Article

Architecture

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Architecture

Architecture in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, as documented in the Society’s journal literature, encompasses a wide spectrum of building traditions—from the indigenous Malay timber house and the ancient Hindu-Buddhist sanctuaries of Kedah to the colonial-era public buildings of Kuala Lumpur and the Portuguese and Dutch structures of Malacca. The records reveal that architectural history in the region has been shaped by the interplay of local building knowledge, imported administrative and commercial demands, and the successive repurposing of structures across centuries. The literature spans from early colonial-era surveys of individual buildings to detailed reconstructions of entire building industries, and from the analysis of single architectural elements such as pillar bases and balustrades to the tracing of professional careers and institutional frameworks that produced the built environment [1, pp. 79–82], [2, pp. 27–37], [3, pp. 66–86].

Members & Sub-Topics

The Indigenous Building Tradition

The pre-colonial Malay building tradition was a craft embedded in village reciprocity rather than a profession. Houses were sized by the number of posts (tiang, literally “posts” or “pillars”), joined without nails using mortise-and-wedge joints, and erected through communal mobilization. Even the larger residences of the ruling class were essentially scaled-up versions of the village model, requiring the temporary conscription of labour rather than the employment of specialists [1, pp. 80–82]. R. O. Winstedt’s 1929 note on a Perak palace provides a ground plan that delineates the component parts of a traditional Malay palace using indigenous architectural terminology: the serambi (verandahs), istana (palace proper), balai rong (inner hall), balai besar (central hall of audience), balai penghadapan (outer hall of audience), penanggah (kitchen), selang (passage), pintu tangga (doors and steps), petarana (dais for princes of the blood), singasana (throne), and bilek kundang (rooms for pages), along with various pillar types including tiang sudut, tiang rembat gun tong, and tiang tinggi [4, p. 457].

M. Macdonald’s 1934 survey of Malacca buildings extended this typological analysis to the coast, identifying the Malay house still visible near Fort St. John as the oldest surviving Malay type in the Settlement. He distinguished it from the Bugis house (which has a protruding kitchen) and the Minangkabau type (whose protruding elements lie on the principal axis), arguing that the characteristic front vestibule was a rational extension of the side-gallery found in agricultural house types, while the change in entrance direction reflected the needs of a trading people living in towns or along roads. Macdonald traced the general origin of the type to Palembang, where houses built on rafts in single rows could not spare front-space for side-galleries, and noted that the plan with steps in front, as shown in Swettenham’s British Malaya, was an assimilation rather than the original form [2, pp. 27–29]. He also catalogued several features on the verge of disappearance: the spongy limonite blocks used for steps, the lower board lining the front-gallery that served as a sleeping-out-porch, and the long drawn low windows that he predicted would reappear in modern architecture [2, pp. 28–29].

In the ancient Hindu-Buddhist context, B. A. V. Peacock’s 1974 study of pillar base architecture at Kedah Site No. 8 (Chandi Bukit Batu Pahat) demonstrated that the structural evidence was incompatible with the stone tower hypothesis previously proposed by H. A. Lamb. Peacock showed that the sanctuary basement was a masonry shell enclosing rubble and earth, not solid piers capable of bearing the downward thrust of a massive stone superstructure. His alternative interpretation, supported by comparative evidence from Sumatra, Bali, and East Javanese temple reliefs, proposed a low-walled sanctuary supporting a multi-tiered wooden roof of the meru type—an eleven-tiered roof ritually prescribed for a temple dedicated to Siva [3, pp. 66–86]. The outer pillar mortises measured 4 inches by 4 inches by 3 inches, implying pillars of 6 to 7 inches square, while the inner pillar mortises measured 7 inches by 7 inches by 3 inches, implying pillars of 9 to 10 inches square. Eight specialized bases with angled mortises indicated a system of cross-struts sloping from the base of each corner pillar to the top of its neighbours, a bracing system designed to resist lateral wind stresses on a tall multi-storied roof [3, pp. 72].

Colonial Building Industry and Public Works

The emergence of a building industry in the western Malay states between 1875 and 1914 was, according to J. M. Gullick, a direct response to the administrative, commercial, and demographic pressures of the tin boom. When colonial administrators arrived in the mid-1870s, they had no building industry to draw upon. Swettenham’s first residence at Bandar Langat was a leaking stockade; Birch had to import house-builders from Province Wellesley because, in his words, “it is impossible to get Perak Malays to work” on the required scale [1, pp. 80–82]. The industry matured through three broad phases. The first, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, saw the establishment of rudimentary Public Works Departments staffed by surveyors and draughtsmen transferred from the Straits Settlements, and the first use of the “transitional Malay house” model—brick pillars supporting a timber upper storey—which required Chinese masons and imported bricks [1, pp. 85–86].

The second phase, driven by the tin price rise of 1879 and the relocation of the Selangor capital to Kuala Lumpur in 1880, produced a building boom in which the city was rebuilt street by street in brick and tile. The 4 January 1881 fire in Kuala Lumpur left 500 people homeless and caused an estimated $100,000 in damage, catalysing the decision to rebuild the town’s core in brick and tile [1, p. 86]. Houses built in Kuala Lumpur numbered 234 in 1884, 218 in 1885, 159 in 1886, and 180 in 1888; brick kilns in Selangor rose from 15 to 33 and lime kilns from 8 to 16 between 1886 and 1888 [1, pp. 86–87]. A new class of contractors emerged, including Ceylonese planters like D. G. Gordon who managed large forces of Chinese and Malay labourers on railway earthworks [1, p. 86].

The third phase, from the mid-1880s onward, was marked by the introduction of Neo-Saracenic architecture, the establishment of a PWD factory with a 40-hp steam engine to process timber and metal, and the increasing use of imported iron, steel, and cement in bridges, waterworks, and commercial buildings [1, pp. 85–91]. The Connaught Bridge (1890) carried the railway across the Klang River on cast iron cylinders driven approximately 60 feet to bedrock; its metal components were fabricated at Stockton-on-Tees and assembled by Howarth Erskine [1, p. 90]. By 1913, J. A. Russell paid more than $1.5 million for Yau Tet Shin’s 300-house “new town” estate in Ipoh, illustrating the scale of property investment that the building industry had made possible [1, p. 94].

H. S. Barlow’s 1992 article on the early history of the Residency Kuala Lumpur provided a detailed reconstruction of the building’s design and construction process, drawing on Swettenham’s own unsigned minute of March 1889. This document revealed how Swettenham personally sketched the plan at Kuala Kangsar, how the design evolved through multiple iterations involving State Engineers Caulfeild and Bellamy, and how Swettenham made on-site alterations during construction—substituting pillars for a wall in the drawing room, adding a verandah all round, and repositioning bathroom staircases. Barlow demonstrated that the building was essentially a product of Swettenham’s personal aesthetic and administrative vision rather than the work of a professional architect. The total cost was approximately $36,000, divided between the years 1888 and 1889 [5, pp. 28–30].

Architectural Attribution and Professional Practice

The question of who designed the landmark colonial buildings of Kuala Lumpur has been a subject of sustained scholarly investigation. Gullick’s 1992 article on the Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad reconstructed the design and construction history of Kuala Lumpur’s most celebrated colonial-era government building, completed in 1897. The building’s design credit, long attributed to Government Architect A. C. Norman by virtue of his name on the foundation stone, properly belongs, Gullick argued, to the younger architect Regent Bidwell, who worked under State Engineer C. E. Spooner’s direction [6, pp. 27–38]. Spooner’s own speech at the 1897 PWD dinner provided the primary evidence: he described how Norman produced a ground plan and Bidwell an elevation in a “Classic Renaissance” style, which Spooner rejected in favour of a “Mahometan style” (the neo-Saracenic idiom developed by British architects in India). Spooner stated explicitly that Bidwell “set about the details” and was “most happy in rendering my ideas on paper” [6, pp. 30–31].

The foundation stone, laid on 6 October 1894, named only Norman as Architect [6, p. 33]. Gullick resolved this discrepancy by showing that Norman, as the senior Government Architect (an ARIBA of ten years’ standing), would have insisted on his name appearing on official documents, while Bidwell—a 24-year-old with only a few months’ service—had no institutional leverage to claim credit [6, pp. 33–34]. When Norman applied for promotion in 1899 and again in 1901, Resident H. C. Belfield explicitly stated that Norman’s list of buildings was “misleading” because he “had little or nothing to do with their design or construction in a number of instances.” Norman was compulsorily retired in 1903 at the age of 45, with Governor Swettenham describing him as “a man of weak character and wanting in energy” [6, p. 34].

A. Ghafar Ahmad’s 1997 chronological biography of Norman extended this investigation by drawing on RIBA records. Norman’s Candidate’s Separate Statement of 30 March 1896 listed nine principal buildings with costs ranging from $9,750 (Police Offices) to $320,000 (Pudu Gaol), totalling approximately $650,750 in claimed works [7, pp. 24–26]. The Sultan Abdul Samad Building cost $152,000, stretched 400 feet along Jalan Raja, and featured a central clock tower 135 feet high; it was the largest building in Malaya at the time of completion [7, pp. 25–26]. Pudu Gaol, designed in an ‘X’ plan with three storeys and 240 cells, cost $320,000 and was initially built to accommodate 950 prisoners; its six-inch walls were of cement, steel, and brick [7, p. 26]. Ahmad noted that Norman’s buildings were essentially hybrids, combining Moorish influence, Tudor, Neo-Classical, and Neo-Gothic styles, and that he successfully adapted his designs to climatic conditions, local building materials, and building details through the use of high ceilings, verandahs, wide overhangs, canopies, big windows, and louvered panels [7, pp. 28–29].

The Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad absorbed 4 million bricks, 2,500 barrels of cement, 18,000 pikuls of lime, 50 tons of steel and iron, and approximately 30,000 cubic feet of timber [6, p. 30]. Public concern that the daily noon signal gun from Bluff Road would damage the structure led to the discontinuation of the 5 p.m. gun [6, pp. 31]. The PWD factory, established to supply materials for the building, was powered by a 40-hp steam engine driving a sawmill and metal-cutting machines, and included a brickworks managed by Gordon & Co. [1, p. 90].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on architecture reveals a clear evolution in both scope and methodological approach. The earliest contributions, such as D. F. A. Hervey’s 1882 note on stone from Batu Pahat, addressed the provenance of building materials for the Portuguese fort at Malacca, quoting Raffles’ translation of a Malay manuscript that listed multiple sources of iron-stone—Kwala Linggi, Pulau Upeh, Batu Bras, Pulau Jawa, Teluk Mas, Pesan Pringgi, Pulau Burong, and the interior of Malacca—along with the prices paid for stone, mortar eggs, lime, and labour over the thirty-six-year construction period [8, pp. 169–170]. Hervey regarded with doubt a tradition attributing the cutting of stone for the fort to the Siamese at Batu Pahat, given the availability of good stone much nearer to hand [8, p. 169].

The 1920s and 1930s saw the emergence of more systematic architectural surveys. Winstedt’s 1929 note on a Perak palace, though brief, provided a valuable ground plan with indigenous terminology [4, p. 457]. Macdonald’s 1934 survey of Malacca buildings represented a more ambitious attempt to reconstruct the architectural genealogy of individual structures through physical evidence, contemporary maps, and administrative records, arguing that each structure’s present form was the product of successive functional repurposings rather than a single coherent design intent [2, pp. 27–37]. His analysis of the Church of St. Paul proposed that the vaulted part was built c. 1520 as a military keep or powderhouse, not as a church, and that the present tower was erected after the building’s abandonment as a church (c. 1760) and served from the beginning as a lighthouse [2, pp. 29].

The 1970s marked a significant shift towards critical reconstruction and historiographical intervention. Peacock’s 1974 article on pillar base architecture in Kedah was the first sustained critical challenge to Lamb’s tower hypothesis, which had dominated interpretation of the Kedah settlement since 1960 and had passed without critical comment into popular literature [3, pp. 70–71]. Krairiksh’s 1974 note on the makara balustrade at Malacca similarly used stylistic analysis to date a single architectural element to the eleventh century A.D., arguing that it likely derived from a temple that predated the founding of Malacca around A.D. 1400–01 [9, pp. 96–98].

The 1990s brought a new emphasis on the social and institutional history of architecture. Gullick’s 1992 article on the Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad corrected a long-standing misattribution in the architectural history of colonial Kuala Lumpur [6, pp. 27–38]. Barlow’s 1992 article on the Residency provided the first detailed architectural and administrative account of its construction, drawing on Swettenham’s own unsigned minute which had not previously been published or analysed in depth [5, pp. 25–34]. Ahmad’s 1997 biography of Norman extended the argument about Spooner’s design primacy into a full biographical framework, adding RIBA documentary evidence that had not previously been published in the Malaysian context [7, pp. 21–29]. Gullick’s 2012 article on “The Builders” represented the most comprehensive treatment to date, connecting architectural history, labour history, and administrative history in a way that neither the architectural literature nor the economic history of the tin industry had previously achieved for this period and region [1, pp. 79–98].

The archival base for this body of work is substantial and varied, encompassing the Selangor Secretariat Files, Annual Reports, the Selangor Journal, personal diaries of Swettenham, Douglas, Birch, and Low, the Singapore and Straits Directory, Colonial Office correspondence, RIBA records, and fieldwork conducted in Kedah and Malacca [1, p. 98], [6, p. 38], [5, p. 34], [7, p. 21], [3, p. 86]. Together, these records document a field that has moved from the description of individual buildings and materials towards the reconstruction of entire building industries, the critical reassessment of established reconstructions, and the investigation of the professional and institutional frameworks that produced the built environment of the Malay Peninsula.

MBRAS Sources

Singapore

Southeast Asia

Malaya

References

  1. J.M. Gullick (2012). The builders JMBRAS 85(2): 79–98. Read on JSTOR
  2. M. MacDonald (1934). Malacca buildings JMBRAS 12(2): 27–37. Read on JSTOR
  3. B.A.V. Peacock (1974). Pillar base architecture in ancient Kedah JMBRAS 47(1): 66–86.
  4. R.O. Winstedt (1929). A Perak palace JMBRAS 7(3): 457–458.
  5. H.S. Barlow (1992). The early history of the Residency Kuala Lumpur JMBRAS 65(2): 25–34.
  6. J.M. Gullick (1992). The Bangunan Sultan Abdul Samad JMBRAS 65(1): 27–38.
  7. A. Ghafar Ahmad (1997). Chronological biography of Arthur Charles Norman JMBRAS 70(1): 21–29.
  8. D.F.A. Hervey (1882). Stone from Batu Pahat JSBRAS 9: 168–170.
  9. Piriya Krairiksh (1974). A note on the Makara balustrade at Malacca JMBRAS 47(1): 96–103.