This website evolves organically day by day like a real fivefootway does. So if you see, anything strange, don't panic and just keep walking on the fivefootway:)

Features | Q&A

‘Small Projects’ at Archiforum (Part II)

WE are back with the second instalment from our tête-à-tête with Malaysian architect, Kevin Mark Low of smallprojects. In our previous article, Kevin spoke of his design sensibilities, influences and beliefs – giving us a peek into what inspires him and where he feels Asian architecture is headed. It is not hard to miss the intensity and passion in this man when topics close to his heart are brought up. Now, let FFW share with you what dreams and aspirations keep Kevin up at night, and raring to go when the day breaks.

Kevin Low, in conversation. (photo: Tjong Jiayu)

* * * * * * * * * *

FFW: Small or Big? What is your vision for smallprojects? Where do you see yourself taking your firm?

Kevin: To be absolutely honest, I’m bored by my work right now. I feel like I’ve designed myself into a box, because I feel like I’ve figured out all the answers for what inspires me in Malaysia and I am pretty stuck and a little frustrated. With the projects that are being built, I almost already know the direction that they’re going in….sure, with the big projects, there always is that fear that I might fall flat on my face since there are a lot of new things im trying out, but at day’s end my work is still based on the same set of inspirations; local, cheaper materials, construction inaccuracies and mistakes, aesthetics of weathering and so on, and when it’s finally built, it’s going to feel like a Kevin Low building – and that bothers me. It is unavoidable in a sense, because the way I design in Malaysia is inspired by the same set of contextual cues, so it’s going to look similar.

I would love to be able to do something in a totally different environment. Take Singapore for example – even across the Causeway, it is going to be quite a different environment. Singapore has a very small locally-produced building material industry, so almost everything’s imported. Your context suddenly becomes the rest of the world. So perhaps the considerations of cost and economy come in – is importing a building material from Indonesia going to be cheaper than importing in bulk from say, China? With that, your context becomes borrowed. How much of that are you going to be inspired by? What then, makes more sense in the building culture of Singapore? Are the prevailing weather patterns more hot and humid than hot and wet but air dry? Is construction happening to such a great extent in the country that the quantity of dust in the air causes more than average maintenance to be considered? The degree of plant growth might appear to be similar to that found in Malaysia, but there really are a dozen other issues that beg consideration. These are what I mean by contextual cues.

The slender and regal Lourvebox House (photos: www.small-projects.com)

Context, by my definition, is not just about the weather and climate, or societal culture. It is about building culture – how a contractor works. For example, the way contractors work in Singapore is quite different from those in Malaysia. These considerations are all tied into a set of cues that you, as an architect, begin to draw your inspiration from. So I think I need to begin to do that afresh if I am going to be doing more work in Malaysia, or I’m going to be stuck in a deeper rut and really start hating my work!

That said and done, I would love to design an airport anywhere in the world. I feel that airport designs, new Asian airports mostly, have gotten stuck in an awful place of antiseptic bling where the only thing larger than inefficient floor area is the obscene volume of space which needs to be cooled. That said, every time I pass by Singapore’s upcoming Terminal Three on my way in and out of the island, I think it looks great. I so hope it turns out beautifully inside too.

FFW: Any plans to build in Singapore then?

Kevin: I’m doing a cemetery in Indonesia and I’ve received queries about building a church in Singapore. I hope that will come alive. I am not sure it will, simply because the work I have done does not appeal to everyone – it has the appearance of incompleteness or under-construction which needs to be appreciated with openness and a different understanding of aesthetics. Not to say that it will all be the same since I would hope to discover a new approach to building in a new environment. But wherever I design, I believe one part of how I think won’t change; it has to do with designing an architecture of economy, of cheapness put together in a way which has integrity and speaks of where it is.

**The British India Offices and the unabashed extensive use of red bricks — almost reminiscent of some colonial nostalgia… one can’t help noticing the intentional painting of the white walls, leaving but a double layer au naturel brick ’skirting’. (photos: www.small-projects.com)**

It takes a certain amount of openness from society I think. I don’t want to sound stuck-up about it, but I believe it’s about sophistication. Having experienced and gone through things from beginning, and seeing what a boutique hotel is all about, then taking a step back with the realization that however cool those five star hotels are, there are times when its cooler to be in a place which resonates with its specific geographic nuances. A place which doesn’t try to hide difference or discontinuity with published cool – perhaps a hotel where you might, say, make your own breakfast, like the Bonton in Langkawi. Everything is there for us to start getting in touch with ourselves once again; it’s simply a matter of connecting to wherever one happens to be.

You know, the days of lifestyle as opulent, of being purely pampered are giving way to a firmer regard for how we use our bodies and minds. Of course there will always be a place for the five star and boutique hotels (god, I personally hope there will always be!) But right now, cooking well for oneself and for close friends is the new ‘bling’. And I think world culture is moving towards self-sufficiency, and I think that’s an important indication; it tells us the way we are determining the way we want to live and, by extension, design and build. I would like to think the work that I do strives for that relevance of sufficiency.

Oh my god, did I actually answer your question?

** The Boardformed House and its delicately-grooved plywood stripformed ceiling which runs through most of the house — you lie in bed and wonder, if you’re actually staring up at your floor (photo: www.small-projects.com)**

FFW: Haha, yes you did — and even more! You mentioned context and building culture. How has the craftsmanship and technology of the Malaysian building industry affected your designs?

Kevin: Tremendously. Because it’s all part of the cues I look for in building culture, and bad workmanship is so abundant in Malaysia. So what I try to do is I try to work with it rather than avoid it. We can’t hope to build anything along the lines of what you have in Singapore…well, that’s not entirely true, we could, but the sheer effort would be quite exhausting; there is simply so much slack abundant over here. We’ve got sixteen year old tillers working for twenty one year old subcontractors, I kid you not. The one big problem is that we have lost the amazing tradition of apprenticeship. Everyone wants to run their own business as quickly as possible and with as many projects in their stable as can be imagined and this applies to the architects too. We are all impatient and want to start young because youth sells.

So, on the one hand, you could say, “But don’t accept or tolerate that badness - you have to strive to make the building industry better”. But my take on this is: it’s not like the building is going to fall down….if there was some way one could coordinate bad workmanship to look cool, to put that sense of un-prettiness into a different aesthetic context, there are times when the un-pretty becomes “Wow – I’ve not seen anything quite like that before”.

**Kevin’s Garden-gate… whimsical and unpredictable. Creeper vines and calloused trunks meander, drawing you skywards. (photo: www.small-projects.com)**

I have a commentary in my website called underconstruction style; it’s actually a dig at the style books you’d see on coffee tables here and everywhere. It goes something like: buildings in Malaysia commonly look so cool when they’re half finished with their raw concrete frames, bare brick walls and twitchy rebars, it’s a national mystery why we bother to ever finish them since they look simply awful when they’re done. So I’m doing something one could call underconstruction style, however much it originally started tongue-in-cheek.

FFW: So would you call that an intention of ‘rustication’?

Kevin: Perhaps you could call it ‘lush brutalism’ or ‘under-construction refined’ or ‘garden-industrial style’. It’s all about bad construction which costs less, weathering and how things age so much in Malaysia. And decay. Decay is something that you don’t need to avoid. It’s just about putting that decay in a form, into a pattern which you can appreciate.

In the cases of mistakes made on site and wherever hacking needs to be done, that hacking stays as a biography of that construction, it stays as an aesthetic of the building. So yes, that’s how it has affected me.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Brickwall House. (photo: www.small-projects.com)

It is on this note of unending possibilities that we end our illuminating chat with Kevin. Personally, I love the idea of a garden-industrial style. The oxymoronic charm of garden luxuriance coupled with the bare and brutal industrial vocabulary does indeed recall the landscape of Malaysian buildings. An unselfconscious tradition of architecture frozen in incompleteness, and yet overflowing with verdant abundance. Such is the aesthetic of the underconstruction that displays the genealogy of site and context, and which Kevin harnesses to create a unique architectural dialogue with. The question of why we sometimes strive for a vocabulary of clinical sterility and stiff, transparent architecture that melts under the relentless tropical heat we are bestowed with continues to confound me.
As designers, we constantly need to return to our context, to take our cues and develop our own specific responses – perhaps with that, can our architecture sustain its own specificity and relevance. What, and where then, do you draw your contextual cues from?

* * * * * * * * * *

read part I of this interview with Kevin

see more of Kevin’s works…

read more of Kevin’s thoughts…

visit smallprojects

* * * * * * * * * *

debbie is currently a masters of architecture student at the national university of singapore. she probably dips her fingers in too many honeypots but relishes it anyway. read her other articles/book reviews on ffw here…

When Space meets Art / When Art meets Space

(Im)materiality and (Other)architectures

Creative Users

Debbie is a student of architecture, a lover of poetry, and a hopeful song-writer who longs for solo-travels and tends to dip her fingers in too many honey-pots.