Sustainable Asian House. Paul McGillick

      THE STORY OF SUSTAINABILITY

      Much has been written over the last twenty years or so about how residential architecture in Southeast Asia has explored strategies for working with the tropical climate. Note my use of the word ‘with’, because we are not talking here of ‘coping’ with the climate or ‘overcoming’ the climate, but of developing ways of adapting to the climate in order to achieve a sustainable way of life. This agenda has been driven by a desire to live more authentically by engaging with the natural world, by health issues such as the need to avoid unnaturally cold air-conditioned environments and the thermal shock of moving in and out of air-conditioning, and, above all, by the need to conserve energy and avoid unnecessary damage to the global ecosystem. The rapid evolution of such climatic strategies has resulted in an approach which could be almost deemed a celebration of the climate, replacing the previous implied idea that the tropical climate was somehow our enemy.

      This has been part of a broader agenda which has been as much political, economic and social as it has been environmental. The aim has been to find ways to live appropriately in the contemporary, tropical world. This, in turn, implies the need for local solutions rather than those imposed from elsewhere—a one size fits all solution which, in architectural language, invariably means International modernism. Hence, terms like ‘tropical modern’ and ‘modern regional’ were used to pin down the emergence of architectural strategies which sought to adapt International modernism to a tropical climate and to local cultures. In other words, there was an attempt to preserve the universally applicable and beneficial aspects of International modernism while achieving an architecture appropriate for its place.

      ‘… a return to living in a culturally and climatically authentic way.’

      The debate surrounding this agenda has commonly been framed against a colonial background. The imposition of foreign rule was understood to imply the imposition of many other things, including building types. Hence, political and economic emancipation suggested a broader emancipation, a whole new way of life based on traditional values and free of imposed Western values, a return to living in a culturally and climatically authentic way.

      Then along came globalization. Now the world was becoming increasingly integrated economically and commercially, and with it came a kind of ‘mass cult’, yet another imposition of a uniform culture from elsewhere which had little regard for regional and cultural differences. Arguably, the new globalization was really only colonialism