Thursday 4 October 2012

Identity of Malaysia Architecture


While everyone of us are struggling to find the real identity of Malaysia architecture, I myself have a different point of view. Since Malaysia are made up of different people from different culture, ethnics, races, religions etc, why don't we appreciate all these and made full use of this? What's wrong with combining all these elements into our design and say that this is 'Malaysia'? We are proud of our nasi lemak with rojak, so why when we come to architecture or design, we tend to reject all these and say that we are just copying or cut and paste from here and there? That's our character! This made our country the main attraction.
If one argues that the mosques' characters are copied from the Islamic country, Chinese temples' identity is from the China, Indian temple from the India, so we ourselves do not have our own image, but try to think further and deeper, if we really want to find out the root of Malaysia, the original culture of Malaysia, we have to go back to the orang asli period. I believe that architecture is for the people, and it is for the society NOW, let's focus on what we have now and design for the people, examine what they actually need but not debating on what is our own ad original image. What made up our country now is the people from different background, use this as our weapon and emphasis on it, tell the world proudly that we are from a 'rojak' country and  we have no problem with it. If we ourselves do not appreciate this, how can we convince others to accept our culture or even our architecture and design?

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