Shophouses, or, the persistence of form.

Front room in a new shophouse, Hoi An, Vietnam.

Hoi An's "ancient houses" [meaning 18th and 19th century] are mostly shop houses - a shop or business on the ground floor opening onto the street, with living quarters behind and above. I saw a similar pattern in Hanoi with the tube houses, and found more recently in Kuala Lumpur, in Chinatown and Little India. What is interesting to me is that these forms [shop house, tube house] continue despite the disappearance [or evolution] or the original impetus for developing that form - especially in Vietnam.

For example, new vernacular houses in Hoi An seem to have the large, open front room opening onto the street, even when the house doesn't have any commercial activities on the premises. Walking down the street at night, I saw house after house with the lights on, TV blaring, and no one in these rooms. It was very strange. I could hear voices, but people seemed to be either in the back room, or in the upper rooms. It was as if the shop, which had historically occupied that space, had disappeared, but habitation patterns hadn't quite caught up yet.

The shop house, or tube house, form, though, also seemed to persist in suburban areas as well, where presumably there are no zoning/tax regulations [the impetus for tube houses in Hanoi] or historical precedent or commercial need on the site [the impetus for shop houses in Hoi An]. We saw these on our bike ride out of Hoi An to the beach, which was 3 miles outside of the town, and also on the plane flying out of Da Nang. New suburban homes were clustered together in the middle of rice fields, densely packed and at least three stories tall. Could it be a need/desire to preserve land for rice fields? Or is it, like the Mongolian ger, an architectural, formal [maybe even cultural] given? 

Unlike the ger, however, the "new vernacular shop house" no longer responds to the original factors that determined its form, because those factors have disappeared, or changed. This is why new vernacular architecture fascinates me. People build houses in a certain way because "that's what a house is" - its form and appearance are coded in spatial organization, color, trim details, and where the car [or motorbike] goes. That code, in turn, is deciphered using historical references filtered through cultural, economic, and societal definitions [rather than, perhaps, actual understandings of history]. I think this can lead to an unfortunate understanding of architecture as a series of eras marked by pat names [Victorian! Greek Revival!], but I think that in reality, it's much more complicated.

I'm more interested in deciphering patterns of occupation, or clues as to the dissemination of culture, building and climate mediation methods...and of course, the point at which the exigencies of climate outweigh the traditional imperative of culture: the moment of innovation in the evolution of form. 


I may have found one today, at 8 Heeren Street, Melaka. Not just the house itself, but the house + the place + some good conversations I've had over the past couple days with some very interesting people. Stay tuned. I have to anyway, since I don't know what it all means yet. 

Not a shophouse: Villa Santosa [c. 1920], Kampung Morten, Melaka, Malaysia.