Simon Soon
The Penang team 2018 field school kicked off with a series of site-based presentations by its team members. One of the first presentations fell to team member Lawrence Chua, who took us on a walking tour along what is known as the ‘Millionaire's Row’ on Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah, formerly and more popularly known as Northam Road. It was originally home to the upper echelons of the British colonial administrators, but when they began to withdraw inland to Penang hill to build their homes on the higher grounds that offered cooler and more agreeable clime, colonial compradors began buying and building over many of the sea-facing tracts on this short stretch of the northern coastline adjacent to George Town.
This coastline was originally dotted with modest colonial bungalows that were viewed as an architectural expression of climate adaptability, unfussy pragmatism, and quiet dignity. The new wealth deriving from the mines and plantations of Perak in the early twentieth century led the colonial compradors to begin yearning for a different kind of architecture that could more accurately reflect the social standing of this new subject-class in the port city of Penang. A seldom discussed consequence was a legacy of a distinct social milieu, made up of important Straits Chinese families, the Kedahan Royalty as well as a Siamese mercantile family. The commissioning of larger and more ostentatious Neo-Palladian and Baroque free-form mansions and villas was important, principally because it facilitated the emergence of the architect as a new building profession in Penang.
Over the years, the rise of private commissions saw former employees of the Public Works Department setting up private architectural practices. The rise of the architect also paralleled the growth in unskilled labour and the use of new materials and technologies, such as reinforced concrete. These together signalled the end of an older building knowledge and labour force, represented by older structures like the Loo Pun Temple 魯班古廟 (Carpenter’s Guild).
This temple, located on Love Lane, was a significant port of call for artisans search of spiritual succour and protection when they first disembarked from China to work in Nanyang 南洋. The house of worship was also a guild which played the role of a pre-modern union. Its supporting cosmology is centered on the master builder as a carpenter/artisan-magician, whose power to transform raw material into built form through labour was also linked to his power to bless or curse deceitful clients who dared to shortchange the builders and not honouring payments upon completion of a building job.
Prior to the rise of the professional architects, that is individuals who defined themselves as the primary designing agent of a building, the built environment of a colonial port city possessed a context-specific ritual economy of building. Broadly speaking, Penang had a tripartite arrangement – British engineers who worked extensively from their ‘pattern books’ (a kind of Ikea-like, build-by-numbers manual), the Chinese artisans/builders who were adept at sourcing building materials and were also custodians of building knowledge, and, a class of convict labourers (later replaced by unskilled labourers) whose sweat and toil constructed the early buildings of Penang.
The rise of the architect came in the 1920s with the rise of the architect. They were able to undercut the pre-existing system through cost-saving measures – principally by introducing new materials and technologies that could easily be handled by unskilled labourers. There was also continuity with the previous period, a close study of the ornamental reliefs suggest that geomantic or Fengshui considerations continued to inform building design and contributed to the eclectic flavour of these syncretic expressions.
An example can be seen in the photograph above, here a bagua 八卦 (Chinese motif incorporating the eight tri-grams of the I-Ching) relief was featured prominently in the pediment of a mansion named Homestead. The pediment is recognisably a triangular shape gable supported by the entablature, a structural hallmark that came to stand for classical pre-eminence in European architecture. Designed by James Stark of the firm Stark & McNeill for tycoon Lim Mah Chye in 1919, the bagua motif framed by the ‘Greco-Roman classical’ pediment is evidence of an attempt to speak across two vastly different cosmologies with its own distinct concepts about site and space.
Ultimately though, Lawrence’s walking tour was a tragic tale about the triumph of capitalism as the supreme form of magic. But we like to think that ending the walking tour at the Loo Pun Temple 魯班古廟 was an opportunity to commemorate another kind of knowledge and history of how an earlier built environment of Penang came to be.
Further readings
Chang Jiat Hwee. 2016. ‘Engineering Military Barracks: Experimentation, Systemization and Colonial Spaces of Exception’ in A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience. London and New York: Routledge, 52-93.
Jon Sun Hock Lim. 2015. The Penang House and the Straits Architect 1887-1941. Penang: Areca Books.
Klaas Ruitenbeek. 1986. ‘Craft and Ritual in Traditional Chinese Carpentry: With a Bibliographical Note on the “Lu Ban Jing”‘ in Chinese Science 7, 1-25.
Klaas Ruitenbeek. 1993. Carpentry and building in late imperial China: A study of the fifteenth-century carpenter’s manual. Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill.
SS Quah. 2008. ‘Place called Homestead in George Town’ in Anything Goes. http://ssquah.blogspot.com/2008/11/place-called-homestead-in-george-town.html