Malaysian Heritage

LOOK AT YOUR TOWN

Article prepared for a heritage society in Malaysia

The streets of any town are full of history. In fact, they are history, a built record of the development of that settlement. Most of us do not see it because we keep our eyes on the ground or on shopfronts and never look at the buildings themselves. But raise your eyes above the windows, take a few moments to look at and think about what has been built perhaps half a century ago and you will begin to develop the ability to read the history in a facade. No digging is required to be an urban archaeologist, just keen eyes and an enquiring mind to question what you see.

First look at the building as a whole. Is it one of a row of identical buildings? How many windows are there in each upper floor? Is the skyline elaborate? Look for the buildings with a date on a raised central section at the top. They provide a hook on which to hang your history. See if the adjoining buildings overlap each other of if part of one has been cut away when the next door one was built. Look at how detailed or elaborate are the nearby buildings and compare them to the ones that you can date.

Most of the early buildings in the streets of our towns were built in the first decades of the last century. They were simple houses above business premises and many had full height stuttered windows protected by a railing which were borrowed from kampung houses. The edges of windows are raised and roofs are extended out over the facade to provide shelter from the rain. A raised portion of the top of the roof, known as a jack roof, was often provided for ventilation.

The earliest buildings in Kuala Lumpur, which are in Jalan Bandar, can be dated accurately to 1895. They were built after the British administration introduced regulations requiring wooden houses to be rebuilt in brick and tile along wide streets to avoid fires. A series of disastrous fires had all but wiped out the small timber and attap settlement during the 1890s. The new buildings were simply detailed and built in blocks of eight or ten identical units. At the ends of some of these blocks of shophouses in KL are characteristic Chinese gables. Similar buildings in Penang, Malaka and Kelang may be older than these since these coastal settlements started earlier than that of KL.

These simple early building facades gradually became more elaborate. We can see from the amount and kind of decoration the different influences on the builders and the increase in the community’s prosperity as its identity starts to be established. Probably the reason that the first buildings were made more grand was a glut of new properties. Some were made finer than the others on order to attract buyers. Certainly we see the beginning of civic values in town design at this time. Many of the buildings were built to the same size and scale and to line up with their neighbours in order to fit in and to enhance the appearance of the town as a whole.

The first notable change in later buildings is that the roof no longer overhangs at the front; it is replaced by an extension of the front wall into a parapet which partly or wholly hides the roof. These are often elaborated and shaped and it is here where you may find the building’s date. The parapet may occur only at the centre of a block of buildings or at the ends and centre; the effect is to emphasise the whole block and establish its identity within the town. A disadvantage of doing away with the parapet though, is that there is then nothing to stop rain running down the facade. The dirt particles in rain leave streaks, so various devices are used to throw it clear.

The simplest way to provide a drip and to throw water off a facade is to put a capping on top of the wall. Since the capping is wider than the wall, it runs rainwater clear of the facade; how far depends on the angle of the rain and wind and the exposure of the facade. The same result may be achieved again further down the facade by means of what are called mouldings. These are one of the most important elements of Classical Architecture.

Mouldings may be applied anywhere on a building to protect door or window openings, to mark floor levels or simply as decoration. In section, they may be practically any shape ? oval, circular, zig-zag or a combination of concave and convex curves, known as ogee. Occasionally mouldings are broken into patterns along their length, the most common being ball and dart ? alternating Os and Vs in relief. Of course, mouldings do not simply float around on a building. Lines which are unrelated look strange, so they need support. And so we come to the vertical supporting elements of Classical buildings: columns.

Columns originate in the far distant past of the wooden building tradition, in the evolution from a trabeated or column-and-beam system. Tree trunks would have been used to support squared off horizontal beams which held up smaller sections of wood or branches, which were thatched to keep out the rain. Of course, this original ‘primitive hut’ may be just a romantic notion, but the elements can be traced in the formalised stone architecture of Greece and Rome. In the buildings that we are looking at, beams are represented by mouldings and columns have become a projecting part of the wall where they are known as engaged columns or pilasters.

Mouldings are used to form a base and a top, or capital for the columns, which can then be seen to support the horizontal beams over a shopfront, along the floor line or a parapet. This begins to incorporate part of the Classical style of building and to make it Architecture rather than simply utilitarian building.

A second problem arises when we project the walls up to form a parapet, losing the protection of an overhanging roof. Rainwater can no longer be simply tipped off the edge of the building. It has to be collected in a system of channels on the roof and carried to rainwater pipes which lead down inside or on the face of the building. See if you can spot the rainwater outlets on buildings with parapets.

This system works well in temperate climates but has a major disadvantage in Malaysia’s torrential rain where the amount of rain falling often exceeds the capacity of the pipes to carry it away. Channels fill up and the roof gets flooded. In order to see how this is dealt with, we have to climb onto the roof or find a nearby vantage point from which we can look down on the building.

Consider how the roofs slope. Obviously, water will flow down the roof to the base, but where does it go from there? A light well is a frequent feature which does more than bring light into the rooms behind; it also acts as an overflow for excess water. Many owners block up these wells, to discover only too late that water then cannot overflow!

Light wells are, of course, an ancient and very practical building feature for a number of reasons. In deep plan town houses they allow natural light to be brought into rooms behind the main facade. They allow the flow of air into and through the house and allow smoke and smells to escape from kitchens. Being deep and narrow, they provide shaded outdoor space for use at most times of the day. Courtyards can be very beautiful features with plants and decorative tiles and can be the focus of family life. Some buildings may have two or even three light wells in the depth if the lot, serving several different functions. One of the best places to see this is in the family rowhouses in Melaka which have now become museums.

Unfortunately it is not possible to see light wells from the outside, but if you manage to go inside an old house, you can observe how they make life possible in the tropics by using long, thin building lots. The activities of the house turn inwards towards these open spaces. The outlines of old light wells can even be seen in some shops. Look for beams around the edges of square areas in the ceiling. Try to imagine that you can see the sky and how the building would have been with light ? and rain ? coming in through the space.

Another interesting thing to observe on building facades is that for a long time glass was not used in window openings. The type of window, called pintu pagar, which is found in kampung houses was used at first: opening down to the floor and closed by shutters. Even when window sills were raised, shutters were still used.It is only much later that, first louvres, then glass was used in the shutters and eventually they become conventional windows. Again, this is useful in dating the buildings of a town.

We can also study the development of buildings through the number of openings in the facade. At first, walls had to be quite thick due to the poor quality of the bricks which were made locally and this required large timber beams to span the ground floor shopfront openings. To get around this, many of the earliest shophouses have upper floor facades of timber, either as louvres or as opening windows. There are generally two narrow upper floor openings which do not require large lintels. Later on, steel beams were used to support the upper floor or floors and more open facades with three windows were possible.

Occasionally a daring builder would attempt a facade of four windows so that the wall was more window than brickwork and good quality materials were essential!

Finally we should look at the supports for the first floor beams; the columns which frame the ground floor opening. These are true columns since they are generally freestanding, separated from the party wall by a five foot way. Many carry signboards and advertisements and have been tiled of resurfaced but you can often make out a base and some form of capital where they come to the upper floor beams. These columns are usually very wide and solid to support the floors above. If there is a column above, it is generally smaller and lighter since it supports only the roof. We are talking here of visual weight. Each of these buildings, and the block as a whole, was composed so that it appears harmonious and strong. The weight of the upper floors can be seen to be well supported by the ground floor.

Let us consider for a moment these early builders who gave so much thought and care to constructing these fine elements of our townscape sixty or eighty years ago. Often they were designing and building in a form or style which was new to them. They put all their skills and experience into the task, used the best materials to ensure usefulness and long life. That the buildings are still standing and many of them are still being used is a great tribute to their good work.