Creating Spaces of Freedom
The 1999 Prince Claus Award
On 8 December 1999 the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development announced the winners of the 1999 Prince Claus Awards. Since 1997 the Prince Claus Awards have been presented to people and organizations in recognition of and to encourage their exceptional achievements in the field of culture and development in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Among the ten laureates who received the Awards were Tsai Chih Chung, cartoonist (1948, Taiwan) and Kenneth Yeang, architect (1948, Malaysia). The journalist and author Ku Pi-ling (Taiwan) and the architect Charles Yencks (1939, United States) have each written an enlightening piece on the works of Tsai Chih Chung and Kenneth Yeang respectively.
Ken Yeang: The Reinvention of the Skyscraper
By CHARLES JENCKS
Ken Yeang (1948, Penang, Malaysia) came onto the scene of international architecture with the Roof-Roof House, constructed for himself in 1984. This curious-sounding structure, built as an environmental experiment in the hot and humid climate of Kuala Lumpur, does indeed feature the roof. It has a gigantic sunshade, a curved white pergola that leaps over the roof below in the flat arc of a projectile, a white comet tearing down through the blue sky in a staccato burst of light and shadow. A porous sunshade on top of a covering for the rain; that is, a Roof+Roof, a poetic and pop architecture created by climatic necessities. In Malaysia the prevailing temperature is 30 degrees, the humidity 70 per cent, and foreigners who fly in never forget the first impression of this equatorial sauna. Since constructing this tour de force in sparkling white concrete (now a bit green with moss), Yeang has developed an ecological architecture for larger building types and it is this, which has made him one of the forces to be reckoned with internationally.Actually, he first developed the approach while studying in the early 1970s: at the Architectural Association in London and at Cambridge University, where he wrote his thesis in 1972 entitled 'Design with Nature: The ecological basis for design'. Here, he also did a thesis on ersatz culture and the simulacrum, under my direction. Abstract thinking and research are essential to his work. By the year 2000 he will have eight books to his credit and several key papers that analyse the tall building, climatically considered. If I am right in predicting his importance, then Yeang will have about the same century of influence, for, however questionable the skyscraper is as the most assertive of urban forms, it is going to continue to dominate cities and therefore it will have to be rethought environmentally and in other ways.
One should also mention the cultural nature of this research, for that is also a rarity, both in this building type and this part of the world, where resources are directed elsewhere. As Ken Yeang has written: 'The fight for Independence (in Malaysia) must be matched by a fight for an independent architecture based on independent thought.' Most architectural cultures remain provincial backwaters and to open them up they need the inspiration and free thinking of a creative leader. Regional architecture can challenge the global forces of commerce and culture only where new knowledge is being produced by individuals who can translate it into a creative art.
It no longer grows from within local practice and local materials. Globalization is much too powerful for the old determinants of form. Basically, in the last hundred years, there have been three types of tall building: the flat slab or 'sky-scraper', the point tower or 'sky-pricker', and the spread-out cluster or 'sky city'. Ken Yeang has challenged the boring homogeneity with what he has christened the Bioclimatic Skyscraper. The ecological imperative has made his structures lively not dull, muscular instead of flat-chested and with an inviting, gregarious face rather than the blank stare of a Mafioso behind dark glasses.
Sky courts
Yeang's concoctions are cheerful; they open out a different face on every side partly because the climate is different on every side. Beyond these considerable aesthetic and symbolic qualities, they have provided several environmental innovations that are equivalent to traditional and modern techniques. For instance, whereas low buildings had such climatic filters as verandas, trelliswork, and louvres, he puts them high above ground; where Le Corbusier introduced the roof garden and concrete brise soleil, he combines these elements with atria to produce 'sky courts' shaded by reflective aluminium louvres, without Le Corbusier's problem of re-radiating the blocked heat back into the house every night.
Yeang's work is empirically driven and systematic in addressing ecological concerns. While its main points can be gleaned from his 'The Skyscraper Bioclimatically Considered' (1996), its most striking embodiment is the fifteen-storey tower near Kuala Lumpur Airport. Instead of an authoritarian and introverted statement of a multinational corporation, the IBM Tower is a robust and picturesque expression of an emerging technology. Most notable of his energy-saving devices are the two spirals of green sky courts that twist up the building and provide shade and visual contrast with the steel and aluminium surfaces, The reinforced concrete frame is further punctuated by two types of sun screens and a glass and steel curtain wall, which, along with the sloping base and metal crown, make the essentially high-tech image much more organic what could be called 'organitech', a synthesis of opposites.
I see the IBM Tower and his ideal version of the eco-skyscraper the Tokyo Nara Tower (1992) as essentially post-modern. They play the double coding in a dramatic way: the vertical columns are strongly opposed by the sliding horizontal sunshades, the spiral of gardens and planting are juxtaposed with the flat glazing. A green hill leaps over a car park nature overcoming the machine while solid fights against void, the rooftop spikes, meant to hold solar cells, play off against curves and a sensuous pool.
Ken Yeang can enter a field, a speculative development, in an exploding civilisation, and still think environmentally. Contemplate the contradictions. It has led to many tall buildings that are flashy, to be sure, and in the larger sense unecological, because they are huge and high tech. But each one is a pragmatic testing of a green idea, however small, and a step in his construction of a new paradigm. As a result we are beginning to see the new skyscraper emerge with what he calls 'valves', movable parts (including windows that open!), filters such as exterior louvres, lift and service cores located on the sides where it is hot, sky courts and vegetation used to cool, contrasts between sunshades and clearglass. All this leads to a new, articulate, and dynamic body. It leads to a new theory that, like Le Corbusier's Five Points, has been summarized and replicated around the world.
If the skyscraper becomes as responsive to its environment as animals and plants have to theirs, then we can look forward to its having the variety of the natural world. Every face, and every individual, slightly different. If it does evolve towards this ecological diversity, then Ken Yeang is to be thanked. The result would be an alternative to the reigning mode of corporate architecture and a new synthesis responding to the climate of a particular place, finding inspiration for a new architectural language in forces that are ultimately cosmic. *
Charles Jencks is the author of the best-selling 'The Language of Post-Modern Architecture', 'Architecture Today', and 'The Architecture of the Jumping Universe'.