Towards a Digital Representation of Vernacular Architecture – The Traditional Malay Houses in Perspective

This paper focuses on an effort to represent the form and style of the traditional Malay houses (TMH) in a digital form to enable proper coding and compilation of the various built forms in a computing environment. In order to develop the data structure to code the form and styles of the houses, the scope of the study is currently limited to the original TMH of the bumbung panjang (long roof) type in which the key features of the houses were easily discernible from the side view. The digital representations of the houses are in the form of a database of construction elements with construction and addition rules to recreate the style of all the various bumbung panjang built forms. With this systematic programming approach, a digital representation of the traditional Malay house could be recalled and created within seconds.