Letter from Sarawak 4 – Concrete boxes we call home
By Bunga Pakma
The last time you saw me, reader, I was zooming through Kuching to catch a bus. As I watched shopping complexes, flyovers and houses whizzing by, my mind snapped back to a memory of a trip to Kuching six months before.
At that time I was with a friend. We looked round at the new buildings going up, and looked at each other. “I am so bloody weary,” he sighed, “of seeing nothing but this damned concrete.” Yes, then, and now, Kuching is stuffed with concrete, hectare after hectare of it.
Concrete is inherently no more ugly than any other thing to build with. It’s gray, but so is granite and slate. Concrete is simply everywhere, there is no relief, and the lack of variety struck me as dreary.
There’s plenty of concrete in the US, but the US has been building nearly 300 years longer than has Malaysia, and the legacy of structures is impressive. In Connecticut, 18th century houses are not rare. Most are of wood. The best timber—chestnut, for example, as lasting as belian—was once plentiful and cheap. Beautiful brickwork exists from all era, and many large public buildings, churches, town halls, and university buildings are built of quarried stone dressed and carved. A handful of old bungalows remain in Kuching’s odd corners, but really you have to get 20 km outside the city before you start seeing wooden houses.
It’s not fair to blame Sarawakians for resorting to cement. What else is there? The only quarries we have produce crushed gray limestone, and as for the trees, everyone knows we have sent the bulk of the forest’s superb hardwood off to Japan and China to be made into—forms for concrete. We have plenty of sand and gravel, and that limestone can also be converted to lime. Perhaps concrete is the only thing available to build with, or the only thing people can now afford.
