Joo Bravo da Costa

OMA, Penang Tropical City, Penang, Malaysia, 2004 Penang Tropical City is a combination of Southeast Asian identity and aspiration.

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PENANG TROPICAL CITY PENANG MALAYSIA

OMA
A mixed-use programme for Penang in Malaysia with the potential to accommodate a resident population of 27,000 required OMA to operate at a planning level, while providing architectural denition. Joo Bravo da Costa describes how this led to a strategy that focused on types rather than objects, and specically a typological distribution of programme across the site.

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The contrasts between hills and sea, countryside and city, offer a powerful backdrop to the rich mixture of contrasting avours, aromas, languages and habits that make up Penangite society and culture. Given the privileged location, the site is a choice plot of land with the potential to become a residential, business and leisure hub within a regional corridor primed to generate strong economic activity.

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Regulated building heights and densities in zones of precisely allocated architectural types; each island is recognisable though not ostensibly designed.

Recent large-scale urban development in East Asia has brought about unprecedented transformations to vast expanses of territory and multitudes of people. Yet the problem of large-scale urban development in the region has so far resulted in a less than ambitious debate on strategies, options and priorities. Given the growth of urban populations and the accelerating transformation of their habits, the problem is often approached as a technical one: a challenge to be addressed by the optimisation of processes, infrastructure and devices. Considering, on the other hand, the increasing opportunities to use recent technology as a means of generating built forms with high visual impact and novelty value, large-scale urban development has recently been interpreted by some as a formal problem: promoting a new repertoire of forms and the processes to generate them. Both approaches are limited in scope. Whereas the technical approach often aims for imprecise targets of environmental sustainability (with only one parameter energy consumption against which to measure its success), the formal approach is usually reduced to one conceptual and abstract process that emphasises form while neglecting programmatic and typological content.

How to design a new city in East Asia? How to work with the East Asian scale and speed of urban transformation, towards strategies that positively respond to the ambitions and needs of contemporary Asian cities and regions? New urban development in East Asia is often intended to be a bold implantation of modernity that quickly replaces small-scale, informal urban settlements. Just as often, the modern East Asian city is destined to take over vast expanses of non-urban open territory. These operations are almost always ambitious in size and means and are often meant to transform the images of countries, the economies of regions, and the livelihoods of millions of people. Such initiatives exceed by many orders of magnitude the kind of project with which most Western architects are comfortable. Consequently, Western architects almost invariably balk at the scale and speed of East Asian urban transformation. Several traumas, anxieties and controversies regarding the modern and Modernism its adulterations, excesses and failures run deep and wide in Western minds, and often inhibit the willingness to understand why the modern city is desirable in Asia, and how to contribute positively to

the most signicant architectural and urban transformations of this age. OMAs Penang Tropical City is a proposal for a large-scale urban development in West Malaysia. A mixed-use programme totalling 1.67 million square metres (17.97 million square feet) of gross oor area will replace the Penang Turf Club a horseracing track and related social facilities from British colonial times. The site extends over 104 hectares (257 acres) at the foot of thickly wooded hillsides, a short distance from the centre of Penang state capital Georgetown, and 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) from the Penang Strait shoreline. The contrasts between hills and sea, countryside and city, offer a powerful backdrop to the rich mixture of contrasting avours, aromas, languages and habits that make up Penangite society and culture. Given the privileged location, the site is a choice plot of land with the potential to become a residential, business and leisure hub within a regional corridor primed to generate strong economic activity. The new city is intended to become an emblem of Malaysian development and ambition. The vision at the origin of this initiative is too ambitious to be formulated as a planning proposal. To begin with, the brief

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The proposal responds to these aspirations by encapsulating local character in a sweeping onrush of newness. It is a suggestion of how a modern Southeast Asian city can be imbued with deep-rooted features of the inherited Southeast Asian city its contrasts and its stir of improvisation.

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opposite: A spatial interpretation of type and programme: the brief is divided into soft and hard programme, then sorted by architectural types and distributed into a diagram of proximities and dependencies.

below: Penang Tropical City at a scale between planning strategy and architectural denition, with an emphasis on contrasts and transitions between different urban environments.

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below: The identity and aspirations of the Southeast Asian city as a formula of contrasts; the stir of improvisation and the precepts of regulated development.

opposite: Soft programme forms a soup, the infrastructural substrate for typological islands of hard programme. Soup and islands are contrasting urban territories that complete each other in function and use.

reects a regional purpose concentrated on economic development and prestige: the new city will be a highlight within the Northern Corridor Economic Region, where industrial entrepreneurship in advanced technology will receive special incentives. Penang Tropical City will therefore have an important regional role. Along with that prospective role comes a desire for a unique image. The proposal responds to these aspirations by encapsulating local character in a sweeping onrush of newness. It is a suggestion of how a modern Southeast Asian city can be imbued with deep-rooted features of the inherited Southeast Asian city its contrasts and its stir of improvisation. This demands more than planning infrastructure and devising general strategies for building development. The brief, on the other hand, is too extensive and too complex to be formulated as an architectural project. With a mixed-use programme large enough to accommodate a resident population of at least 27,000 (with employment opportunities as well as leisure and civic facilities for many others), Penang Tropical City is a large-scale development to be conducted in phases over several years. This proposal provides typological outlines to be developed further in later stages. Different
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architects would design the several clusters of the city, following the given parameters of building height and position, number of units, and type of clustering. The method is, then, to achieve an effective planning strategy as well as a suggestive architectural denition, with a concept that is open enough to multiple design contributions and to fertilisation by local culture. At a strategic level, government, developer and local inhabitants want a change to modernity. Newness notwithstanding, the vitality and spontaneity of local urban life as it exists now will be a vital ingredient of a stirring and characteristic new city. At the level of design, the proposal is dened mainly at a scale between urban planning and architectural design. Various urban environments are characterised by typological combinations (not individual buildings). This is a method focused on types rather than on objects a kind of typological thinking concentrated on an intermediary scale of operation, reaching into infrastructural generality as well as architectural specicity. Penang Tropical City originates from a typological distribution of programme a method of giving shape to differentiated

urban environments by precisely allocating architectural and urban types. Architectural types (hotels, apartment towers, parking structures and so on) are concentrated in clusters that depend on their proximity to other clusters (housing to ofces, hotel to convention centre), and all are connected by a fabric of public facilities, thoroughfares and roads. Urban types (a tower plaza, an elevated podium, a pedestrian street) are interwoven with this system of proximities and dependencies. The proposal is a web of relations (contrasts and transitions), the result of a spatial interpretation of type and programme. First, a distinction is made between soft and hard programme. Soft programme (schools, a concert hall, medical centre, library, museums, a convention centre and mosque) is institutional and necessitates public investment. Hard programme (housing, hotels, ofces and retail) is private and attractive for prot. Soft is kept to a modest (necessary?) amount of facilities, while hard takes up more than 90 per cent of the total volume to be built. Soft comes in small amounts of large, individual, distributed units (for example, a school for each neighbourhood, one mosque for the whole

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bottom and overleaf: Hard programme is sorted by architectural type and distributed into circumscribed clusters. Starting from a simple set of typological rules, each cluster can be further developed by a different architect.

below: A colonial-era turf club outside Georgetown will be replaced by a new urban hub. Mountains and sea will surround the new tropical city.

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Soft and hard programme are then identied with two contrasting types of urban environment. Soft is the connective tissue, a fabric formed by the infrastructure and amenities that support and energise the city. It is a minimally regulated territory where the spontaneity of Malaysian outdoor life ourishes in full force. It is a uid zone an urban soup. Hard programme, on the other hand, is sorted by architectural types into clusters, inside regulated zones.

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As a result of typological distribution, soup and islands embody contrasting urban territories that complete each other in function and use. The soup is the zone of movement, interaction and outdoor life. Stalls and open-door shops surround public buildings and line the streets, lling them with the strong smells, the hot avours, and the multilingual sounds of Malaysian life.

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below: In a Penangite street, the spontaneous and permanently stirring mixture of the images, avours, scents and languages that make up Malaysian culture.

area), whereas hard comes in large amounts of small, aggregated units (apartments, shops, hotel rooms and ofce oors). Soft is contingent on institutional initiative and is manifested in singular facilities that serve large areas of hard programme. Hard depends on a different logic repetition and agglomeration according to type (apartment blocks, ofce slabs, shopping strips). Soft and hard programme are then identied with two contrasting types of urban environment. Soft is the connective tissue, a fabric formed by the infrastructure and amenities that support and energise the city. It is a minimally regulated territory where the spontaneity of Malaysian outdoor life ourishes in full force. It is a uid zone an urban soup. Hard programme, on the other hand, is sorted by architectural types into clusters, inside regulated zones. Building height, volume and density are specied in order to create clearly identiable agglomerations, each of which is circumscribed and forms a unique silhouette in Penang Tropical Citys horizon, one in an archipelago of urban islands. As a result of typological distribution, soup and islands embody contrasting urban

territories that complete each other in function and use. The soup is the zone of movement, interaction and outdoor life. Stalls and open-door shops surround public buildings and line the streets, lling them with the strong smells, the hot avours, and the multilingual sounds of Malaysian life. Positioned within the soup, the islands are the realm of indoor activity and contained public space, the regulated environments of the modern Asian city. The ingredients of the tropical city come together in a play of contrasts that expresses and amplies the contact between old and new habits, identity and aspiration. Large-scale urban development in East Asia or the rise of the modern Asian city, echoed in other locations where scale and speed combine to bring about radical urban change remains an urgent subject for contemporary architectural enquiry and discourse. The subject/problem is evidently not new. Yet despite the unprecedented transformative effect on an enormous portion of the world, three decades of staggering urban growth and change

in East Asia have so far inspired no such discursive efforts or generational phenomena as the advent of Modernism in the early 20th century, or the Radical event a half-century later. Whether regarded with awe or disdain, whether greeted by silence or uproar, the modern Asian city simply advances, inexorably and condently. In its many peculiar incarnations it continues to present singular challenges, and to offer opportunities for far-reaching strategies, beyond stolid functionality, beyond self-absorbed formalism. Scale and ambition, along with climate and culture, motivated the concept of typological distribution at the origin of the Penang Tropical City project. The thinking behind that concept is tied neither to strategic expedients nor to design intricacies. It is a logic of relations. Penang Tropical City is an expression of the contrasts, transitions and similarities latent in a mixed programme of architectural types and urban environments the authentic ingredients of the new tropical city. 1
Text 2011 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images OMA

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