Wall panel details of House no. 456.
The weatherboards are held together using tongue and groove joints and nails.
The team interviewed Pak Ahmad bin Kassim, who is one of the few remaining residents with knowledge of Malay kampung house construction.
The Story of Wood
(Building Regulations)
Pulau Ubin is one of the only two remaining kampung landscapes in Singapore and members of the public have expressed strong interest in the retention of the cultural settings of the island primarily because the landscape is a reminder of an era of the nation’s history, of life in the past. Consequently, plans to retain the “cultural heritage and rustic character of the island” were announced in July 2017. However the use of the kampung houses acquired by the state have yet to be decided upon (Othman 2017). Meanwhile, houses that are still occupied by residents are in need of maintenance and, in some cases, repair, restoration and checks on their structural integrity.
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Despite the acknowledgement of the value of the landscape on Pulau Ubin, with the government releasing statements claiming that the “rustic charm of Pulau Ubin would be preserved for as long as possible”, a distinction needs to be made between mere retention and formal conservation. The fact remains that the kampung landscape on Pulau Ubin will not be kept indefinitely and this raises questions of the meaning of being conserved.
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The former colonial government of Singapore expressed a bias against wood construction which has been retained in the post-colonial government. Wood is deemed unsafe due to its combustible nature. The situation in Singapore stands in sharp contrast to the Scandinavian nations and Japan, where regulations provide for wood as a construction material. Their example may serve as precedents for our regulatory boards to emulate.
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In addition, the kampung house whose essence itself is change and adaptation could provide insight on how we could shift our approach to conservation away from the preservation of icons and landmarks towards ensuring continuity of landscapes within the context of change and development.
1. British regulations on the colony of Singapore
The Great Fire of London in 1666 burnt for four days, destroyed 13,200 houses and left at least 70,000 inhabitants in London homeless. In response, the Rebuilding Act was passed in 1667 to regulate the rebuilding works and stipulated that all new buildings were to be constructed of brick or stone. Usage of timber was banned in order to prevent a repeat of the disaster. This same aversion to wood as a construction material was imposed onto British colonies. However, houses built entirely of wood were nonetheless featured in building drawing submissions to the municipal authorities, meaning that hundreds of wooden buildings were permitted, regulated, and their construction and records incorporated into formalised procedures in 19th and early 20th century colonial Singapore. However, conversely a rather different set of illegal or “spontaneous” settlements comprising cheap, densely-built wooden housing with attap or zinc roofs and constructed on land without planning approval, were also prevalent and mostly inhabited by the labouring class (Loh 2007). These urban kampungs were “squatter settlements” but confusingly they are also referred to as “kampung” and “attap huts” and have often been muddled with legal kampungs and wooden houses built with regulatory permits.
2. Post-Independence policy on wooden houses
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Sometime in the 1970s, possibly with effect from 1969, Malay wooden houses across Singapore and old kampung settlements faced the onslaught of a new requirement either the rebuilding of lower half of the house posts that reached the ground as brick piers or the wholesale rebuilding of the house in brick. Those who could not meet this new requirement were asked to vacate their plots and move into public housing or HDB flats. This erasure of wooden houses was gradual and there were still numerous kampung structures with wooden houses that occupied land with legal titles and building permits up to the late 1980s before these too were removed through land acquisition.
3. The end of “close-one-eye” policy on Pulau Ubin
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The wooden houses on Pulau Ubin remained under the old status quo until the 1980s. In 1989, inspectors from the Land Office were noted to have “taken a sudden interest” in the wooden houses on Pulau Ubin and had visited each place armed with measuring tapes “eyeing wooden houses suspected to have been enlarged with additional structures or extensions” (ST 1989). Six operators of several huts offering seafood and rooms for campers have been told to demolish their huts as the huts were “unauthorised structures” and it is illegal to build extensions on State land (ST 1989). According to one of the operators, Pulau Ubin Seafood, they had to demolish their hut in 1984 following an order similar to the one issued in 1989 by Land Office signifying that the “close-one-eye” policy on Pulau Ubin may have ended in early 1980s.
4. Stricter current situation
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In Singapore’s fire codes, section 1.1.1 elaborates on the provisions for “Buildings under Conservation”. And according to this section, buildings have to comply with “Fire Safety Requirements Affecting Shophouses under Conservation” and this is also applicable to “old shophouses, including residential buildings having timber floors or staircases not designated for conservation that existed before 1969” (Singapore Civil Defence Force,2013). The only allowances for timber as a construction material by regulatory boards are for the shophouse typology, the typology that has been deemed by the URA as valuable such that material authenticity has to be preserved. The fire codes stipulate that timber floor joists and boards need to be pressure ‘injected’ with flame retardant and elaborate on the protection of staircases, provision of alarm systems and ensuring means of escape amongst other measures. However shophouses and kampung houses are completely different typologies of buildings. For one, unlike shophouses, wooden components in a kampung house comprise much more than floor joists and boards. Hence, the safety considerations for a kampung house would be very different, resulting in uncertainties in conserving these wooden houses under current regulations.
5. Regulations for wood construction in Scandinavia and Japan
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Scandinavian nations and Japan have regulations that provide for wood as a construction material and may serve as precedents for our regulatory boards. Norway and Finland, considered to be the global leaders in the conservation of wooden houses, have imposed new regulations and codes to address the issue of safety in wooden houses. For example, in Norway, individual historic structures and historic towns have been installed with fire protection systems such as early detection devices, sprinkles, frost-proof fire hoses and also fire engines designed to navigate medieval streets. So, there are ways to ensure the safety of the material in construction (Stubbs and Thomson, 2011). In Japan, the Building Research Institute has dedicated research to find ways to improve fire safety in wooden buildings. Techniques such as covering wood with a non-combustible material and the burning marginal layer design have been tested to ensure the fire-resistive performance of wooden buildings. The Japanese government passed the Act for Promotion of Wood in Public Buildings in 2010 (Hagiwara, Kagiya and Suzuki, 2014) and it reflects the commitment of the authorities there in maintaining the building tradition. So, the understanding that wood is an unsafe, combustible material in Singapore is one that is unfounded and too easily imposed on our construction industry as a blanket policy. Even if it were to combust more easily than other materials, there are precautions that could be put in place to deal with the case of a fire.
6. Current attempt to revise new codes/regulations by URA
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Recognising the heritage value of the timber buildings on Pulau Ubin, URA has been revising present regulations to develop a set of guidelines for kampung houses. This has been mentioned in several FUN meetings with the purpose of providing greater flexibility to suit Pulau Ubin residents and building users. The assessment and approval of designs will be granted by NParks without the need for the residents to go through other agencies. In the guidelines presented across several FUN meetings, the retention of timber or its replacement with the same material has been encouraged “to retain the traditional kampung look and feel”. The attempt to revise the building regulations to fit the context of Pulau Ubin as a kampung landscape is promising for the future of wooden houses in Singapore. The guidelines will be undergoing revisions and clearance by various agencies and is expected to be officially released in 2019. In November 2019, NParks announced a project to restore seven kampung houses and an old coffee shop in the town centre.
