COLLECTIE TROPENMUSEUM Een huis met een dak en wanden van atap Molukken TMnr 10011491

An attap dwelling is traditional housing found in the kampongs of

Brunei Brunei, officially Brunei Darussalam, is a country in Southeast Asia, situated on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. Apart from its coastline on the South China Sea, it is completely surrounded by the Malaysian state of Sarawak, with ...

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania, between the Indian Ocean, Indian and Pacific Ocean, Pacific oceans. Comprising over List of islands of Indonesia, 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, ...

Malaysia Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia. Featuring the Tanjung Piai, southernmost point of continental Eurasia, it is a federation, federal constitutional monarchy consisting of States and federal territories of Malaysia, 13 states and thre ...

and

Singapore Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...

. Named after the attap palm, which provides the wattle for the walls, and the leaves with which their roofs are thatched, these dwellings can range from huts to substantial houses. Until the nineteenth century even significant public buildings such as

temple A temple (from the Latin ) is a place of worship, a building used for spiritual rituals and activities such as prayer and sacrifice. By convention, the specially built places of worship of some religions are commonly called "temples" in Engli ...

s were built in this manner. The attap dwelling was used as the inspiration for the natural cross ventilation system for Newton Suites, by WOHA Architects, Singapore.

Singapore

Attap-roofed houses were formerly common in rural areas of

. From the 1950s onwards, many attap roofs were replaced by

zinc Zinc is a chemical element; it has symbol Zn and atomic number 30. It is a slightly brittle metal at room temperature and has a shiny-greyish appearance when oxidation is removed. It is the first element in group 12 (IIB) of the periodic tabl ...

sheeting.

Public housing Public housing, also known as social housing, refers to Subsidized housing, subsidized or affordable housing provided in buildings that are usually owned and managed by local government, central government, nonprofit organizations or a ...

and

urban renewal Urban renewal (sometimes called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in the United States) is a program of land redevelopment often used to address real or perceived urban decay. Urban renewal involves the clearing ...

programmes resulted in a sharp decline in the number of attap- and zinc-roofed houses starting from the 1960s. As of the 1980 Census, 10.8% of houses were attap- or zinc-roofed, vs. 34% in 1970; most were located in outlying areas.

References

Sources

Normand-Prunieres, Helene. 'Malaysian Dwellings', ''Proceedings of ENHR International Housing Conference 2004'', (Cambridge: University, 2004)
House types Architecture in Indonesia Architecture in Malaysia Architecture in Singapore {{house-type-stub