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