George Town has many heritage buildings as a UNESCO World Heritage Site that need to be preserved due to their status. Adaptive reuse of heritage buildings is a common method of building conservation and should be done in maximum retention with minimal intervention by applying the right materials with the appropriate approach. This paper focuses on the four approaches of adaptive reuse that were applied to Shophouses at Cannon Street in George Town, Penang. The data was collected from a survey on ten Shophouses in Cannon Street, Penang. The findings of this research point to the common approach of adaptive reuse in Shophouses that has been used as the Preservation approach.
Arulmigu Kamatchi Amman Devasthanam in Penang is the sole Vishwakarma community temple in Malaysia, and it marks an entry into the world of Pathars; the traditional
Tamil goldsmiths, a sub-ethnic group within the local Indian diaspora. The conception
of this temple as “devasthanam” or “place of God”, by the Pathars, implores this study
to explore this community temple as a place. This study frames the temple and the lived
experience a person has in it as a unit of analysis. The primary data comes from ethnographic study that involves participant observation and spatial study. The secondary data
is drawn from document and photo reviews alongside the writings of pioneering Indian art
historians. The findings of this study are chronicled as a narrative account to reveal this
temple as a dimension of the local Pathar community’s lifeworld and to understand how
it develops into a locus that gathers human experience, insideness and identity formation
through the conception of Hindu temple as a synergy of form, meaning and use. The
findings of this study not only record this temple as a space of specific cultural continuity,
but highlights the need to recognize the diversity and differences within Indian diaspora
This article examines the roles taken by seats in the buildings that form the lifeworld of Pathars—traditional Tamil goldsmiths—as an ideoscape following their migration to Penang during the British colonial period in the 19th century. This study used a phenomenological ethnography method to bring Pathars’ lived experiences with their physical environment to the forefront, highlighting the subjectiveness of architecture that shapes their lifeworld. The ideoscape of seats is analysed in themes to examine the power and politics of seats in the Pathars’ lifeworlds, including present-day migrant workers. To find a seat is a metaphor that elicits discussion on Pathars’ existential lives and highlights how this community has attempted to negotiate its way as agents of change or to bring the agency to their position in creating spatial norms in place amidst the state reifying its enclaves with essentialised notions of ethnic identity, following the formation of nation-states.
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