Worawee Buasai
Thailand
Kampung Monthly Housing
Site: Kampung Bahru, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Kampung Monthly Housing is located in Kampung Bahru, a traditional area surrounded by the modern city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The district is not ordered in the perfect grid but is clustered irregularly. The specific user of this housing is first aimed for the rural-urban migrant who comes to the city to seek a better life. According to the research, privacy and isolation are the main issues confronted by the people who live in the city in the generic vertical apartments. By extracting the characteristics of the vernacular Malay houses, levels could be used to solve the following issues.
The concepts of this Housing are sharing and socialization inspired from the Malay word Kampung (village). It is also commonly used to refer to either one’s hometown or a rural village giving more or less a nostalgic feeling of childhood in the faraway land, in which everything was more simple, natural and less artificial. In this case, this housing can be a tool to help people adjust themselves and blend in together with the surrounding by recreating another community that is helpful to one another where life is less segregated and sharing becomes the main routine. The design is open for transformation; the clusters can later be incremented horizontally and vertically based on the core of the building with the post and beam construction.
The irregularity of this place aims to express the disorder of traditional living lifestyle, however, with its own strategic system makes the life of the user in its suitable order. Vernacular can surely be the catalyst in the contemporary housing by looking back to the traditional way of living and bringing its peculiar characters to adapt to the current issue of increasing population. In this case, the irregularity and the levels are the key vernacular languages that have been extracted to form a new type of housing.