Southeast Asian Houses : Expanding Tradition

Seo Ryeung Ju is a professor in the Department of Housing and Interior Design at Kyung Hee University. She has focused on researching the traditional culture of housing and housing design of new towns in Southeast Asia since 2009, supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF), and she has published a number of articles about Malaysian and Indonesia houses. She has also expanded her research scope into other Southeast Asian countries.

She established the Asian Research Center for Housing (ARCH) as an anchor of the Asian Housing Education & Research Network, which serves as a professional network for researchers and professionals in the area of housing studies in Asian regions. As her first action with ARCH, she organized the first Southeast Asian Housing Forum, titled “Commonality and Diversity in Southeast Asian Housing: A Search for New Identity,” which was held in Seoul, Korea, on October 6-7, 2011, with twelve housing professionals from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. This laid groundwork for sharing the housing cultures of each Southeast Asian country and building a strong academic network. She recently served as chair of the scientific committee of the Asia-Pacific Network for Housing Research (APNHR) and successfully organized the network’s 2015 conference, held in Gwangju, Korea.

She has also published ARCH field research reports periodically: in 2011, Modernization of Vernacular Houses in Kampong Bharu, Kualar Lumpur, Malaysia, and in 2012, Houses in Southeast Asia; A Glimpse of Tradition and Modernity.

Himasari Hanan is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture of Institut Teknologi Bandung. She received her master’s degree from Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and her doctorate from Kassel University in Germany. She has been engaged with research on vernacular architecture since 2008. Currently her research focus is on Batak Toba architecture and Bali Aga architecture. She also does research on creative cities and creative tourism. She wrote an article on the traditional Batak Toba house in Village Architecture in Sumatra (2016), published by IVA-ICRA, Vienna, Austria, as well as other international conferences and journals. She has initiated and engaged in organizing Arte-Polis, an international conference on creative culture and place-making, since 2006. She was chief of the research group Architectural History, Theory, and Criticism at Institut Teknologi Bandung in 2007-2014. She has been involved in other research activities on national issues on the board of advisors for the Center for Local Government Innovation (2008-2015) and the Urban and Regional Development Institute (2001-2016).

Syed Iskandar Ariffin is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). He received his graduate education at the University of Humberside and a doctoral degree from Oxford Brookes University in the UK. As a senior member of the Council of Architectural Accreditation and Education Malaysia, he has led many initiatives in architectural education in Malaysia, most significantly serving as chief editor of The Manual of Accreditation for Architecture Programme (2013) and LAM Policy and Procedures for the Validation of Overseas Programme in Architecture (2015). He was the founder and first director of KALAM, a research center for architecture and built environment in the Malay world. He authored Architectural Conservation in Islam (2005), exploring conservation philosophy and practices from Islamic perspectives. Currently he is the executive director of the Institut Sultan Iskandar, UTM’s research and consultancy company, focusing on urban habitat and sustainability.

Wandee Pinijvarasin is an architect working as a lecturer and researcher in the Faculty of Architecture at Kasetsart University, with interests in vernacular architecture study. Since 2004, after obtaining her PhD from the University of Melbourne, she conducted various research and design projects in Thailand. Her research encompasses the evolution of vernacular houses and their cultural meaning in central Thailand provinces, cross-cultural comparative studies of Lao Viang ethnics in Thailand and Laos, and vernacular architecture for cottage industries in Phetchaburi. She has also worked on research projects engaging vernacular applications for community design and development including a conceptual planning project for tourism development and a network around the Angkhang and Inthanon Royal Project stations in Chiang Mai, and design guidelines for reconstructing fired areas of the vernacular commercial community in Angthong. All of her work emphasizes searching for local wisdom and cultural sustainability in the vernacular architecture environment.

Var Morin is a lecturer of the history of Khmer architecture and architectural conservation at the Royal University of Fine Arts and at other private universities across Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Prior to his university career, he worked as a conservator for nearly twenty years at Angkor in Siem Reap and Banteay Chhmar temple in Banteay Meanchey Province. As his research interest has been exclusively focused on historical buildings, specifically temples, he successfully completed his Ph.D. in political science in early 2017 with a thesis titled “Angkorian Architecture Reflects the Leadership in that Era.” In the government institution, he worked as a vice-rector of the Royal University of Fine Arts before he was appointed as an advisor of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts.

Hoang Manh Nguyen is an associate professor of the Department of Architecture at Hanoi Architectural University (HAU) in Vietnam. He has focused on research about vernacular housing and housing development, heritage and urban conservation, and environmental architecture, and he has published many articles in these three fields. He received a doctoral degree from HAU in 2002 and completed his postdoctoral practice at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, in 2005. From 2011 to 2016, he was in charge of the Institute of Tropical Architecture. As a member of the executive board of the Vietnam Green Building Council and Vietnam Association of Civil Engineering Environment, he has led many successful projects and activities regarding housing research, urban conservation, and green building. One such project is an annual event called Vietnam Green Building Week, which he has organized since 2010. He was also the founder of VIEALIFE group, an institution for architectural and art design consultancy on climate adaptation and energy efficiency (www.viealife.com). Currently, he is the executive director of the Institute of Green Urban Development.

Min Kyoung Kim is a part-time lecturer at Kyung Hee University and Seowon University in Korea. She has studied Southeast Asian housing since 2010 and obtained a doctoral degree in 2015 with her thesis “A Study of the Modernization Characteristics of Vernacular Houses in Malaysia.” She has focused on studying the modernization of vernacular houses in Southeast Asian countries.