By: Lim Poon Thong 1001540025
MATERIAL / IMMATERIAL
Petaling Street is a historical landmark. Many tourists came to Petaling Street to shop and stay because the merchandise sold on Petaling Street is cheaper than the other places, with an intermediate price, which is affordable for almost everyone. As time passes, Petaling Street is flooded with foreigner, especially foreign workers from another country who wanted to make a living at Malaysia and to earn money for their family back in their hometown.
Since it is a historical landmark, Petaling Street is mostly made of timber and bricks. For the old folks who stayed in Petaling Street for over 50 years, bricks and timbers are very common to them because all the shophouses are built with bricks and timbers. Simple, yet stable. The shophouses are still here for over so many years, beside that there is some defect on the materials itself, which will not affect the stability of the building. Most of the shophouses are made from bricks, with plastering finishes. Time passes and we can see the bricks are exposed. Nowadays, buildings are mostly built with concrete, and people would not appreciate the beauty of all these kind of simple materials such as bricks and timbers. In Chinese teachings, we always head for the root, which mean that we should forget about where we come from, and everything has its ancestral home.
You can say that Petaling Street is the combination of modern and past. If you stand in the middle of the street, left side would be buildings with concrete and complicated façade, right side would be simple shophouses with bricks and timbers. People tend to forget about their past when life goes on. The modern part of it is filled with young people who wanted to make a living or earn some money, while the past part is mostly older people who stayed in Petaling Street for many years.
The first impression when you see an old shophouse, what will you think? Old? Dirty? Haunted? People tend to judge something based on the cover. What lies inside a shophouse is a small community, a peaceful surrounding. When you stepped into the shophouse, the texture of the bricks, with some moss on it, the smell of the timber plank, the friendly people inside, all these simple things, have meaning behind it. All these immaterial elements are what we should seek for. The nice and cool temperature without air conditioning, everything is just so simple. Shophouses is not some old and haunted building, it is one of the ancestor of the modern buildings nowadays. A very simple example, Merchant’s Lane located at Petaling Street. It is just a café renovated from old shophouse, why is it always crowded with people? Because of it is a café? Or because of the environment? Youngster nowadays like to hang out at places like this, but they forget about that actually all these things are derived from a traditional shophouse. So why not try to appreciate all these simple and intangible elements? Without all these ancestor buildings, there would not be any high rise buildings as it is now.