THEORIES OF ASIAN ARCHITECTURE

PROJECT 1

Reading the Contexts of Traditional Streets

This module began with an assignment that required us to analyze a chosen historical street in Malaysia of our choice via a virtual map visit, and to create a sketch journal that presented the street's physical/non-physical contexts (physical could be material things such as building architecture and religious sites, while non-physical would delve into topics such as culture, cuisine, and history).

Reflection:

In many ways this assignment was similar to Project 1 of my Architecture History module. This time, I quickly understood what needed to be done, and since I had ample hours of practice in sketching at this stage in the course I had no issues drawing from the many photos and virtual street views I had of my chosen site (that being Petaling Street's Wet Market). I had great interest in learning about what made one of Malaysia's oldest wet markets special, and was able to compile and streamline its most notable qualities in what I think is a cohesive order.

ASSIGNMENT

Infographic

A smaller assignment than the other two projects for this module, we were tasked to research lightly on local vernacular, traditional architecture and present our findings in an infographic poster. The information was mostly obtained through our prerecorded lectures but additional outside research could also help. My choice was Malay traditional house architecture.

Reflection:

This assignment was a little bit easier compared to the other projects due to most of the information having been laid out for me prior, but it was still worthwhile practising how to arrange the information on a board in a readable and engaging manner. Not only that but balancing space taken up by text and image is trickier than it sounds, especially since architecture infographics heavily rely on pictures.

PROJECT 2

Research in Asian Architecture

This was a tricky one. For the first time I was given the opportunity to produce a research poster with a group of other fellow students, which also required us to create a proposal and abstract. The topic we chose in mind was adaptive re-use, which would help us to define our specific scope of study and significant issues to investigate. Our chosen site was Jalan Tun H.S. Lee.

Reflection:

This assignment combined both the graphical presentation efforts from my previous assignments with more advanced efforts of researching, but the hardest part was really coming up with the proposal and the objectives of our study. It took us a while to come up with the questions we wanted to address as well as what sort of issue regarding adaptive re-use we could investigate (eventually we decided upon the re-use of abandoned shophouses along our street).

Personally I think we could have given more time to the actual investigation of adaptive re-use, as a lot of our time was eaten up by just defining what exactly we wanted to study on our street. Admittedly I was little bored during this project because I was already used to the creative aspects of architectural work such as drawing and creating designs, so strictly conducting research was out of my comfort zone. Still, I don't doubt that it was a valuable learning experience in seeing how to approach architecture from a more analytical and contextual standpoint.

REFLECTION

Overall, this module had a more domestic focus towards teaching me about architecture history and showing me the intricacies of Asian traditional architecture design. It also raised some questions about how the encroaching phenomenon of globalization and subsequent homogeneity of culture might influence the uniqueness of our local architecture, which is in and of itself a very interesting topic to consider.

Otherwise, I learnt more practical soft skills such as:

Communicating between group members, and making sure everyone's opinions are heard and everyone is on the same page of the assignment as you are
Making journals, infographics and posters readable by arranging text and images in a cohesive, readable and engaging manner
Producing an abstract and a proposal for a research, as well as conducting more academic forms of research (very challenging)
Remembering to screen share the correct slide on Microsoft Teams

My tutors were also very helpful in prompting us to ask ourselves questions and giving us tips during our assignments, and the prerecorded lecture format really suited the mostly-text contents of the module, allowing me to be really flexible with my schedule. Overall, I could not have had a better introduction to Asian Architecture.