. Traditional shophouses do not have fascinating or complicated façade, but there is just a five foot walkway with an entrance, with a few windows at the façade of 1st storey of the building. From what I observed, functions follow form is best to describe the shophouses. Besides shading and rainproofing, the five foot walkways actually let people walk by and feel the shoplots itself through walking. The front part of a shophouse is used for business purpose, therefore the space will be much bigger. Since the private spaces such as kitchen, toilet, bedroom etc are mostly used by the owner himself, they are all located at the back part and the upper story of the building, where the public cannot easily access without the permissions of the owner. Due to the long rectangular shape of the shophouse, ventilation and natural lighting through opening will be a challenge, therefore there will always be an open courtyard located at the middle of the shophouse to overcome these challenges.
As mentioned above, many shophouses are abandoned. In our centuries right now, the preservation of these shophouses which are known as the heritage site has been paying close attention. People start to learn and appreciate the beauty and the importance of preserving the heritage site as they are our root, which is something passed down from our ancestors that cannot be created. This is where adaptive reuse stepped in. As we can see nowadays there are many cafes around Kuala Lumpur, but many of them did not realize that it is actually renovated from an old shophouse, with the original texture and materials. For example, Merchant’s Lane Café located on Petaling Street. Youngsters nowadays like to hang out in the cafes, and takes photo of the café to share with other people through social media. Without realization, this actually helped them learn to appreciate the beauty of shophouses and at the same time spreading awareness to attract more people to visit and get to know the traditional shophouses. Without changing the form of a traditional shophouse, it is successfully preserved by transforming the original function to keep up with the pace of evolution.
Why is this kind of adaptive reuse popular now? With the fast pace and busy living style in the city, people are trying to escape from all these to find temporary contentment so that they can slow down their pace and get to see clearer what actually they wanted to do. It is a cycle of life. When we are young, we wanted to grow up faster to be an adult so that we can do whatever we want. When it comes to the time where we already are an adult, things are not going well as we thought, and this is the time where we wanted to go back to the childhood times where we don’t have to worry about anything. It is the same in architecture, with old buildings being forgotten and replaced by new modern buildings, as time goes on, people started to get bored and annoyed by all these ‘concrete jungle’, so they started to preserve as many old buildings as they can and make adaptive reuse.
As a conclusion, architecture is not complete without user experience. Ultimately, when we design something, it is going to be used by the people. Therefore, what for we designed something fancy and complicated, but nobody wanted to use it? It’s time for us to slow down, sit down and think about it. What people really need, what architecture really is, and what should we do to achieve all these purposes.