The Thinker on the Hill

It’s late on a Friday afternoon, and it’s been raining all day. I am teaching a group of first years at University of Malaya about dance culture, in the newly reopened classroom wing of Dewan Tunku Canselor. When I open the window to expel the extraneous airconditioning, I get a whiff of petrichor — the scent of dissolved lime that comes from rain landing on hot cement.  I glimpse the exposed concrete beams on the exterior of the building, the same dripping grey as the low sodden sky, and it makes me absolutely delighted.

I have only been teaching at Dewan Tunku Canselor a few weeks. During the last academic year, the dance department was squatting in the Graduate Studies Building. Now that the new chancellory has opened, the old chancellory which adjoins Dewan Tunku Canselor has been vacated, and all the departments standing in line for new spaces have duly been bumped along. The dance department office is now settling into unusually plush digs that used to belong to the university registrar, and classes are now run in Dewan Tunku Canselor.

Everyone knows Dewan Tunku Canselor; it’s the single major landmark when directing people through the campus. “After you pass Dewan Tunku Canselor on the right…” It is the big grey hulk on top of the hill, long ignored since it was gutted by fire in 2001, but still brooding at the edge of vision, like something out of a dream, or a nightmare. It has the permanence and timelessness of an archetype dragged from the Jungian collective unconscious — it has always been there, and always will be.

My first knowledge of DTC was using it for rehearsals for a dinner-theatre rendition of Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular. I was twelve years old, and a role had been created for me in the play. It was not as glamourous as you might think — my task was to behave like an obnoxious child and eat crisps by the fistful from a plastic bag, two things which I am still perfecting well into adult life.

How the director had swung DTC as a venue for rehearsal, I do not know. In the early nineties, were there so few rehearsal spaces in KL that we were forced to hide out in the cavernous main hall of DTC? Or, more likely, was there so little theatre going on that we could rehearse wherever we liked?

As a child, DTC was frightening — its massive bulk, its endless gloom, the musty smell of stained seat cushions. I know I was never tempted to explore its inner Gormenghast — when I was not on stage, which was most of the time, I must have sat as close to the ring of stage light as possible, with my back up against something solid. But now I would have it no other way — an appreciation of buildings like DTC is something that should come with age.

Designed by Kington Loo and opened for its first convocation ceremony in 1966, DTC is a fine example of the Brutalist style of the 1950s and 60s. From the French béton brut for ‘raw concrete’, Brutalism makes a virtue out of that cheap and ubiquitous building material. Instead of being covered up with plaster and paint, the marks of the wooden forms in which the concrete is poured is retained in the finished product. The style is best demonstrated in low-rise institutional buildings, suiting their gravitas, with the interior mechanisms of the building characteristically demonstrated in its exterior, often in the curved staircase facades.

By the 70s and 80s, Brutalist buildings were popularly despised. They came to symbolise everything that was wrong about inner city architecture — grey, ugly, impersonal, dehumanising. But in fact, Brutalism sprang from the highest humanitarian ideals, from a socialist ideology that propounded equality for all. Concrete was seen as a democratic, or perhaps a proletarian, material. The popularity of concrete, and of Brutalism, across the world was supposed to demonstrate something universal about the human spirit. In the rush to rebuild after the end of the Second World War, when building materials were hard to come by, Brutalist constructions were designed to be cheap to build and to maintain, and to be durable.

And how they have endured. Kuala Lumpur, a paradise for wrecking machines, has only a few remaining specimens of Brutalism. Apart from DTC, I can name only the Australian High Commission on Jalan Yap Kwan Seng, and Bank Negara, whose enormous striated columns dominate the roundabout below Jalan Parlimen with appropriately Fort Knoxian imposingness. And yet Brutalist buildings must be very difficult to demolish. Thanks to its architecture, when the fire ripped through DTC it destroyed all the interior furnishings, but made very little impact upon the main concrete structure of the building (which must have come as a great disappointment if, as I fantasise, the fire was lit by some despondent UM architecture graduate hoping to get rid of an eyesore and clear a plot for his own imaginary folly at the same time). The main bones of the building survived, down to the concrete balustrades, and, of course, the indelible scars of the wooden forms, although these were blackened by fire. The scorch marks, touchingly, had to be scrubbed off by hand.

Ironically, the insensitive restoration that followed may have done more damage to DTC than the fire. Certainly its dignity has not emerged entirely unscathed. The interiors have been gussied up with recessed lighting and moulded ceilings, elevators with buttons on stylish glass panels (we’ll see how durable those are!) and shiny marble everywhere.

Around the ground floor, the foyer has been enclosed with stained glass patterned with pretty flowers, more 1920s art deco than 1950s post war. The administration has tried to soften the exterior with topiary in pot plants and the interior with pastel-coloured seats and Malay-style wooden carvings.

And yet the spirit of Dewan Tunku Canselor endures. As a building, it is serious, not frivolous. It rests its chin on its fist, scowls and thinks, and in its somber thinking, it represents the intellectual rigour for which Universiti Malaya was once known. By contrast, the new Chancellory, all superficial sparkling glass, white plaster and ostentatious Islamicist iconography, has no subtlety and requires no maturity. Like Disneyland and Putrajaya, with its cartoon domes and pastel prettiness, its architecture best rewards the saccharine tastebuds of five-year olds.

A veritable ivory tower or perhaps a white elephant, the new Chancellory towers above the central lake of the campus, completely out of proportion to its surroundings. Dewan Tunku Canselor, meanwhile, and especially its adjoining Old Chancellory, pressed up against the slope of the hill, have over time become absorbed by their environment. Now they seem like slabs of exposed mountainside, where the turf has been ripped away to reveal the very bones of the country beneath.

The old chancellory on the right, and the new chancellory, in white, on the left.

Since its reopening, university convocations are once again taking place at Dewan Tunku Chancellor. Convocation is yet another preening circus in which I find little favour, and not just because it makes it hard to find parking. But at least when fresh UM graduates take their photographs against a faux leatherbound book background, clutching stuffed toys and fake flowers, above them broods unchanged the grey shadow of Dewan Tunku Chancellor, its concrete facade never pretending to be more than it is.

The mark of a good university has always been its age, its ability to endure while adapting to changing times. And since people are mortal, and academic departments too must bow to trendiness and fortune, what better way to symbolise this endurance than through a Brutalist landmark? Upon this rock, I will build my university.

Links and References:

Review of the performance of Absurd Person Singular: Christmas Treat That Went Awry, by Tan Gim Ean, The New Straits Times, 4 January 1991.

Account of the restoration of DTC: Rehabilitation of the Tunku Canselor Hall, University of Malaya, by Zuraini M.A., Department of Building Surveying, University of Malaya.

Another ode to Brutalism in Kuala Lumpur, with beautiful accompanying images: Brutalism’s Brutal Practicality, by Azrul K. Abdullah, first published in Vox, Feb 2002.

A different conspiracy theory, that disaffected student politicans at UM set fire to DTC as an act of protest against Mahathir, reported in the British press: Students questioned over suspected arson attack at Malaysian university, by David Cohen, The Guardian, 4 July 2001.

Thanks to this post for confirmation of my suspicion that the stained glass panels are not part of the original design, and for its touching suggestion that DTC is an example of Malaysian architecture: What is Malaysian Architecture?, ACAU News, 2 July 2007.

A beautiful image of the foyer of DTC taken in 2008, really emphasizing the feeling of seeing the bones beneath: Campus Brutalism, LINCOLNOSE2®2008.