KL sprouts 'karaoke architecture' -------------------------- Mehru Jaffer Contributor The Jakarta Post ---------------------------

I flew into Kuala Lumpur International Airport, the only one in the world perhaps that is cradled in the lap of a lush rainforest, one afternoon in November to be greeted by a nation in mourning.

Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah, Malaysia's 11th king, had passed away that morning.

At Istana Negara, the official residence of the Malaysian king, on a hillock and away from the heat and dust of the city, the resemblance to London's Buckingham Palace is complete, especially during the ceremonial changing of the guard.

I was more interested in seeing the Petronas Twin Towers.

Ramesh Biswas, an architect friend and editor of Metropolis Now, spent much of his childhood in Kuala Lumpur. He lumps the tall Twin Towers together in what he terms "karaoke architecture", which is visible to him in all the tiger economies of southeast Asia. In karaoke it is not important how well you can sing, he says, what matters is that you do it with verve and gusto.

The policy of vying to have the largest and highest of everything has even succeeded, as today there is hardly anyone who is not aware of the 88-storied, 450 meters of glittering steel and glass and the 180,000 square meters of floorspace per office tower that are advertised on millions of picture postcards and are visible within the ancient Klang valley for tens of kilometers.

Since Kuala Lumpur is still in search of its position in the world, prestige projects continue to be constructed. In fact many have described the city as an ongoing building site, ever since it was founded in 1857.

It was the southwest coastal town of Malacca that was always the most important city in southeast Asia during the second millennium and Kuala Lumpur was just a muddy delta where two rivers met. At first it was the Chinese tin miners who cleared the jungle to build settlements here. The Malay sultans were happy to be away from both the mosquitoes and the miners and continued to live in their comfortable capital of Klang, just north of Malacca. But tin mining soon brought great riches to the Chinese.

In 1885 one Yong Koon expanded his tin business into pewter and founded the Royal Selangor legacy of craftsmanship. It is fascinating to drive down to the Royal Selangor pewter showroom and factory to watch.

Malaysian artisans hand cast and engrave exquisite items to this day. The British came next, and towards the end of the 19th century replaced the settlement of haphazard wooden structures of the tin miners with an urban pattern of shophouses connected by an endless row of arcades that helped to protect pedestrians from the heat, humidity and tropical rainfall.

In the meanwhile the Chinese had made enough money to construct temples and to own shops. The British brought in both Hindu and Muslim Indians to help them build railway lines, labor in rubber plantations and, just before they left Malaysia in 1957, to take over professional jobs from them in offices, hospitals and schools. Soon Kuala Lumpur became a powerful magnet for many more adventurers, fortune hunters and romantics who only contributed to make the people, cuisine and architecture of the place even more eccentric.

To walk around the city today is to discover many a wooden hamlet and low-lying arcade from the past, some crumbling, some restored, even in the midst of all the structures that are frantically being built.

Although the home of Yap Ah Loy, the Chinese founder of Kuala Lumpur, now lies buried under the multi-storied offices of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, many an ancient temple and mosque still stand. The gray block of concrete looming over the oldest mosque in town even dares to overshadow its exquisite Moorish architecture.

But it is heartwarming to see the mosque awash in paint so white that it seems to glower right back at all the shimmering metal and glass above it as if to insist that there cannot be much of a future without a past.