2025 March

Editorial

How does Malaysia's architecture capture the spirit of Malaysian-ness? What does it mean to experience Malaysian-ness? This special issue, Experiencing Malaysian-ness, delves into the innovative and contemporary dimensions of identity expressed through the country's evolving built environment. From avant-garde skyscrapers to community-driven urban spaces and further to microarchitecture, this issue showcases how modern architectural practices reinterpret and reshape the cultural, social, and environmental narratives of Malaysia. Malaysia's contemporary architecture becomes a medium for embodying cultural memory and collective belonging in an era of fluid identities and rapid change.

Rather than attempting to define Malaysian-ness in static or formal terms, this issue approaches it as a lived and experiential condition—something that can be felt, encountered, and inhabited. Through space, material, scale, and narrative, Malaysian architects today are offering new ways to articulate the local in a world increasingly shaped by transnational flows and standardised aesthetics.

To reflect this complexity, we organised the selected projects across a spectrum of five scales—XS (extra small), S (small), M (medium), L (large), and XL (extra large). This curatorial framework does more than represent physical dimensions; it allows us to examine how ideas of Malaysian identity play out differently across typologies, functions, and contexts. From intimate community spaces and adaptive reuse projects to corporate campuses and monumental towers, each project invites readers to consider how scale mediates experience, cultural meaning, and spatial agency.

At the XS scale, Temple of Togetherness by Bunga Design Atelier represents a poignant example of how architecture can nurture belonging in fractured urban conditions. Built as a small yet potent spiritual and social space, the Temple of Togetherness exemplifies how an architectural sculpture can facilitate social agency in an expansive urban park. Through rigour in exploring a habitable space with an unconventional material—penyapu lidi, a common cleaning tool found in Malaysian households, the designers created an ethereal and ephemeral form that brings people together in a tropical urban park.

Similarly, small-scale projects such as Women's Aid Organisation (WAO) Shelter Home and Ur-Mu 1 demonstrate that design excellence can emerge through constraints—whether they be budgetary, spatial, or programmatic—while still foregrounding human dignity, empathy, and context. WAO Shelter is a Corporate Social Responsibility Project by Veritas Architects. Being one of the first childcare centers with Green certification, achieving the highest Platinum score, this modest yet innovative architecture provides a dignified, supportive and regenerative environment for those less fortunate. Urban Museum Malaysia (URMU) by DTLM Architects is an adaptive reuse of a 1950s modernist four-storey walk-up apartment building in Kuala Lumpur into a contemporary gallery. Modest in its scale, the urban museum offers collections of Southeast Asian art and culture.

Moving into medium-scale works, Sama Square and Sentul Works exemplify how cultural hybridity is significant in contemporary Malaysian architecture. These projects reflect a growing design culture responsive to memory and modernity, where buildings no longer impose identity but allow it to unfold through time and use. Sama Square by TK&A Architects is a composition of a colourful ensemble of civic spaces that explores a new market and retail development paradigm, creating an inclusive and vibrant public realm for the community. In contrast, in collaboration with YTL Land & Development, Sentul Works by C+P Architects explores the adaptive reuse of a colonial-era railway administration building into a new contemporary heritage office. Oculus House by Wooi Architect explores similar themes within a domestic typology, using spatial layering and materiality to reimagine dwelling forms for contemporary domesticity. It pushes the boundaries of rethinking building on a steep site, while creating a tropical living environment that is naturally ventilated and washed with natural lighting.

We observe the complexities and contradictions of representing nationhood in architecture on large and extra-large scales. GDP Campus by GDP Architects speaks to the role of institutional architecture in shaping educational and cultural aspirations, while Bagan Hospital and Paramit Factory address questions of wellness, labour and sustainability in the Malaysian industrial and healthcare landscapes. Finally, Merdeka 118—the tallest tower in Southeast Asia—stands as a powerful symbol of ambition, innovation, and global presence, yet also prompts critical reflection on scale, context, and meaning in architectural representation.

To complement the featured projects, this issue includes academic and reflective contributions from key Malaysian architectural and urban discourse voices. Eleena Jamil, reimagining themes from her recent book Essence of Place, reflects on how place-based thinking and environmental responsiveness remain central to Malaysian design identity. Her essay invites us to look beyond aesthetics towards architectural practice's ethical and ecological dimensions.

Lee Jia Ping offers insights into the evolving role of placemaking and the "creative city" in shaping more inclusive, participatory urban environments. In contrast, Ahmad Nazrin's exploration of "Urban within a city" provides a layered understanding of Malaysian urbanism as a mosaic of historical, cultural, and socio-political forces. In this issue, David Teh and Edric Choong share an insightful conversation with two prominent architectural development figures: Tengku Dato’ Ab. Aziz Tengku Mahmud, CEO of PNB Merdeka Ventures, and Ar. Farid Baharuddin, Principal of RSP Architects, share their insights and perspectives on the iconic Merdeka 118 and the surrounding precinct.

These contributions collectively underscore a shift in how architecture is practised and understood in Malaysia today. Designing buildings that merely reference tradition or mimic global trends is no longer enough. Instead, the challenge—often implicit rather than declared—lies in crafting spaces that resonate with the lived realities of a multicultural society, engage with local ecologies and respond to the aspirations of a new generation. As revealed in these works, Malaysian-ness is not a fixed identity but an unfolding process shaped by hybridity, memory, and modernity.

Moreover, the issue draws attention to the experiential nature of architecture. Malaysian-ness, as felt in space, is not always visible. It may reside in the filtered light through timber louvres, in the softness of a courtyard breeze, in the echoes of communal laughter beneath a zinc roof. It is tactile, emotional, sensory—often implicit rather than declared. The architects featured in this issue are acutely aware of this. Their work shows that identity is not something we display but something we feel and inhabit.

In this spirit, Experiencing Malaysian-ness does not seek to offer a single definition of what Malaysian architecture is or should be. Instead, it embraces multiplicity, ambiguity, and dialogue. It invites readers to encounter the richness of Malaysian architectural practice as it unfolds across different contexts and scales, each with its own story.

As guest editors, it has been a privilege to curate this collection of works and voices. We hope this issue will serve as a provocation—an invitation to reimagine identity, culture, and place through the lens of contemporary design.