Kubik House Ipoh, Malaysia Marra and Yeh

‘Why do people want to live in houses and then live as though they were living in apartments? It defeats the purpose. They want a garden and they want a house, but then they close it all up.’—Carol Marra + Yeh have always been fascinated by the tension between what architects are trying to achieve and what craftsmen can actually make.

Working a great deal in Malaysia, they are acutely aware of what is available and what is possible. ‘What we try to do in our designs’, says Marra, ‘is to take your normal construction methods and normal materials and think of some way to modify them so that they increase the environmental performance of the building.

She points out that these solutions can be sophisticated without being outrageously expensive or involve high-tech machinery, or control systems ‘which people either can’t afford or can’t understand or are not even available in that country’.

In developing their approach to sustainable tropical living, Marra + Yeh have been strongly influenced by expatriate Danish architect Berthel Michael Iversen who established an office in Ipoh in 1934. As well as incorporating vernacular references in his otherwise modernist buildings, Iversen developed a range of strategies for natural ventilation and sun control, and also made use of local materials in innovative ways.

Entry level and lower level plans.

The long cooking/eating bench is designed for entertaining large numbers of people.

The living/dining/cooking area looking back to the stairs leading from the entry.

There is not a lot that is typical about the Kubik House. The client is a German precision engineer married to a Malaysian Chinese, who wanted to escape from the formality of Europe and live a relaxed lifestyle with a strong connection to nature. He also did not want a ‘typical Malaysian house’.

Where everybody else was looking for a flat, rectangular site, he chose one that was trapezoidal in shape with a steep slope falling three metres—making half the site unsuitable for building—and a stream running down the side. The architects saw opportunities in the site.

The initial brief was for an informal house where all the doors could be left open, with space to entertain and room for their extended Malaysian family and long-term guests from Europe. Later, the client asked for an office where he could receive business associates without them having to go through the house.

The result is a response to at least three things. First, it was a response to the topography. Secondly, it was a response to the macro and micro climate and issues such as wind and sun. Thirdly, it was a response to the challenge of how to simultaneously provide privacy and community within the same house. In other words, they set out to design a home that was physically and culturally of its place.

In the end, it was the topography of the site that facilitated the programme for the house. The house is built over three levels and follows the fall of the slope. Arrival is at the middle level where there is an entry platform with the client’s office off to the side. This is the public space. From there one either goes upstairs to the bedrooms and the private space or downstairs to the glazed, double-height communal space.

The living/dining area enjoys full transparency to the garden and forest outside. Its customized folding timber and glass doors create one continuous space from inside to the outside terrace, which wraps around two sides of the house.

There is thus a sense of journeying through the house—a journey which actually begins from the roadside where there is little sense of what the building is really like. In the transition from the public to the private realm, the house only reveals itself gradually. Indeed, it never reveals all of itself at any one time. ‘It is’, says Carol Marra, ‘about what you present to the public face and what you keep to yourself.’

Apart from its connection with nature and the provision of a generous entertainment area, the expansive living/dining/entertainment space on the lower level also plays an important role in climate control. All the doors and windows can open, but during the hottest part of the day the double-height volume allows hot air to rise and be drawn up through the stairwell, thus creating constant air movement. Unlike most buildings in the tropics, this house (because of the site) is oriented south– north, which enabled the architects to harness the prevailing winds and funnel air through the house.

The topography also assisted climate control in another intriguing way. Above the house is a 500metre hill, while 300 metres below is a pond. During the evenings, a cloud of moist air settles over the site, moving down towards the pond. In the morning, this cloud begins to move up again, creating the equivalent of a sea breeze.

Other climate control devices in the Kubik House include refurbished 1940s General Electric fans and an evaporative cooler developed in the United States. Unlike air-conditioners, the evaporative process takes place inside the machine, hence it is not adding moisture to already saturated tropical air. It does use a lot of water though, about 8 litres an hour, but this is supplied from an underground water storage tank fed from the roof.

The air comes out of the cooler at about 26 degrees Centigrade, depending on how dry it is outside. The exhaust is pushed out to two air-compressors, which sustain the only air-conditioning in the house, located in the bedrooms. By pushing the cool saturated air into the compressors, the compressors work less because the ambient temperature is reduced. Hence, the air-conditioning itself is made more energy-efficient.

The air control system in the house works in tandem with the wall construction. Unlike the normal double-brick wall construction, this house has an outer skin of brick and an inner skin of aerated, lightweight concrete blocks with a layer of aluminium foil placed in between. The effect is to push heat out but also to absorb cool air on the inside.

So, instead of cooling air, it is a thermal mass (the concrete block wall) which is being cooled. This acts like a battery, retaining the cool air. Tests showed that the room stayed at about 24 degrees until 3.00 pm in the afternoon—a huge energy saving compared to normal air-conditioning.

The living/dining space looks directly out to a heavily forested steep slope with a cascading stream.

The project was also an exercise in sustaining local crafts and materials. A local craftsman who makes dragon heads out of rattan for Chinese New Year was commissioned to make the frames for custom- designed pendant lamps which were then pasted up with Chinese linen and Japanese paper. The stone flooring in the living area and bathrooms is local Ipoh marble, while all the timber is air-dried waste timber from a local flooded dam site. All the doors and windows are timber within steel frames. Local joiners were used to make the frames which fit perfectly despite the zero tolerance of the steel frames.

German and Malaysian Chinese clients bring together two quite different concepts of privacy and community. Where private space may be a high priority for a Westerner, Asian cultures are more communal and will tend to have more fluid spaces. The Kubik House aims to reconcile these two tendencies by providing both private and communal spaces, but linking them in a fluid way.