Formerly a Stranger's House: Reflections on Shophouse Typology

Abstract

This thesis brings forth the Southeast Asian vernacular shophouse as a resilient type loaded with memory, and reads its variations over time alongside local socio-political histories as fodder to question future possibilities of an otherwise abject typology. As its name suggests, the shophouse traditionally consists of a commercial program on the ground level open to the street, and a domestic residence above. Highly sensitive to the urban life that surrounds it, in the Indonesian context it has lived multiple lives, shifting in attitudes of negotiation between the public and private. Once serving as homes as well as open points of exchange, their subjection to modernization and a series of turbulent events has transformed them into either purely commodified spaces for storage and consumption, or closed but empty containers devoid of spirit. While the shophouse has a fate which is overwhelmingly driven by its public perceptions and outside forces, the thesis, with some naivete, takes on the position of rejecting this tendency of the urban context to overpower inhabitations of the interior. As a project it proposes the possibility of reviving dead instances of the shophouse through strategic reinsertions of elements which might embody its essence as a means to generate new forms of a lost domesticity, and perhaps form reconfigurations of memory.