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“Tropical” Architecture in the Highlands of Southeast Asia: Tropicality,

Modernity and Identity

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“Tropical” Architecture in the Highlands of

Southeast Asia: Tropicality, Modernity and Identity

David Beynon

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Southeast Asia: Tropicality, Modernity and Identity, Fabrications, 27:2, 259-278, DOI:
10.1080/10331867.2017.1295502

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Fabrications, 2017
VOL. 27, NO. 2, 259–278
https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2017.1295502

“Tropical” Architecture in the Highlands of Southeast

Asia: Tropicality, Modernity and Identity
David Beynon
Faculty of Science, Technology and Built Environment, School of Architecture and Built Environment,
Deakin University, Geelong, Australia

ABSTRACT
The “tropical” condition has long been established as a Western trope that defines the
“otherness” of climates perceived as hot, humid and uncomfortable compared to the
“temperate” West. Both colonial adaptations and “Tropical Modernist” architectural
responses to Southeast Asian locations were primarily framed in terms of their
amelioration of this apparently hostile environment. That the more recent conflations
of tropicality with postcolonial Asian identity and environmental sustainability remain
within the same construct leads to questions not only of what architectural alternatives
there might be, but also what alternative tropicalities there might be. This paper explores
the possibilities suggested by contemporary buildings in Southeast Asia’s tropical
highlands. Produced in the relative absence of “tropical” imperatives and the presence
of long-standing traditions of autonomy and resistance to lowland state formations, this
architecture offers a less homogenous reading of tropicality.

Introduction: Tropicality/Locality in Southeast Asia

Writing on tropicality in the highly influential volume on Tropical Architecture,
which revived a mid-twentieth-century discourse in the new millennium, Bruno
Stagno observed,
Life in the tropics is under the permanent dominion of sensuality. This is evoked by
the presence of an exuberant vegetation, under a sky inhabited by capricious clouds;
the hammock with its soft swaying; by the importance of the shade that gathers; by the
breeze that refreshes and evaporates the sweat of the skin; by the rain, the bracing sun
and the multiple mirages. The noises at night come from vigorous nature: the sound
of the buds when they blossom, the rustle of animals free and unleashed, the dense,
powerful perfume of humidity wafting in the air.1
The architecture of tropical regions has long been defined in this manner, primar-
ily by contrasting notions of sybaritic indolence and disease-ridden discomfort,
extremes derived from the perceived otherness of the tropics to Western culture.
Such a discourse might seem a self-evident response to the exigencies of the

CONTACT David Beynon [email protected]

© 2017 The Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand
260  D. BEYNON

tropical climate, but this arbitrary reduction of an entire region’s architectural

culture to climate has never served to define the architecture of the “temperate”
West.2 In architectural terms, one of the differences between the beginnings of
modernity in Southeast Asia when compared with contemporaneous develop-
ments in Europe, North America and Australia is that (with the exception of
Thailand) the region’s modernity was largely shaped by colonial regimes where
colonists were greatly outnumbered by native inhabitants. As a result, individual
works of architecture that express early twentieth-century idioms of technolog-
ical and spatial progress have to be considered within this context. This begs the
question of how the putative ideals of these architectural expressions might be
reconciled with the power structures and manifest inequalities of the colonial
encounter in Southeast Asia.
To answer this question, this paper will explore how attention to minor cultures
and marginal architectures might expose and critique this tropical paradigm. All
architecture represents particular histories of cultural relations and influences.
Many forms of architecture evoke a mixture of local and imported traditions,
and this paper will argue in relation to Southeast Asian architecture that some of
these traditions have been de-emphasised in favour of others that seem to embody
principles of tropicality understandable to outsiders. In particular, it will argue
that the confluence of spatial, material and symbolic aspects in Southeast Asian
architecture cannot simply be reduced to those that relate to imported ideas of
comfort within a tropical climate, and so suggest less homogenous readings of
tropicality in relation to architecture.
Culturally, European colonisers differentiated their Southeast Asian subjects
through perceptions or constructions of their “otherness,” a term that has been
familiarised in postcolonial literature.3 In architectural discourse and practice,
this state of otherness was attributed to the tropical climate of Southeast Asian
colonies and regarded synonymous with architectural expressions of modernity.
This equivalence is curious as, notwithstanding the European and North American
continents’ considerable climatic variations, from the heat of the Spanish summer
to the cold of the Scandinavian winter, climate has rarely been the primary driver
of modern Western architectural expression in Europe or North America. While
climatic adaptation is certainly evident in the geographical variations of Western
architecture, the rhetoric of Western Modernism has concentrated on its ideals of
spatial freedom, aesthetic abstraction and the integration of structure and surface,
with few explicit references to climate differences across its territories. However,
when Europeans conquered and started to inhabit the tropics, the broad range of
Western architectural imperatives found themselves subordinated to the intensely
perceived otherness of this unfamiliar environment. This otherness is perhaps
most starkly contrasted in the tropical non-West, that zone of most extreme
otherness to the “temperate” West. As David Arnold puts it, extending Edward
Said’s conception of Orientalism as a geographic/cultural distinction between the
enlightened West and its inferior other:
 FABRICATIONS  261

‘the tropics’ became a Western way of defining something environmentally and cul-
turally distinct from Europe … in mental and spatial juxtaposition to the perceived
normality of the northern temperate zone.4
The tropical climate was seen to conspire against all that the West represented:
progress, dynamism and enduring human domination over the natural world. In
the tropics, in an atmosphere of enervating heat and humidity, the need to thwart
the relentless elements became the primary motivation for Western-influenced
architectural thought and consequently has generated discourses around Southeast
Asian architecture that have been both homogenising and essentialising. And
while this mode of thinking has become more reflexive, particularly in the wake
of Arnold’s coining of tropicality as a clear way of expressing the tropics as a
trope constructed by the West – not just a physical space but also something
conceived as intrinsically other in a culturally embedded sense – these climate-
based associations have become further entrenched.5 The apparent contrast
between the temperate West and the tropical non-West has been a pivotal point
of departure for these discourses, and architecture in Southeast Asia continues
to be framed within their terms.
Instead, as Jiat-Hwee Chang and Anthony King have pointed out, the trope of
the tropical has become a part of a more globalised notion of sustainable archi-
tecture.6 Mid-century Modernist excursions into tropical Asia as codified by
the works of theorist-practitioners such as Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew and Otto
Koenigsberger and their institutions constituted the field of tropical architecture
as the embodiment of an apparently technical discourse, embodying the techno-
logical and social progress that Asian societies aspired to by the mid-twentieth
century.
As it was seen strictly as the technoscientific adjustment of design and planning princi-
ples of modern architecture to the timeless “natural” conditions of the tropical climate,
it was also rendered ahistorical and apolitical.7
There is irony in this technological framing. Colonial developments in Asia had
long adapted of such tropical/subtropical building types as the Bengali bangla
pavilion via the East India Company’s bungale to bungalows in Singapore and
northern Australia.8 The pragmatic nature of many colonial buildings means that
the field, as a whole, should not be seen as universal in its aims and methods.
However, connections to local forms of architecture became increasingly elided in
tropicalist discourses in favour of technological knowledge apparently imported
wholesale from the West. These epistemic revisions were explicitly or implicitly
influenced by the work of figures such as Pierre Gourou, a mid-twentieth-century
cultural geographer who’s studies of Southeast Asia suggested that indigenous
ways of knowing their own surroundings were less rational and ordered than
those of Western experts.9 A question raised by this apparent contradiction is to
what degree this notion of the tropical was/is the actual situation in Southeast
Asia or is purely a lingering form of orientalism, one of the processes by which
colonisers exercised power over the colonised. As Ashis Nandy has suggested,
262  D. BEYNON

the most enduring forms of colonial power are those that are not overt; “a
culture in which the ruled are constantly tempted to fight their rulers within the
psychological limits set by the latter.”10 The tropical climate was also regarded the
ultimate in sybaritic comfort. Apart from a shelter from sun and rain, the needs of
architecture would seem to be few. Nature is abundant and fecund. In this respect,
the apparent discomforts of the tropical climate were only rendered urgent when
colonised Southeast Asians absorbed Western views towards it, based not only
on Westerners’ preferences for a temperate climate but also absorption of cultural
and economic practices that had been normalised in such a climate. However, the
minority of colonised subjects of early twentieth-century Southeast Asia who wore
Westernised clothing and worked to the efficiencies promoted by their colonial
masters often internalised the pejorative perceptions of their environment.
The contrasting perceptions outlined so far suggest that while dealing with the
climatic conditions of the tropical zone might not have been the only imperative
of post-independence architects in Southeast Asia, Western notions of such a
climate’s inhospitability has remained. Despite political independence, predomi-
nating work practices and business clothing in postcolonial Southeast Asian cities
generally require artificial maintenance of a temperate climate within buildings
for human comfort. In an era of increasing scrutiny of the environmental conse-
quences of mechanical cooling, this has meant identification of these culturally
imported practices as fundamental design principles. While cross-ventilation,
passive cooling, solar orientation and the like are important for comfort (in a
variety of climates) the idealised conditions that they have combined to create
have become primary sites of cultural colonisation.
Furthermore, such appropriation of Western ideas about locality in ex-colonial
environments becomes useful to serve the politics of identity in contemporary
Southeast Asia. Thus, as Chee Kien Lai and Anoma Pieris argue, by the 1990s a
sense of equivalence between the “tropical” and “Asian” identities had developed
in Southeast Asia.11 While Asian identities, even if repressed and marginalised, did
prevail in colonial period Southeast Asia, the correspondence of such identities
with the tropical climate is an outcome of lengthy periods of domination by cultures
that viewed this climate in a particular (and prejudicial) manner. Therefore, the idea
of a tropical climate as posing a problem to be overcome and the sense of tropicality
being mobilised as the basis for anti-colonial identity cannot be easily separated.

Conflations and Complications: Tropicality and Southeast Asian Identity

Contemporary Southeast Asian built environments have undergone and continue
to undergo rapid change as part of a lengthy decolonisation process dating from
the mid-twentieth century to the present. Countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia
and the Philippines deal with the ongoing demographic legacies of colonial set-
tlement, religious affiliation and territorial definition. At the same time, since
decolonisation, Southeast Asia has come to redefine its modernity, not only in
 FABRICATIONS  263

reference to the West but also increasingly in relation to intra-Asian develop-

ments. Increasingly, Asian architects such as William Lim in Singapore have been
challenging the conflation of universal with Western within received definitions
of architectural modernity.12 As Chang and King suggest, “We see tropical archi-
tecture not as a depoliticized entity but as a power-knowledge configuration,
inextricably linked to asymmetrical colonial power relations.”13 Following Abbas’
argument, there is still a reluctance to consider cultures previously peripheral to
empire as now central; a trait that is exemplified by continued discursive refer-
ence to former colonial masters for cues and comparisons regarding their value,
suggesting the replication of colonial economic and social hierarchies.
Even the most celebrated of Southeast Asia’s post-independence architects
have applied ideas of tropicality to architecture without taking much interest
in their sources and genealogies.14 The adoption by architects such as Ken
Yeang and Tay Kheng Soon of techno-modernity in the service of local identity
implicitly de-ethnicises Southeast Asian architecture, allying local identity
more to an updated notion of modernist progress (now eco-progress) of form
following climate than to the minefield of ethnically/religiously specific formal
references that might ignite chauvinism or conflict, 15 suggesting that the colonial
notion of tropical otherness is still being perpetuated. On the one hand, they
remind us, perhaps, that all architecture can be perceived as a human reaction
to nature’s inhospitability to dwelling, with such projects as Yeang’s bioclimatic
skyscrapers and groundscrapers directly fighting architecture’s displacement of
so-called natural relationships, aspects of which could be seen as intrinsically
anti-ecological. On the other hand, the internalisation of colonial attitudes
towards the tropical, noted earlier, might also be seen in their work. Firstly, a
building such as Yeang’s Singapore National Library might be seen in its techno-
modernist expression as an internalisation of imported notions about architecture,
rather than an example of climate-inflected abstraction (Figure 1). Secondly, the
aims of its spatial envelope are based on presumptions about what constitutes a
suitable (and efficient) workplace that would remain intact even if its architectural
expression were based on local antecedents.
Countering this, at least in purpose, have been architectural extrapolations of
ecodevelopment and intermediate technologies, derived from mid-twentieth-cen-
tury notions of small-scale development.16 Work by various architects in Southeast
Asia has localised such ecodevelopmental ideas, merging globalised ecological prin-
ciples with local typologies in a number of projects, most notably the Aga Khan
Award-winning Kampong Kali-Kode in Yogyakarta by Yusuf P. Mangunwijaya in
1985, and more recently by the projects of firms such as TYIN Teguestue and a.gor.a
Architects. This architecture, while not immune from notions of importing Western
expertise and indulging in romantic notions of the picturesque vernacular, does at
its best allow local protagonists a degree of agency as it operates partway between the
formalising aspirations of architects and the practical imperatives of having to apply
local materials, methods and miniscule budgets to necessary facilities (housing,
264  D. BEYNON

Figure 1. National Library, Singapore by architects T.R. Hamzah & Yeang. Photograph by David
Beynon, 2006.

medical facilities, schools, etc.). The resulting architectures often have a rough-hewn
“honesty” which appeals to global architectural discourse’s appreciation of mini-
malised form, partially an evocation of craft traditions largely lost to middle-class
metropolitan populations in both West and East, and partially an assuagement of
the limited scope of a generally elitist and metropolitan-centric discipline.
However, sometimes the insertion of the local is less comforting for the global
audience, as it appears as the re-emergence of more atavistic and fragmented
notions of identity and locality. This is where traditional local forms of architec-
tural expression find themselves more bluntly applied, blurring aspects of locality
and international modernity until the results are distinctive, but not readily attrib-
utable to either the local or the universal.17 For instance, it is common to see the
application of specifically local forms to otherwise global types of architecture,
whether in villages or in towns and cities. Most prominent is the use of distinctive
local roof forms, adapted, or sometimes apparently just grafted, to office buildings,
hotels, government offices and other generic globalised typologies, such as is found
in many localities across Southeast Asia.
Sometimes these architectural hybridisations of the local and global reinforce
prevalent ethno-political or nationalist narratives: for instance, the evocations of
Malay identity within Malaysian national institutions such the National Library’s
utilisation of the songket tengkolok (folded traditional Malay headgear) fabric pat-
tern on its roof and the Istana Budaya or National Theatre’s reference to the form
 FABRICATIONS  265

of the sirih junjung, a traditional Malay table arrangement. Similarly, a series of

Dewan Suara (Civic centres) in Sarawak, Malaysia indicate how local governments
may exploit these associations.18 In the town of Bau, situated in the traditional
territory of the Bidayuh people, the traditional baruk (head house) is reimagined
as a conical-roofed council chamber. Similarly, in many provinces of Indonesia
a local vernacular house type or form has been selected to represent the identity
of a city or province, and in some cases government regulations prescribe such
usage.19 However, there are other forms of vernacular architecture in remote or
more provincial parts of nations that appear marginal even to national narratives.
The prevalence of these hybridised types can also be read as emblematic of a
contemporary environment that, while on the one hand globalising and argu-
ably homogenising their formal expression around pantropical criteria, is also
developing new forms of localisation whereby strands of specific traditions (not
limited to climate) are reified into culturally based building elements that are freely
mixed with technologies from other localities. Such buildings raise questions of
how the architects who build in these environments might reconcile the idea of
vernacular architecture, traditionally seen as anonymous and collective, and the
self-conscious practice of grafting distinctive vernacular forms onto otherwise
globalised building types. What is important is the choice of characteristics to be
translated out of their customary context and the meanings that are ascribed to
these representations.
Consequently, the next section of this paper focuses on examples of architecture
that incorporate localised forms and spaces, but do so in situations where climate
is clearly not the primary driver of architectural expression and form. In both
techno-Modernist and ethno-Nationalist forms of Southeast Asian architecture it
is difficult to discern these distinctions due to the influence of global and national
trends. However, exploration of more localised architecture suggests how the
broader discourse on tropical architecture might be inflected if other significant
cultural aspects were given greater prominence over climatic concerns. More spe-
cifically, this next section will concentrate on upland or highland Southeast Asian
environments. Due to their altitudes, highland areas in the tropics have lower
average temperatures and sometimes their climate approximates the temperate
conditions familiar to and deemed comfortable to Westerners, so that the tropi-
cality of their architecture lies only in their geographical and conceptual location.
They are also locations where local forms of architectural expression seem to have
been particularly enduring in the face of imported world views, and so provide
different ways of interpreting local architecture beyond the climatic response.

Lowland Centres and Upland Peripheries

The highland areas of Southeast Asia have produced myriad cultural and archi-
tectural traditions, often due to the domicile of indigenous populations, who have
remained culturally distinct from lowland powers from ancient times, through the
266  D. BEYNON

colonial period and into postcolonial environments. Examples of such culturally

distinct groups include the Toba Batak and Karo of North Sumatra (Figure 2),
the Sa’dan and Mamasa Toraja of West Sulawesi, the Bahnar and Ede of Vietnam’s
central highlands, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, the Manggarai of Flores, the
Iban and Bidayuh of western/central Borneo. The “daily experience of difference”
remains a powerful force in these areas.20 The strength of such local typologies
and compositional forms across the complex centre–periphery relations across
Southeast Asia testify to the relatively recent introduction of centralised state
structures, analyses of which are provided in James Scott’s The Art of Not Being
Governed.21 Scott concentrates his discussion on the traditional divide that exists
in many Southeast Asian countries between coastal, valley or downstream (hilir
in Malay) peoples and hill or upstream (ulu) peoples, and how the formation
of states was essentially a valley phenomenon whose reach was the least (or the
most successfully resisted) in the hills.22 He goes on to describe the hillier regions
of Southeast Asia as the “enormous ungoverned periphery … home to fugitive,
mobile populations …” but not in a negative way.23 Contrary to the usual nation-
alist way of viewing such inhabitations as archaic living ancestors, Scott counters
that their ways of life, their shifting subsistence farming, their social organisa-
tions, their diffused populations, are not the result of peoples being left behind by
progress but instead are “purposefully crafted both to thwart incorporation into
nearby states and to minimise the likelihood that statelike concentrations of power

Figure 2. Rumah Adat Karo (traditional Karo house), Desa Dokan, North Sumatra, Indonesia.
Photograph by David Beynon, 2015.
 FABRICATIONS  267

will arise among them.”24 Even apparent empires such as that of the Khmers, while
certainly centralised at Angkor, can more clearly be seen as the most powerful
of mandalas (a model of state formation defined by the centre) with its influence
dissipating at its extremities rather than meeting the clear boundaries of Thai,
Cham or Viet polities.25 In the diffused areas in between dominant centres local
cultures flourished largely unimpeded. This “purposeful crafting” has meant that
such populations (such as the Tana Toraja, Karo and Toba Batak in Indonesia, the
Bahnar and Ede in Vietnam and Cambodia, the Karen in Myanmar and Thailand,
Ifugao in Philippines) have managed to successfully evade the political and cul-
tural policies imposed by colonisers and lowland states, including their imagined
boundaries.26
The following examples of minority architecture are from different Southeast
Asian highland areas and illustrate various contemporary means of dealing with
this confluence of cultures, influences and power relations. Each also demonstrates
methods of developing architecture that is not primarily based on climate, but on
other characteristics important to their specific culture. Firstly, the persistence/
translation of local symbolic forms can be seen in the contemporary religious
architecture of several of these highland regions. Indonesian regional churches
provide evocative representations of the intersection of tradition and contempo-
raneity, literally expressing the interplay of locality and globality in their often
syncretic compositional forms. Not only do local elements of language, music
and ritual find themselves integrated with imported rituals and doctrines, but
local buildings also hybridise architectural types. Such characteristics can be seen
in the Catholic churches in the Toba Batak and Karo regions of North Sumatra.
The overall form of the Gereja Katolik Inkulturatif Paroki St. Mikhael (Catholic
Church of St. Michael) at Pangururan on the shores of Lake Toba is based on the
jabu (traditional communal Toba Batak house) (Figure 3), while that of the Gereja
Katolik Inkulturatif Karo St. Franciskus Asisi (Catholic Church of St. Francis of
Assisi) in Berastagi is based on a rumah anjong-anjong (a particular form of rumah
adat or traditional Karo house where the main roof form is replicated in miniature
at its peak). Both adapt traditional forms at a vastly increased scale materially
translated from timber into concrete (Figure 4). This mixture of recognisably
local and culturally specific house forms with Western ecclesiastical imagery has
the practical purpose of addressing the spatial needs of large congregations, while
expressing the congregation’s identity through their form and aesthetics.27 The
presence of these two buildings is also illustrative of the appearance of a non-state
religion in many highland areas as noted by Scott. He posits that this was not just
because they represent an alternate power to that promulgated by lowlanders, but
that they provide an “alternate, and to some degree oppositional, modernity.”28
Their theological content may have originated elsewhere, but they now suit local
purposes, syncretising important religions as a precondition of their acceptance
by local communities.
268  D. BEYNON

Figure 3. Gereja Katolik Inkulturatif Paroki St. Mikhael (Catholic Church of St. Michael), Pangururan,
Indonesia. Photograph by David Beynon, 2015.

In contrast, an example of the persistence of a local spatial layout can be seen

in the enduring use of the Iban rumah panjai (longhouse) form in the upriver
areas of central Borneo. While a number of Austronesian peoples traditionally
dwelt in longhouses, for a combination of historical, political and geographical
reasons, the Iban are almost unique in still constructing them.29 An important
aspect of the rumah panjai is its emphasis on spatial arrangement. While there
is carving and other symbolic/decorative elements, these are not intrinsic to the
form of the rumah panjai as are, say, the upswept roofs of the Torajan tongkonan
or the Minangkabau rumah gadang. While the most obvious aspect of an Iban
 FABRICATIONS  269

Figure 4. Gereja Katolik Inkulturatif Karo St. Franciskus Asisi (Catholic Church of St. Francis Assisi),
Berastagi, West Sumatra, Indonesia. Photograph by David Beynon, 2015.

rumah panjai is its length, it is best understood in cross section. In terms of pro-
prietorship, the rumah panjai can be thought of as a series of linked segments,
each of which is owned and occupied by a single family. However, while each bilik
(apartment) remains separate, there are no separations between the ruai (gallery
spaces) of each family’s section so together they form a continuous shared space.
In the interior of Sarawak, both adapted and newly constructed rumah panjai
can frequently be seen. An example is Rumah Matop, near the town of Betong
(Figure 5), the exterior of which combines as a great variety of architectural forms,
so it seems less like a single building than a mass of connected structures. What
has persisted is the essential spatiality of the building type. Recently constructed
longhouses may be hard to recognise at first glance (Figure 6) and may use con-
crete and rendered brickwork and sheet metal or glazed ceramic tile roofs. In fact,
many new rumah panjai have little if any discernable architectural style and are to
the outsider indistinguishable from generic contemporary terrace or row houses
that are widespread in Sarawak and other parts of Southeast Asia. Nevertheless
in both Rumah Matop and these examples, there remain the same sectional qual-
ities, notably the centrality of the ruai. This suggests that so long as the basic
socio-sectional schema of the rumah panjai remains intact, adherence to formal
and material characteristics is relatively inconsequential.
The autonomy of these upland communities presented by Scott challenges
prevailing assumptions of historic power relations in Southeast Asia, relations
that – as evidenced by contemporary Toba Batak/Karo churches and Iban long-
houses – have architectural implications today. In both these cases, their national
270  D. BEYNON

Figure 5. Rumah Matop, near Betong, Sarawak, Malaysia. Photograph by David Beynon 2012.

Figure 6. Recently constructed rumah panjai, near Sri Aman, Sarawak, Malaysia. Photograph by
David Beynon, 2012.

marginality has been partially compensated by cultural autonomy. Certainly

upland areas are not always marginalised, and there are lowland areas that are mar-
ginal to centralised systems of governance in a region of such variegated terrain.
Many of the lowland areas of Southeast Asian nations, especially in archipelagic
 FABRICATIONS  271

Philippines and Indonesia, have retained distinctive forms of traditional architec-

ture, due to their physical and political distancing from power centres. Conversely,
state power can and has been exercised in upland regions – such as Dutch colo-
nial efforts at making Bandung the capital of the Netherlands East Indies, and its
retention as a centre of provincial power in modern Indonesia.
There are two points that need to be separated here. Firstly, the role of periph-
eral locations within Southeast Asian nations in providing clues for generating
site- and culture-specific local architectures that do not rely on globalised archi-
tectural tropes for their authority. Secondly, there is the specificity of highland/
upland locations where responsiveness to climate is not the primary generator
of architectural forms. The confluence of these two points might be more clearly
developed by relating Scott’s writing to Homi Bhabha’s ideas about the location
of culture, in particular his emphasis on importance of the moment and location
of encounter between local and imported cultures as the generator of newness
in the world.30 Bhabha suggests that knowledge of cultural difference needs to
“foreclose on the Other,” meaning to dismantle the epistemology that the West has
constructed around its “natural” dominance of global culture.31 For marginalised
groups, this means a freeing of local traditional forms from externally applied
framings, allowing them to be reinterpreted in the light of their own interac-
tions. These buildings are not constructed so much in reaction to modernity as
for the continuation of other trajectories. They represent the results of particular
entanglements of temporal and spatial circumstances and their contradictions.
By considering their architecture as a form of cultural process their value might
be more widely recognised. Moreover, they embody comparatively raw thought
processes, as their choices and judgements remain relatively unobscured by elite
taste-cultures. Barthes suggests that it is the “myths” of history, geography, cul-
tural identity and nation that provide “meanings” in ways that seem natural and
finite,32 and following this line of thought, the conditions of flux represented by
the localised cultural mixing in these buildings offer particular opportunities for
examining the construction of such meanings. What is produced in the wake of
seemingly ubiquitous notions of tropicality is instead a mixture of significations
that are relatively “uncooked” in Barthes’ “kitchen of meaning,”33 a rawness that
exposes the alchemical processes by which their architectural components are
combined and expressed. Cultural “differences”, as expressed in their architecture,
are partially managed consciously and partially seeps in through the altered con-
ditions of life in their new nationalised/globalised environment. Their reflexivity
is indicative of how local Southeast Asian cultures are positioning themselves
between their own localised histories and the external legacies of colonialism,
modernity and globalisation.
Such architectures reveal moments where identity is both split and blurred, in
Derridean terms, moments of brisure.34 They can be said to constitute examples
of “hinged” spaces involving cultural and architectural selves that have been split
and then reconstituted in a slightly different form. The elements of an “original”
272  D. BEYNON

cultural tradition can, in a sense, be identified, for example, in the resemblance of

their overall architecture to specific house forms that relate to particular traditions,
sets of beliefs and ethnic/cultural sources. However all of these elements have also
been adapted and transformed to varying degrees suggesting a far more dynamic
practice, and a complicated subjectivity. These examples of upland architecture –
with their very different motivations and responses – shed light on other equally
significant prerogatives for architecture in the region beyond climatic concerns.
As Said suggests, agency is the “residence of the power to narrate,” and so the loca-
tion and direction of this power is crucial in understanding buildings in tropical
highlands.35 The term “residence” is useful in this context in that it refers to the
way in which power is always situated. This means positioning tropical architec-
ture in relation to both its own disciplinary boundaries and to various senses of
identity, from the global to the national to the locally specific in terms of ethnicity
or religious adherence. The architecture of tropical highlands suggests how the
trope of the tropical maybe actualised in relation to other aspects of local identity.

Minority Architecture in upland Southeast Asia

As observed by Mikhail Bakhtin;
culture is not made of dead elements, for even a simple brick … in the hands of a
builder expresses something through its form. Therefore new discoveries of material
bearers of meaning alter our semantic concepts, and they can force us to restructure
them radically.36
Within a Southeast Asian nation this can be translated to the relationship between
the dominant/governing/central culture, and those cultures of the provinces, the
periphery of the nation’s assumed self. The resultant architecture might be the
result of local officialdom’s prescriptions for state-based or city-based identity, to
corporate branding of locality and architectonic abstractions of local cultures (e.g.
resorts, museums and cultural centres), along with demands for more literal, leg-
ibly symbolic content than provided by modernist/tropicalist/broadly regionalist
architectural forms. To explore this further, we might consider that the identity of
a minority ethnic group within a nation is somewhat similar to that of a migrant
community – they may not have physically migrated, but temporally and culturally
they have been partially displaced. In this context, Southeast Asian architectural
historiography has long been a reframing process, from standpoints that put the
vernacular architecture of the region as the outcomes of ex-continental drifts
from mainland Asia out to archipelagos of isolations and fragmentation, towards
Sumet Jumsai’s reclaiming of essentially waterborne cultures being in themselves
productive and influential far into that mainland37 (a notion that opposes the
prevalent idea of ancient Javanese or Cambodian or Vietnamese or Thai culture
as primarily provincialised manifestations or amalgams of Indian or Chinese
cultures), and towards views that prioritised the locality, the originality, and the
indigeneity of localised Hindu/Buddhist architecture. In a contemporary sense,
 FABRICATIONS  273

these relations between centre and periphery continue to underlie contradictory

motives for buildings in Southeast Asia. However at the same time, the overt appli-
cation of identity and the desire for cultural and ethnic distinction has not abated,
and is perhaps reinforced as marginalised peoples around the region seek ways of
re-emplacing themselves, anchoring their identity to the ground that they occupy.
The ongoing tension between global and local is often written into architec-
ture, buildings being highly visible and relatively enduring manifestations of local
positions, be they cultural, religious or political. However, as has been noted
in relation to Southeast Asia,38 buildings themselves are often curiously absent
from social or cultural discourses, even though they are often pressed into the
symbolic service of national, provincial or local identity. If, as Anthony King has
noted, nations are Anderson’s “imagined communities” then the space and form of
buildings are the imagined environments that contain, materialise and symbolise
these communities.39 “Imagined communities come to be attached to imagined
places,”40 using their cultural memory to remake the places of indigenous settle-
ment into somewhere where they can feel “at home” in the contemporary world,
not necessarily as recreations of pre-colonial states, but as the results of the mix of
memory, circumstance and projections of the future. Local architectural interven-
tions are therefore important beyond their immediate effect, in that they represent
instances of particular histories of cultural relations and specific influences. In
the European context, Paul Gilroy has posited the importance of the colonial past
being an intrinsic component of the postcolonial present, a point often lost in the
conflicts around the subject of immigration and multiculturalism in Europe.41 In
Asia, the ex-subjects of such colonisation have their own multiculturalisms to deal
with. Their own relations both with nations that formerly ruled over them and
the margins of their own territories marked out largely by those former colonisers
are often contested, and argued from the centre through concepts of homogenous
national identity.42
Individually, if buildings rely on culturally integrated or learned codes of mean-
ing to communicate their purpose in situations of clear cross-cultural mixing,43 it
is understandable that messages legible within buildings demonstrate the interplay
between meaningful forms from the backgrounds being mixed or allied with both
local and received codes of interpretation. Such buildings are really part of a con-
tinuum of buildings intended to evoke, whether in an allegorical, metaphorical or
literal manner, a sense of local identity and a transportation of that identity into the
contemporary world. However “pure” locality, if ever such a thing existed, cannot
be returned to in the contemporary world. New ideas and new needs have been
generated through the imposition of the outside world, whether via colonisation,
nationalisation or the diffuse strands of contemporary globalisation. As Bhabha
asks “What of the more complex cultural situation where ‘previously unrecognized
spiritual and intellectual needs’ emerge from the imposition of such ‘foreign’ ideas,
cultural representations, and structures of power?”44
274  D. BEYNON

Alternative Tropicalities
Traditional vernacular buildings are not necessarily indifferent towards climate.
Cross-ventilation is facilitated by raised floors and permeable walls. Steep roofs
and overhanging eaves keep out heavy rain, (heavy rainfall is a factor even in
cooler upland regions, as is humidity). However, the promotion of certain ver-
nacular forms as proto-ecological in their use of raised floors, permeable walls
and floors to aid cross-ventilation and overhanging roofs and shutters to provide
shade ignores other aspects of vernacular architecture, such as the customary
division of internal spaces or the sense of the house as a living being. Where
these latter aspects take precedence, such as in the Torajan tongkonan – which is
perceived as not just the seat of ancestors, but as an embodiment of the ancestor –
the interior of the building may be physically uncomfortable due to the emphasis
on an overarching roof form of customary importance. Yet in the promotion of
certain localised forms, these more esoteric aspects of traditional cultures have
been de-emphasised in favour of “principles” more understandable to outsiders.
Further consideration of the typological translations involved in buildings
like the Toba Batak and Karo Churches or the contemporary Iban rumah pan-
jai suggests the presence of what Bakhtin terms “heteroglossia.”45 Within their
architecture what initially appears as unitary is really difference within unity, a
confluence of others within their forms and spaces. The subject “architecture” in
these cases is decentred, held in creative tension, in différance.46 Heteroglossia is
also useful for thinking through how to define such buildings local/national/global
or as vernacular architecture/formal architecture, as it allows for the blurring of
such categories in a way that conventional distinctions between the individual
creations of architects and the supposedly anonymous and collective efforts that
result in vernacular buildings do not. While there are differences, the Toba Batak
and Karo churches have clearly been conceived as architectural wholes, and while
rumah panjai are constructed over several years by different members of a com-
munity using a variety of materials and stylistic idioms, each addition conforms
to a clear spatial schema. Both might be also termed eclectic, using the definition
Peter Collins derives from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Victor
Cousin. As he puts it;
The Eclectics were in fact claiming quite rationally that no one should accept blindly
from the past a legacy of a single philosophical system (or of a single architectural
system) to the exclusion of all others, but that each should decide rationally and inde-
pendently what philosophical facts (or architectural elements) used in the past were
appropriate to the present and then recognise and respect them in whatever context
they might appear.47
An acceptance of eclecticism defined in this manner, identifies the presence of
rationally chosen elements from different sources and traditions within the hybrid
whole of buildings such the Toba Batak/Karo churches and the various forms of
contemporary Iban longhouse, as much as it does the projects driven by architects
such as Yusuf P. Mangunwijaya, TYIN Teguestue and a.gor.a.
 FABRICATIONS  275

These definitions all suggest a multiplicity of ways of understanding these build-

ings, and their confluence of spatial, material and symbolic aspects cannot be
simply reduced to those which seem clear in terms of imported ideas of comfort
within a particular climate. The enthusiasm with which local and global elements
are adopted within their architecture is indicative of a “slippery” atmosphere in
which the re-invention of tradition, ethnicity, kinship and other aspects of identity
attempt to create an “arena for conscious choice, justification and representation.”48
So these overlays are not simply a merging of locality and globality. These build-
ings embody forms of power and knowledge to differing degrees in relation to
modernity, and their knowledge of how to mediate traditions into the contempo-
rary environment is in each case juxtaposed with their agency in relation to that
knowledge, the power of those that build and use them to apply what they know.
They are as Nederveen Pieterse has suggested for Indonesia, not just examples of
“global melange” but eloquent about the “terms under which cultural interplay
and crossover take place.”49 In a holistic sense, such buildings are adaptations and
interpretations, as Caples and Jefferson put it; “channelling information streams
of cultural traditions, spatial imprints, materiality, landscape and colours into
Modern architecture.”50 These buildings are both acts of re-territorialisation that
attempts to localise the cultural aspect of the previous colonial power, but also a
response to the contemporary Indonesian state.
These full-scale typological translations bring local vernacular culture to bear
on globalised power structures in a much more holistic sense than the almost
Asia-wide use of traditional roof forms to graft local identity onto building types
that are otherwise imported and imposed in toto. As such they bend globalised
types to local ways of being within architecture as much as they acquiesce to
imported ideas. For instance, to enter the main space of the Catholic Church at
Pangururan, you have to mount covered but still external stairs behind the front
façade, reimagining the traditional entry sequence into a Toba Batak jabu. The
fact that the main worship space of the church is raised on symbolic piles hybrid-
ises its spatial positioning in the same way that the images that decorate its walls
hybridise its visual presence.
Thus, the highland “tropical” architecture described in this paper is not exclu-
sively traditional or contemporary, but a sometimes conflicting hybrid of these
things, evoking a mixture of local and imported traditions. They indicate how new
typologies (such as that of a Christian church) are rendered in a locally “tradi-
tional” manner and traditional local elements (such as the spatial organisation of
the longhouse) can be reinterpreted in the light of new interactions. By marking
out space – creatively and (in the context of the dominant tropical hegemony)
radically – alternative subjectivities are articulated by these hybridised buildings,
suggesting a more complex and diverse grounding for their postcolonial nations’
future architecture. This grounding might be the basis not only for alternative
forms of architecture (as sourced from the rich variety of local building traditions
and expressions) but also for less homogenous forms of tropicality. Such alternative
276  D. BEYNON

tropicalities do not mean negating climate-responsive aspects of architecture, but

do mean greater recognition of its symbolic and socio-spatial aspects. With this
recognition, the tropical climate in Southeast Asia need not be foregrounded any
more than the temperate climes of Europe and North America, requiring certain
architectural responses for human comfort but rendering these implicit in favour
of more precise responses to the social and cultural specificities of particular
localities.
Unlike the adverse impacts caused by European colonisation, during which
many aspects of vernacular cultures in Asia were threatened, reduced, or mar-
ginalised,51 decolonisation saw a proliferation of the local within the global. This
process has since imploded as centralised national identities and their imagined
community become fragmented and as smaller communities, previously isolated
by geography communicate and support each other. Much in the same manner
as local languages that were previously restricted or prohibited in their use have
gained popularity, repressed local forms and expressions legible in architecture are
being remade at a variety of levels, from the national (e.g. Indonesian/Malaysian/)
to the provincial (West Sumatra/Sarawak) to the local (Toba Batak/Karo/Iban). In
the wake of both tropical modernism and abstracted evocations of the regional
vernacular, this tropical highland architecture is decorative, symbolic and visceral,
but also political in expression. Drawing on traditional architectural forms that are
expressive and idiosyncratic, the contemporary buildings of highland Southeast
Asia also provide an architecture that is unashamedly eclectic, involving mimesis,
appropriation, consumption and the distillation of disparate sources, with regard
for received meanings but also a sense of how to creatively combine them. These
updated forms of expression lend an unmistakeable place specificity to the glo-
balised means of making architecture and present a visceral counterpoint to the
diffused pan-Asian modernity produced within the dominant tropical paradigm.

Notes
Bruno Stagno, “Tropicality,” in Tropical Architecture: Critical Regionalism in the Age
1. 
of Globalization, eds. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (London: Wiley-Academy,
2001), 65–92, 78.
2. 
Anoma Pieris, “‘Tropical’ Cosmopolitanism? The Untoward Legacy of the American
Style in Post Independence Ceylon/Sri Lanka,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
32 (2011): 332–349, 334.
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
3. 
1992), 1; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 31.
David Arnold, “India’s Place in the Tropical World, 1770–1930,” Journal of Imperial
4. 
and Commonwealth History, 26, no. 1 (1998): 1–21, 2.
David Arnold, “Inventing Tropicality,” in The Problem of Nature: Environment,
5. 
Culture and European Expansion, ed. D. Arnold (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995),
141–168, 142; Gavin Bowd and Daniel Clayton, “Fieldwork and Tropicality in French
Indochina: Reflections on Pierre Gourou’s Les Paysans du Delta Tonkinois, 1936,”
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 24, no. 2 (2003): 147–168.
 FABRICATIONS  277

6.  Jiat-Hwee Chang and Anthony D. King, “Towards a Genealogy of Tropical

Architecture: Historical Fragments of Power-knowledge, Built Environment and
Climate in the British Colonial Territories,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
32 (2011): 283–300, 284.
7.  Chang and King, “Towards a Genealogy of Tropical Architecture,” 283.
8.  Madhevi Desai, Miki Desai and Jon Lang, The Bungalow in Twentieth Century India:
The Cultural Expression of Changing Ways of Life and Aspirations in the Domestic
Architecture of Colonial and Post-colonial Society (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
9.  Bowd and Clayton, “Fieldwork and Tropicality in French Indochina,” 152.
10. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3.
11. Lai Chee-Kien and Anoma Pieris, “Post-tropical/Post-tsunami: Climate and
Architectural Discourse in South and Southeast Asia,” Singapore Journal of Tropical
Geography 32 (2011): 365–381, 365.
12. William Lim, Asian Alterity: With Special Reference to Architecture + Urbanism
Through The Lens of Cultural Studies (Singapore: World Scientific, 2008), 56; Anthony
King, “Modernism: Where We’re at (And How We Got Here),” in Non West Modernist
Past: On Architecture and Modernities, eds. William Lim and Jiat-Hwee Chang
(Singapore: World Scientific, 2012), 27–36, 31.
13. Chang and King, “Towards a Genealogy of Tropical Architecture,” 284.
14. Abidin Kusno, “Tropics of Discourse: Notes on the Re-invention of Architectural
Regionalism in Southeast Asia in the 1980s,” Fabrications, 19, no. 2, (2010): 58–81, 69.
15. Lai and Pieris, “Post-tropical/Post-tsunami,” 373.
16. E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (New
York: Blond & Briggs, 1973), 80.
17. Abidin Kusno, “Architecture After Nationalism: Political Imaginings of Southeast
Asian Architects,” in Critical Reflections on Cities in Southeast Asia, eds. Tim Bunnell,
Lisa Drummond, and Kong Chong Ho (Singapore: Times Media/Brill, 2002), 124–
152, 124.
18. David Beynon, “Architecture, Identity and Cultural Sustainability in Southeast Asian
Cities,” Review of Malaysian and Indonesian Affairs, 44, no. 2 (2010): 179–208, 189.
19. Reimar Schefold, “The Southeast Asian-type House: Common Features and Local
Transformations of an Ancient Architectural Tradition,” in Indonesian Houses:
Tradition and Transformation in Vernacular Architecture, eds. Reiner Schefold,
Gaudenz Domenig, and Peter Nas (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2003), 19–60, 54.
20. L.A. Eng, Francis Collins, and Brenda Yeoh, Migration and Diversity in Asian Contexts
(Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013), 9.
21. James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast
Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
22. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 2.
23. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 6.
24. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 8.
25. Stanley J. Thambiah, “The Galactic Polity: The Structure of Political Kingdoms in
Southeast Asia,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 293, no. 1 (2013): 69–97.
26. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 11.
27. Ronald Hasudungan Irianto Sitindjak, “Studi ikonologi panofsky pada arsitektur
dan interior gereja katolik inkulturatif pangururan,” Dimensi Interior, 9, no. 2 (2011):
119–136.
28. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 319.
 278  D. BEYNON

29. Robert Winzeler, “Two Patterns of Architectural Change in Borneo,” in Indigenous

Architecture in Borneo: Traditional Patterns and New Developments, ed. Robert
Winzeler (Phillips, ME: Borneo Research Council, 1998), 88–118; David Beynon,
“The Contemporary Iban Longhouse: The Sustenance and Applicability of a Socio-
spatial Culture,” The International Journal of Sustainability in Economic, Social and
Cultural Context, 9, no. 1 (2013): 87–99, 87.
30. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 35.
31. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 31.
32. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Travers (New York: Hill and Wang,
1972), 91.
33. Roland Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 157.
34. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976),
65.
35. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), 359.
36. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1986), 6.
37. Sumet Jumsai, Naga: Cultural Origins in Siam and the West Pacific (Singapore: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 23.
38. Stephen Cairns, “Troubling Real-estate: Reflecting on Urban Form in Southeast
Asia,” in Critical Reflections on Cities in Southeast Asia, eds. Tim Bunnell, Lisa B.W.
Drummond, and K.C. Ho, 101–123, 102; Anthony King, Spaces of Global Cultures:
Architecture Urbanism Identity (London: Routledge, 2004), 32.
39. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1990), 6; King, Spaces of Global Cultures, 5.
40. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics
of Difference,” in Culture Power Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, eds. Akhil
Gupta and James Ferguson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 33–51, 39.
41. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005),
145.
42. Koompong Noobanjong, “Power, Identity, and the Rise of Modern Architecture:
From Siam to Thailand,” PhD diss. University of Colorado, 2003, 340.
43. Umberto Eco, “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture,” in Rethinking
Architecture; A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1997),
173–195, 182.
44. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 12.
45. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981),
272.
46. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 49.
47. Peter Collins, Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture (London: Faber and Faber,
1965), 118.
48. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 44.
49. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalisation Goes in Circles: Hybridities East-West,” in
Hybridising East and West: Tales Beyond Westernisation. Empirical Contributions
to the Debates on Hybridity, ed. D. Schirmer, Gernot Saalman, and Christl Kessler
(Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), 21–34, 25.
50. Sara Caples and Everando Jefferson, “Introduction: Mixology,” Architectural Design
75, no. 5 (2005): 5–7, 7.
51. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 13.

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