Category Archives: Food for Thought/Opinions

The difficult road to balanced heritage conservation: lessons from George Town

The old town of Georgetown  (Penang) was listed as UNESCO Word Heritage in 2008. Visit Georgetown nowadays and you will see a town in deep transformation, with attractive shophouse facades without unsightly air-con compressors or bulky, ugly industrial signboards, houses tastefully converted into hotels and guesthouses.  Although conservation-trained eyes will point out to you that […]

What criteria for listing and managing heritage sites ?

—————————————————————————————————————————- Also in the News: Sat. 18 April 2015 – Fort Alice, Sri Aman, re-opens. For day programme,  see Sarawak Museum webpage. For more on the Fort, see our articles of  02/02-17/05/2015,  09 March 2015 & 12 March 2015 —————————————————————————————————————————– The Sarawak Cultural Heritage Ordinance 1993 puts forward the following criteria for the registration/listing of […]

“What Constitutes a Heritage Building” ?

On the first day of 2015, The Star newspaper recalled, in an article, the criteria used by Malaysia’s National Heritage Department for the listing of heritage buildings, in application of the Malaysia National Heritage Act 2005. These are : 1) the historical importance, association with or relationship to Malaysian history; 2) the good design or […]

It’s a worldwide issue. Common patterns?

Heritage conservation is a global issue. One of our members spotted a recent Sydney Morning Herald opinion column on old, heritage sandstone buildings on Sydney’s Bridge Street. The author, Elizabeth Farrelly, fumes on news that the Government proposes to sell them to a global hotel chain and reflects on the place of heritage in our […]

Food for Thought : on memories of Kuching’s old riverfront market buildings

“I realised that kids this generation know nothing about old Kuching buildings. So, if we don’t start being conscious about our culture and heritage, soon, our history and heritage will be just stuffs of myths and legends.” This moving comment was made in 2008 by ‘Pegs’, a Sarawakian who was involved in a measured drawing and documentation exercise of the […]