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Ferry Terminal, Port Klang, Malaysia

Part 1 Project 2002
Stuart Caunt
University of Huddersfield | UK
"If there is anything that Architecture can ‘give to the people’ it is no more (but also no less) than choices that go beyond pre-coded style, finished products, and regurgitated norms." Lebbeus Woods


At the coastal edge, the proposed ferry terminal at Port Klang basks in the Malaysian climate. The building is understood as a dynamical system with distinctive properties that are characterised by the degenerated, chaotic nature of the site.

In its simplest form the building exists as separate social and functional spaces, meeting at an important threshold, buoyant in space, which marks ‘the start’ of the traveller’s journey.

The buildings external aesthetic relates to its skin as a fragmented scab. The scab shows an authentic relation to time, recognising the chaos and disorder without ignoring or erasing it. It conceals and heals the chaos to reveal spaces of life and ordered activity. Internally; light, space and materiality are used to create an uncomplicated, uplifting architectural language, which offers simple choices to peel off the grand processional sequence at regular intervals so that the traveller may use the building’s facilities suspended within the lungs of the building below.



Stuart’s project of a ferry terminal in Port Klang, Malaysia, responds and explores a landscape of changing relationships between land and water, threshold and transition, and a datum line along which a series of poetically expressed accretions are delicately and tentatively poised.

The project has been developed and explored through countless sketches, maquettes and models, of which the resultant ‘between space’ of ferry terminal as journey is sensitive, inhabited, and informed design, whilst challenging its paradigm.



2002
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