Napong Tao Rugkhapan
Until recent decades, the pre-war shophouse received comparatively little scholarly attention compared to other state-endorsed building typologies. Key Malaysian architectural treatises devoted scant space to the origin and variety of this particular built form, despite (or perhaps because of) its ubiquity in Malaysian towns and cities.
Beginning in the late 1980s, there was an emerging interest in shophouse architecture in George Town, the Malaysian city with the highest number of pre-war shophouses. The year 2008 marked a major shift following the UNESCO inscription of George Town (and Melaka) as a World Heritage Site. Since then, George Town has been a revival interest in vernacular architecture and urbanism.
One key product of the UNESCO inscription is the ‘Penang shophouse styles’, a chronology of shophouse stylistic development which resulted from years of research by Penang heritage practitioners. This StoryMap explores the origin of the chronology. Rather than studying the history of Penang shophouses per se, we are interested here in the writing of the architectural history.