Grilles

A new assignment came in weeks ago. It's a residence in Ampang Hilir. Very leafy suburb indeed. A friend of mine and I are doing the landscape works for this double storey bungalow. On one site visit, I stumbled upon these old grilles from yesteryear, chucked albeit neatly into a corner.

I insisted that we ought to keep it. Children of the previous house, and like all things nice about 70's Malaysia, they were easily forgotten and forlorn. I can't easily put it into words - what is it about them which I find so 'poignant'?

Is it nostalgia? Perhaps. When and if you grow up among them, you come to 'see' its use for security and an overlay to the scene which a window captures. Time really affects the mood of the enclosed space. The colour of light and shadows cast from it paint patterns of the outside into the inside.

Otherwise, grilles are also what I'd call iron curtains (pardon the immediate association), and depending on how sophisticated they are, they form a lacey or perforated skin that floats in the air. There's a 'flight' about it, oblivious to the burden of gravity, kind of like the imagination that all designers 'should' and like to have.