CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2 :

2.0 Problems existed in terrace housing

Terrace house is a roll of identical houses that shared side walls. The first and the last houses is called an end terrace, they are mostly larger sizes than the middle houses. It usually has open spaces at the front and back for car porch and wet kitchen or storage purpose. Each roll is consisting of 10 to 12 units depending on the width of the house that have to consider about the Fire Services Department. Statistics shown that terrace house is the most preferable house for the average Malaysian. The demand from the terrace house is also the highest among the other types of properties. However, the quality of the terrace house had seen to be reducing for the recent years. Houses are require to build fast and so causes the creative design efforts are lacking. Most houses were build according to the schemes which was typically planned layout for maximum land use. Therefore, some of the new developed housing area are lack of rationale when comes to the planning of the area or the specific layout of the interior. Moreover, there are aspects like flexibility of spaces, poor ventilation, lighting, vegetation and social and security had become the problems of the contemporary house.

2.1 Flexibility of spaces

It is always important come to the interior planning of a house where different family requires different kind of spaces for their daily needs, while modern terrace house are mostly fixed in their planning of spaces due to the limited land and increases of population for the area. A standard house planning that we could found around the medium income are consist of a living area, dining area, kitchen, 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. That comes to the problems which when there are increases of numbers of family members throughout marriage or  adoption, there will be limited or lack of spaces for them to live in the same house. It will then have the needs to purchase another unit of house as to have their own privacy space and moving space while it will lead to the financial problems because of the unaffordable price for the low income family to purchase another unit.

2.2 Ventilation

For the older century, architect often pay particular attention to the ventilation of a building. Houses were built according to the transition of air or the direction of wind flow because of the temperature of the interior could affect the comfortable of the user. Traditionally architects creates opening like air wells, windows, doors or ventilation panels to achieve better ventilation to the interior. While the importance of ventilation concept seems to be neglect due to the demands of the users when it comes to the security consideration. Young generations prefer to have less opening to avoid the thief from coming in easily as well as having enough privacy. Even nowadays the modern houses designed to have large and wide windows but they were mostly fixed window that doesn’t allow air ventilation. Even there is an open-able window, users would rather covered it with curtains to avoid others view through the condition of the interior. Besides, uses of air-conditioning system are way too convenient to the young generations when the surrounding temperature was increasing day by day. This causes the importance of natural ventilation being ignored or losing attention to the young generation.

2.3 Lighting

Followed by the closed up opening of the interior, it stop the natural lighting from coming into the interior. Without the skylight, the middle part of the house can receive only minimal sunlight and were mostly needed help of the artificial light. Terrace house are built normally having windows at the front and rear of the house, it was mostly connected with both left and right side of houses that resulted of the unavailable of creating opening for the both sides. Due to the limited opening, the usage of the artificial light requires more and thus requires more electrical supply.

2.4 Vegetation

They do have park or playground around or at the middle of the residential area, but we could rarely see trees around the houses. If there is tree, mostly there have only one tree for each 15 or 20 meters. We have learned that the greenery would provide better air quality and helps to filter noise but due to the limited spaces of the house boundary, users would rather transform the small garden beside the car porch into concrete land to park their cars instead of plant some plants on it.

2.5 Materials

No doubt concrete is a good source to use on architecture as it was a sustainable, strong and easily available in our country. 90% of the houses in the country were using concrete as main construction material. Concrete was used as a good thermal mass material in overseas in order to achieve thermal comfort of the interior, the idea of using concrete for both cooling and heating systems was well designed and worked in overseas. In winter, concrete absorb heat during the daytime for cooling down the interior while release heat at the night time to warm up the interior; in summer it release heat at the night and the heat will be carried away by the well ventilated houses. It sounds to be prefect but when it was applied in Malaysia which having hot and humid tropical climate, concrete might not be a good option. It require much ventilation to cool down the interior at the night while it was almost an impossible task as users could just turn on the air conditioning system to cool down the house rather than taking risk of exposes their interior to the outsiders.