CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3 : Traditional Malay House

Traditional Malaysia is one of the richest culture components of Malaysia. It is built according to the living culture and habits to suit the users. Generally, Malay House is considered as near-perfect house as they were energy efficiency, environmental friendly to our local climate. Architects now are often looking for new solution for tropical climate design, but Traditional Malay House seems to be forgetting by the new generation. One of the characteristics of Malay House is that they design with deeply understanding of the surrounding condition and it have high flexibility towards expansion depends on the family need. In this chapter, it will be study about the design concept of the Traditional Malay House as to inspire what could we do to improve our modern terrace house to improve the problems that existed in the house.

3.1 Flexibility of the houses

Basically traditional Malay house can be divided into the front and back portions with the rumah ibu (main house) as the centre. At the entrance of the house, there are this anjung(covered porch) lead from the stairs, it act as a transition space between public and private space. It also serve as a guest entertainment area for those unfamiliar visitor. Next is the Serambi Gantung (hanging verandah). This is the place where most of the guest are entertained, the people will sit here and chit-chat or rest at this area, the well planning of having low window and opening for ventilation and views for the people inside to see what is happening outside.

Once enters to the Rumah Ibu (the core house) which is the largest area in the house where most of the activities will be carry at here, they pray, meeting or sleeping at the rumah ibu. One that separated this important area among the house is they raised the floor level to the highest as to highlight and paying respect. Following with the selang is the close walkway to the dapur(kitchen) and dining area. Most of the womenfolk will gather and chit-chat or socialize. Dining area are one level higher than the selang and here comes to the lowest level area in the house which is the kitchen. Kitchen area always the lowest area where washing, cooking, preparation of wet stuff are all done here.

Through the simple explanation of the space planning of traditional Malay House, we saw how they completely planned the uses and the level of spaces to separate the main and secondary space. It also shows the privacy consideration where the visitors been serve at the space with plenty of opening and it’s well ventilated. Moreover, that is not only the good planning of the Malay house, the flexibility of them to add or remove certain space in order to respond to the expansion of members in the house.

              Unlike contemporary terrace house, they have much more option to choose to add in spaces which is needed as well as the orientation of the space. It is obviously where malay house have this opportunity to add in the additional spaces because of the extra land besides, and the problem from the terrace house is that there are limited space for the surrounding.

3.2 Design for Climate Control
- top zone (roof)
- middle zone (body)
- bottom zone (underneath)
- materials

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.

Introduction

Architecture is an amazing thing that can reflect characteristics of certain groups, races, place and so to the culture. It has to do with planning, constructing, space, surrounding, aesthetics considerations and etc. Most of the architecture we live in had been through many stages of changes to transform due to the existing factors. While the transformation goes, it somehow weakens the function and created some problems to the new generation. As we can see, contemporary terrace house today have been developed to masonry and reinforced concrete with air conditioning system. It is a common architecture which we can found it all surrounded at our side. Contemporary terrace house actually are not best architecture that designed to suit the warm and humid Malaysia climate. Traditional Malay house that as one of the most significant architecture in Malaysia. It was said perfectly built for the physical condition of Malaysia. Their formal and spatial planning and placement on the site have a strong rationale which is derived from and responsive to the environment. While in the new era, people seems more prefer to stay in the contemporary concrete house as it is more convenient and strong in structure compare to the Traditional Malay House in 21^st century. Traditional Malay House had slowly been eliminate by the new generations as it could not provide better security, sustainability, privacy as well as the problem of vernacular architecture skills. However, the concept and system of Traditional Malay house are still have the opportunity to improve the living quality for the new generations. Where it should not be eliminate by the generations. Therefore, this research aims is to investigate the possibilities of integration of the architecture construction and concept of the Traditional Malay House into the contemporary house. The methodologies of the research are to studies and compare the structure and concept of both Traditional Malay House and Contemporary Houses. The main finding shows the integration of concept from Malay House to contemporary house provides better design solution to the new generation by a model of the terrace house. It shows a possible way that could increase the liveability of the terrace house by the implement of the philosophy of the Traditional Malay House.