Shophouse talk: architecture as a reflection of a place, its history and people

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in ANASTASIA ASHMAN,culture,history,society

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By ANASTASIA ASHMAN

At a global nomad dinner party — guest list drawn up virtually by a mutual friend who met the diners all over the world — I had the pleasure of chatting with an artist and his architect wife.

Seattle-area residents, they spend a third of their time abroad in places like Kerala, India and the Neapolitan island of Procida, creating public art and advising governments on historic preservation and ways to make it a sustainable choice.

A year before I moved to Penang, the couple was based in that Malaysian state. Patricia worked with local officials on a conservation plan for the Georgetown city center, a collection of vernacular architecture unmatched by other Southeast Asian nations making it a candidate for UNESCO’s World Heritage status. In modernizing, hot-to-trot Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore leveled most of their shophouses. (The New York Times highlights one Singapore restoration this week.) She inventoried a thousand shophouses. These two- or three-story rowhouses mostly built between the 1890s-1930s with a shared five foot-wide covered arcade were both places of work and home, ensuring 24/7 vibrancy in the tropical port city.

To me, shophouses embodied the equatorial island’s melange of cultures and its exotic mercantile history.

I marveled at the crumbling lime facades and the multilingual signs that reflected the city’s waves of traders, immigrants and British administration. A native majority saw $$ in tearing them down, so openly loving these decrepit structures under threat was my foreigner quirk.

Here’s Patricia on the merging of Chinese, Malay, Indian and European styles in Penang’s shophouses:

From the Chinese came the courtyard plan, the rounded gable ends and the fan-shaped air vents; from the Malay came the carved timber panels and the timber fretwork; from the Indians, urban construction techniques, including a hard-wearing plaster; from the Europeans, French windows and decorative plasterwork.

How does architecture influence your understanding of a place, its people and history?
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Anastasia Ashman is a California-born writer/producer of neoculture entertainment based in Istanbul. This series covers what’s crossing the mind and desk of expat+HAREM’s founder.
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Tagged as: Anastasia Ashman, architecture, British, Chinese, conservation, Don Fels, expat+HAREM founder, expat+HAREM founder series, founder's desk, Georgetown, global citizen, global nomad, historic preservation, Hong Kong, India, Indian, Italy, Kerala, Malay, Malaysia, Naples, Nassim Assefi, Patricia Fels, Penang, Procida, Shanghai, shophouse, Singapore, Straits Settlements, UNESCO, World Heritage site

  • Anastasia M. Ashman

    Ah, the Haghia Sophia. One of my favorites. I’m not a purist (and certainly after 500 years as a mosque the building has internalized that role as well as its original one as a church) but I do agree preservation or conservation is something we should try to negotiate in our built futures. There has to be some place for it. Thanks for the comment Suzanne (Blackincense)!

  • http://www.expatharem.com/identity-messages/ Anastasia

    Ah, the Haghia Sophia. One of my favorites. I’m not a purist (and certainly after 500 years as a mosque the building has internalized that role as well as its original one as a church) but I do agree preservation or conservation is something we should try to negotiate in our built futures. There has to be some place for it. Thanks for the comment Suzanne (Blackincense)!

  • http://makinsense.wordpress.com blackincense

    Preservation wherever possible, should always be discussed!

    I am in mind though, of my “adopted” lands of Germany (including East, which tells you how old I am.) where so much was destroyed. The act of rebuilding was catharsis and indicative of hope, even on buildings which seemed to have little “innovation”. These were mainly due to time constraints, after the war, and things had to be aright rather quickly. Still, I have a sweet nostalgic feeling when I look at a photo in my collection: it is of a post-war office building. In a discreet corner of the foundation someone placed a hand print. I have often wondered about that hand. It’s a “man size hand”, so I must think it must have been a worker, post war, who felt some sort of personal pride in rebuilding Germany.

    As for Istanbul, I would like to see the Hagia Sofia completely restored, and returned to the Orthodox patriarchate. Nothing else, will ever be right, until that is accomplished. It would go a long way to restoring stability and peaace in that region. But I fear we must wait many years, and do so patiently and peacefully.

  • http://makinsense.wordpress.com blackincense

    Preservation wherever possible, should always be discussed!

    I am in mind though, of my “adopted” lands of Germany (including East, which tells you how old I am.) where so much was destroyed. The act of rebuilding was catharsis and indicative of hope, even on buildings which seemed to have little “innovation”. These were mainly due to time constraints, after the war, and things had to be aright rather quickly. Still, I have a sweet nostalgic feeling when I look at a photo in my collection: it is of a post-war office building. In a discreet corner of the foundation someone placed a hand print. I have often wondered about that hand. It’s a “man size hand”, so I must think it must have been a worker, post war, who felt some sort of personal pride in rebuilding Germany.

    As for Istanbul, I would like to see the Hagia Sofia completely restored, and returned to the Orthodox patriarchate. Nothing else, will ever be right, until that is accomplished. It would go a long way to restoring stability and peaace in that region. But I fear we must wait many years, and do so patiently and peacefully.

  • http://www.speakingofchina.com Jocelyn

    This post sent me back into my days in Shanghai, as I mourned over the passing of so many beautiful works of art. I used to live in the neighborhood where there were Shikumen-style homes, a type of architecture native only to Shanghai, and had to watch them systematically get cleared away for glitzy new architecture. Just like the shophouses, Shikumen were also a melding of different cultures — but more of the Chinese aesthetic married to a Western one.

    • http://www.retaggr.com/Card/AnastasiaAshman Anastasia M. Ashman

      Jocelyn, I hear you, it is such a bittersweet experience to see something lovely being bulldozed.

      In Shanghai I photographed a regal (brown-stone?) facade of a home, its interior gutted and rubble spilling through the front-door frame. Preservationists would sniff that this kind of destructive renovation is “facadism”, but surely it’s better than taking the whole thing down….

  • http://www.speakingofchina.com Jocelyn

    This post sent me back into my days in Shanghai, as I mourned over the passing of so many beautiful works of art. I used to live in the neighborhood where there were Shikumen-style homes, a type of architecture native only to Shanghai, and had to watch them systematically get cleared away for glitzy new architecture. Just like the shophouses, Shikumen were also a melding of different cultures — but more of the Chinese aesthetic married to a Western one.

    • http://www.expatharem.com/identity-messages/ Anastasia

      Jocelyn, I hear you, it is such a bittersweet experience to see something lovely being bulldozed.

      In Shanghai I photographed a regal (brown-stone?) facade of a home, its interior gutted and rubble spilling through the front-door frame. Preservationists would sniff that this kind of destructive renovation is “facadism”, but surely it’s better than taking the whole thing down….

  • Anastasia M. Ashman

    Thanks Tee, Catherine, Ivy, Liz and Kathleen.

    Tee, not sure villagers moving into Istanbul’s limits were seeking bucolia. I think with the gece kondu (“built-in-the-night”) structures they were recreating what they knew from home and were able to create with the resources at hand, here in Istanbul.

    It would be interesting to learn more about what they think of the newer buildings — waste of time and $, eye-sores, neighborhood interlopers, welcome additions? Where I live in Istanbul there is a huge range of legal and illegal dwellings, from over-the-top mansions to abandoned construction, uninhabitable places from which smoke curls on cold winter days. They seem to exist pretty peacefully in this un-zoneable combination.

    The mine heating water for all the houses is awfully clever design, Kathleen!

  • http://www.expatharem.com/identity-messages/ Anastasia

    Thanks Tee, Catherine, Ivy, Liz and Kathleen.

    Tee, not sure villagers moving into Istanbul’s limits were seeking bucolia. I think with the gece kondu (“built-in-the-night”) structures they were recreating what they knew from home and were able to create with the resources at hand, here in Istanbul.

    It would be interesting to learn more about what they think of the newer buildings — waste of time and $, eye-sores, neighborhood interlopers, welcome additions? Where I live in Istanbul there is a huge range of legal and illegal dwellings, from over-the-top mansions to abandoned construction, uninhabitable places from which smoke curls on cold winter days. They seem to exist pretty peacefully in this un-zoneable combination.

    The mine heating water for all the houses is awfully clever design, Kathleen!

  • Kathleen Smith

    As we return to living in the UK next week, I just had to respond to Liz’s comment. We lived for two years near Easington Colliery in the northeast of England and I delighted in the history of the people living in the houses she mentioned. There was a man everyone called “pop”at the Peterlee Development Association who had a photographic history of the “back to back” houses (and a prized collection of photos of people awaiting news of disasters in the mine shafts.) The architecture enabled community…and SO practical…a hot water pipe running from the mine through a row of houses, offering a Saturday night bath to all!
    Now we return to Surrey, where the posh and often isolated housing has its own challenges….we leave the palm trees behind for awhile..Kathleen

  • Kathleen Smith

    As we return to living in the UK next week, I just had to respond to Liz’s comment. We lived for two years near Easington Colliery in the northeast of England and I delighted in the history of the people living in the houses she mentioned. There was a man everyone called “pop”at the Peterlee Development Association who had a photographic history of the “back to back” houses (and a prized collection of photos of people awaiting news of disasters in the mine shafts.) The architecture enabled community…and SO practical…a hot water pipe running from the mine through a row of houses, offering a Saturday night bath to all!
    Now we return to Surrey, where the posh and often isolated housing has its own challenges….we leave the palm trees behind for awhile..Kathleen

  • http://pocketcultures.com/ Liz

    I like Ivy’s comment – culture is something you experience. And there’s something about an original building that let’s you experience history in a way you can’t in a museum.

    We have a similar situation in the UK (but a lot less glamorous!) with these ‘back to back’ houses:

    http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-birmingham_backtobacks

    At one time they were the main type of housing in Northern cities, but over the last 100 years they have been destroyed to make way for more modern (and sanitary) housing. These are now the only remaining examples in the UK. I visited them last year and having grown up in North England I was so glad of the opportunity to see for myself how my ancestors lived.

    So I hope some of these beautiful buildings will survive to help others experience their heritage in the same way.

  • http://pocketcultures.com/ Liz

    I like Ivy’s comment – culture is something you experience. And there’s something about an original building that let’s you experience history in a way you can’t in a museum.

    We have a similar situation in the UK (but a lot less glamorous!) with these ‘back to back’ houses:

    http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-birmingham_backtobacks

    At one time they were the main type of housing in Northern cities, but over the last 100 years they have been destroyed to make way for more modern (and sanitary) housing. These are now the only remaining examples in the UK. I visited them last year and having grown up in North England I was so glad of the opportunity to see for myself how my ancestors lived.

    So I hope some of these beautiful buildings will survive to help others experience their heritage in the same way.

  • http://nanyate.com Ivy

    I think they should restore them as they did with Singapore’s Katong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katong). As a compromise, they could always turn them into a shopping, food or entertainment district, should the residents insist on monetizing it.

    After all, these are irreplaceable cultural icons.

    Culture is not just a snapshot; it’s an experience. I would like my future children to touch, see, smell, taste and feel the real deal and not just glance at photo in some modernized museum.

  • http://nanyate.com Ivy

    I think they should restore them as they did with Singapore’s Katong (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katong). As a compromise, they could always turn them into a shopping, food or entertainment district, should the residents insist on monetizing it.

    After all, these are irreplaceable cultural icons.

    Culture is not just a snapshot; it’s an experience. I would like my future children to touch, see, smell, taste and feel the real deal and not just glance at photo in some modernized museum.

  • http://www.bazaarbayar.com Catherine Bayar

    Beautiful places, those shophouses – glad I had the chance to see them in Hong Kong and Singapore before they all disappeared. I love the ‘house over the shop’ idea of many vibrant cities, a way of life far better than the isolation of suburban sprawl. I guess I’m more drawn to places where people prefer living stacked on top of each other than spread apart. In our small town of Selcuk, that’s meant farmers have sold family farms to foreigners because they felt removed from center, opting to live in apartments over walking streets so they could be intimately involved in the bustle of daily social life, even if only from their balconies.

    Up on Ayasuluk Hill, our 1930′s house is one of few remaining of that basic tile-roofed vintage, built from the stones that fell from a Byzantine basilica’s outer walls. In Turkey’s scramble to modernize in the last 30 years, these places have been torn down in favor of the nondescript concrete bunkers than now litter the ancient hill that’s been inhabited for about 8000 years, with precious little of its history left to see.

    My husband and I hope to be involved in the preservation of his hometown Mardin in the coming years, before the architecture of that multiculturally blended place with its narrow alleys and closely knit community is unraveled. So I cheer the work of this artist and architect you met and hope others follow in their footsteps.

  • http://www.bazaarbayar.com Catherine Bayar

    Beautiful places, those shophouses – glad I had the chance to see them in Hong Kong and Singapore before they all disappeared. I love the ‘house over the shop’ idea of many vibrant cities, a way of life far better than the isolation of suburban sprawl. I guess I’m more drawn to places where people prefer living stacked on top of each other than spread apart. In our small town of Selcuk, that’s meant farmers have sold family farms to foreigners because they felt removed from center, opting to live in apartments over walking streets so they could be intimately involved in the bustle of daily social life, even if only from their balconies.

    Up on Ayasuluk Hill, our 1930′s house is one of few remaining of that basic tile-roofed vintage, built from the stones that fell from a Byzantine basilica’s outer walls. In Turkey’s scramble to modernize in the last 30 years, these places have been torn down in favor of the nondescript concrete bunkers than now litter the ancient hill that’s been inhabited for about 8000 years, with precious little of its history left to see.

    My husband and I hope to be involved in the preservation of his hometown Mardin in the coming years, before the architecture of that multiculturally blended place with its narrow alleys and closely knit community is unraveled. So I cheer the work of this artist and architect you met and hope others follow in their footsteps.

  • http://www.taranoble.com Tee

    On a microcosmic scale, I think about this every time I look out my window. We are out in Batı Ataşehir in a very architecturally sophisticated development. Just across the street is a neighborhood of gece kondus.
    It’s obvious that before wealthy developers snatched up all of this land, it was settled by village emigrants seeking a bucolic feel within the city limits of Istanbul proper. You end up with this kind of scenario: our security guards shooing away horses that the gypsies have let off of their carts to graze as they take our recycling. Cold hard evidence of the severe socio-sconomic divide that exists here, in other words. Quite frankly, it activates my yuppie guilt a bit:(

  • http://www.taranoble.com Tee

    On a microcosmic scale, I think about this every time I look out my window. We are out in Batı Ataşehir in a very architecturally sophisticated development. Just across the street is a neighborhood of gece kondus.
    It’s obvious that before wealthy developers snatched up all of this land, it was settled by village emigrants seeking a bucolic feel within the city limits of Istanbul proper. You end up with this kind of scenario: our security guards shooing away horses that the gypsies have let off of their carts to graze as they take our recycling. Cold hard evidence of the severe socio-sconomic divide that exists here, in other words. Quite frankly, it activates my yuppie guilt a bit:(

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