Bangsar Social Housing

Bangsar Social Housing

Bangsar Social Housing is a self initiated research project looking at modals for achieving commercially viable and attainable inner city housing.

Homogenous and Undifferentiated

High rise housing in Malaysia has become a slave to the economics of the profit motivated, highly commodified nature of real estate. Nowhere is this more felt and observed than in the homogenous and undifferentiated housing options available in the urban centre of Kuala Lumpur.

“Housing is becoming less an infrastructure for living and more an instrument for financial accumulation…. the capacity of a building to function as a home becomes secondary.” In Defence of Housing, Peter Marcuse.

Urban Sandwich

Our proposal explores the idea of returning housing to the street, reconnecting it with the ground. We propose replacing the corridor with a third space, inserting a street of supportive communal functions – shops, gardens, a library, a clinic, laundromats, theatre –  between two rows of ‘terraces houses’. The tower is no longer disembodied, detached from the ground and surrounding neighbourhood. Instead, in this sandwiched form, becomes a knot, and extension of the city – varied, ad hoc, accidental and highly communal.