Open Door Policy

When Malaysian landscape architect and urban designer Ng Sek San visits a destination, the first thing he does is seek out the slums. The poorest of the poor neighbourhoods. Places so removed from our traditional notions of architectural ‘style’ and ‘beauty’ as to make those concepts seem almost obscene. Like haute cuisine in the middle of a famine. 

“That’s where I get a lot of my inspiration,” Sek San admits. “I walk in slums. I photograph slums. I look at scale and light, and how they use local materials, including cardboard. Because all those things are free of charge. Scale is free of charge. Light is free of charge. 

“When people have no resources, but they have dignity, that’s when creativity gets maxed.”

t’s not the typical holiday beat you’d expect from a world-renowned architect. But then Sek San Ng isn’t really your standard commercial operator. Over a much-chronicled 40-year career, this rebellious, do-more-with-less spirit has given him some very firm ideas about how buildings should actually be built.  

For one thing, they should be cheap. Not in the sense of poor quality or cutting corners for the sake of profit, but literally affordable to build. And to live in. Designed to maximise the wellbeing of the maximum number of people.  

While most commercial developers might allocate 70 per cent of their budget to materials and 30 per cent to labour, for example, Sek San reverses that ratio. He employs local builders wherever possible, pays them good wages, and builds his buildings from deliberately unglamorous, home-spun materials: concrete, recycled timber, old copper pipes, forgotten industrial machinery, recycled signage, cardboard. Anything he can get his hands on. Imperfections aren’t just tolerated, they’re celebrated. Nothing is wasted, and nothing travels a single mile more than necessary. 

This not only keeps costs low, but allows Sek San to limit the carbon footprint of his projects. 

Double-glazed windows? Meh. A frivolous luxury. In Malaysia, where humidity tops 80 per cent and summer temperatures regularly hit 30 degrees celsius, glass is considered a premium material, usually reserved for big-budget commercial jobs and climate-controlled residential compounds. As such, many of Sek San’s buildings have no closeable windows and very few doors. Light, air and people are encouraged to flow through a space uninhibited. Birds literally nest in his office in downtown Kuala Lumpur. 

Integrated heating and cooling? Nope. Instead, Sek San opts for plants, which ramble and creep over his designs in dense green curtains, providing low-cost insulation, passive cooling and free oxygen – all at the same time. Trees sprout not just through the floor, but through furniture. Roofs are often clear plastic, because that’s the cheapest way to keep the rain out and let light in. After a couple of years, Sek San’s jungle projects tend to look less ‘built’ and more extruded from the landscape, like overgrown temples from some ancient civilisation with impeccable taste. 

“I don’t need cladding or windows,” Sek San says, “just time for the plants to grow. I’ve always said that time should finish a project for us. It’s the fourth dimension of a building. You know, modern buildings, they look good at the beginning, but then they start to deteriorate. I think a good building should be timeless.”

Sek San Ng was born in the Malaysian tin-mining town of Ipoh, on the Kinta River, about two hours north of Kuala Lumpur. As a teenager in the 1980s, he moved to New Zealand, eventually earning both a Civil Engineering degree and a Postgraduate Diploma in Landscape Architecture. 

After completing his studies, Sek San spent 12 years in New Zealand and Singapore, working with big firms like Boffa Miskell Partners and Belt Collins International. Carefully sharpening his philosophy. Sucking up inspiration from renowned figures like American landscape designer, Martha Schwartz. In 1994, he returned to Malaysia to establish his own practice, Seksan Design, resolving to eschew the glamorous climes of Europe and America and focus all his energy on improving the lives of ordinary people in his own region. He’s been designing and building here – almost exclusively here – ever since. 

This means that, while the name ‘Sek San Ng’ may not be widely known outside South-East Asian architectural circles, within those circles, it’s revered. More than any other designer, Sek San coined and pioneered the idea of the “Third World Aesthetic” – a design philosophy which has literally changed the trajectory of South-East Asian architecture.  

“I started my younger days as a student activist, so we were always campaigning for the underdogs and the poor,” Sek San says. “I guess that kind of infiltrated into our design philosophy. 

“The Third World Aesthetic is about championing the slum. The raw. The local. The grit. The grime. But it’s also a way in which we can differentiate ourselves from western thinking. Because if we do the same thing as designers are doing in Japan or Europe or America, we can only ever be second best. We have to find our own design language.”

There’s no better example of this design language than Sek San’s passion projects – the Sekeping Retreats. These boutique Malaysian guesthouses are scattered across the country, from Bangsar in KL to the small jungle town of Rawang, and each one tackles an idea, or a problem, or a thought experiment. Ideas like, “Can we build a guesthouse in the forest without knocking down a single tree?” or “Can we pick up and move an old warehouse, piece by piece, and turn it into a jungle oasis?” 

“I was proposing a lot of these ideas to developers, and they couldn’t understand them,” Sek San laughs. “I couldn’t get them into my commercial projects. So I thought I’d have to do it myself. I wanted to demonstrate to other developers that we can build in these difficult environments without destroying them.”

These Sekeping projects often came about organically. In one instance, Sek San was visiting a rundown industrial warehouse to buy a second-hand bicycle, when the owner casually offered to sell him the warehouse instead. That structure was reassembled and converted, piece by piece, to become part of Sekeping Serendah, nestled within five acres of tropical rainforest an hour north of KL. 

On another occasion, Sek San’s lawyer called out of the blue, saying there was a crumbling, three-storey neoclassical building for sale in Ipoh – Sek San’s old home town. Did he want it? Turns out, that building was part of Sek San’s childhood. He grew up around the corner. When his school master caught the boys with unruly hair, he’d shave it off and send them to the barber here to finish the job. And that old barber was still there, all these years later, still sweeping the floors! Sek San immediately reached out to some wealthy contacts and, together, they purchased the property – which turned out to be more like an entire city block – turning it into Sekeping Kong Heng. A mixed-use tourism, hospitality and retail precinct that eventually helped rejuvenate the Old Town itself. 

“The idea behind that one was: can we do heritage conservation without it costing an arm and a leg?” Sek San says. “Because in Malaysia we cannot be like Singapore, where they restore the building to its original form, using horsehair and lime wash and everything. Conservation here is often so expensive that owners will just burn their properties down instead, then rebuild new.” 

To that end, Sek San and his partners wanted to leave as much of the original structure as possible. Even trees growing on the old building were preserved – natural markers of age and time. “They’re all part of history. They tell a story,” Sek San says. “I think that old buildings should remain old buildings.” 

Sekeping Kong Heng also demonstrates Sek San’s unique approach to heritage conservation, which is that a building is only as valuable as the people and stories inside it. What he calls the ‘living culture’. In the case of Kong Heng, that meant the original tenants, like Sek San’s old barber, some of whom had been working in the building for over 35 years. Rather than push these businesses out to make way for faux-industrial cafes and high-end retail spaces, Sek San and his partners encouraged them to stay, fixing their rents and upgrading their facilities. Sek San’s barber was given a custom-built glass hair salon, right in the centre of the building, where he continued to work for another nine years. 

Sek San’s other commercial projects, like the vibrant community and culture hub REXKL in Kuala Lumpur, follow this same spirit. They’re not about gentrification but rather rejuvenation. And those are two very different things. Gentrification is a force for the New, but it often comes at the expense of the Old: existing tenants, existing architecture, families, ecosystems. Vulnerable people who get priced out of their own neighbourhoods to make way for young professionals who, as Taylor Parks once wrote, are “willing to pay for that coffee-house slice of bohemia”. Crime goes down. Rents go up. And everybody wins – except for all the losers. 

This is anathema for Sek San. Gentrification implies exclusivity, and if there’s one thing he stands for as a designer, it’s including as many people as possible. And not in some abstract, metaphorical way. Literally including them. 

In his office in KL, for example, the entire ground floor is a free-use space for artists, human rights groups, or basically anyone that wants to just come and hang. WIFI is fast and free, and there are no gates or doors. Sek San even built a small bench out on the street, near the office, so migrant workers would have somewhere to pause and sit with their shopping. He and his staff often leave books out there for street cleaners to take home and read to their kids. 

While other designers might toss around words like ‘community’, Sek San actively builds human connection into every single project. It’s basically the reason his projects exist. 

This is a luxury not every designer has, of course, and the reason Sek San can pick and choose his buildings boils down to money. Specifically where it comes from. Instead of the archaic patronage models that have sustained architects and landscapers for centuries – rich private clients, governments or cashed-up commercial developers – Sek San relies on like-minded partners, or even social media crowdfunding. 

“I’m a social media bitch,” he laughs. “And this is what I tell young architects. You do not need patronage. You don’t need governments. If your idea is good enough, pitch it and people will invest in you.” 

Using this crowdfunding model, Sek San has built everything from an orphanage in Thailand (Dhammagiri Foundation Orphanage) to a community farm smack-bang in the middle of residential Kuala Lumpur (Kebun-Kebun Bangsar). And all designed with his signature Third World Aesthetic. Local materials. Local workers. A willingness to embrace imperfection, age and decay. Abundant plant life. And a total disregard for engineers, clients or the bureaucratic whims of Malaysian permit law. When he built Kebun-Kebun Bangsar, he did it on public land, and without the permission of the local authorities. The first they knew of it was when vegetable crops and cows started colonising downtown Bangsar. 

“They’ve tried to evict us twice already,” Sek San laughs. “They sent me a letter threatening a 500,000 ringgit fine and five years’ jail time. I tore it up and threw it in the bin. Then we used social media to fight back. 

“This was why we set up Kebun-Kebun Bangsar in the first place. It’s not just a farm. We set it up to teach young people their rights to land, to resources, to food. Unless we fight for these things, they will never be given to us automatically. We are meant to give people inspiration to do more. We are meant to be disruptive. So that’s what we’re going to be – disruptors.” 

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