Architects Building Resilient Communities

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Architecture should enable and strengthen human connections – a key condition in creating resilient communities to face the 21st century catastrophes. How should we translate our concerns in the work that we do as studio tutors in the architecture design studio projects? This is the central thesis for the Unit 2 studio of the Master of Architecture (M Arch) design thesis studio projects, consisted of twenty-five (25) final year students from 2018 to 2020. The students collaborated to offer the design solutions based on their meticulous study of the site contexts in a ‘context specificity’ approach, focused on deriving ‘specific solutions for specific problems’, that included many hours of site observations as well as interviewing members of the two communities, in the 2018-2019 program at Kampung Kerinchi, Kuala Lumpur and in 2019-2020 program at the old town Petaling Jaya (section 1, 2, 3 and 4). Proposals were derived from the study of both areas, within local and communal private and public realm including religious buildings, markets, schools, housing, adaptive reuse of old buildings, hospital and health-care buildings, transportation buildings, day care and recreational facilities, all based on a site-context issues driven approach. A presentation to the local authorities, councilors and residents were presented at the end of each year. The studio were led by the architectural practitioners Kevin Mark Low and Lisa Foo with the University of Malaya academic, Naziaty Mohd Yaacob, as collaborators to the students’ design process for the year-long academic program. 

This is a conclusion to the series on  'Re-examining community architecture: with site specific issues in local context situations'. The podcast is based on the essay submitted to the organisers of the International Forum for Architecture Thesis Design in Taiwan & Southeast Asia 2020 , National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, in partnership with the Taiwan Ministry of Education.

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