Two trips up the same hill, sixteen years apart: a bamboo dome, a garden of geodesic domes, and a city that grew up in between.
The old Tanjong Pagar railway station is closed now. Trains from Singapore stop at Johor Bahru, across the causeway. But when I was a student at the Singapore American School, you could still board a train in the middle of the city and ride it all the way up the peninsula to Penang (trains are still my favourite way to travel).
I made that trip with my dad, and I remember the cold more than anything. The air conditioning on that train ran as if it had something to prove, and by the time we arrived we were frozen. In Chinatown we each bought an Indian blanket for about a dollar. They were cheap and scratchy, and they were the best thing we bought all trip. We both still have them, years and several countries later.
From George Town we took the funicular up Penang Hill. If you have only known the island at street level, the hill is a surprise: the air cools, the traffic noise falls away, and the city spreads out below you like a map. The British understood this long before I did. When the lowlands became too hot, they built a retreat on the summit, and in 1923 a railway to carry people up the slope.
We had afternoon tea at a small hotel near the top, the Bellevue. I was already the kind of teenager who stopped to look at buildings, and in the lobby I stopped at something odd: a small geodesic dome, made of bamboo. A note beside it said that it had come from Buckminster Fuller.
Doing more with less
I knew the name. Every architecture student does, although most of us only half understand him. Fuller was an American engineer, inventor and self-taught designer who spent his life asking how the whole world could be housed, fed and powered with the least possible material.
The geodesic dome was his best-known answer. It is a shell of small triangles, each one stiff on its own, that together enclose the most space for the least material. The bigger the dome gets, the less material it needs for every cubic metre inside it. Fuller and his students built them out of everything from aluminium to cardboard. One of them, 76 metres across, was the American pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. In 1960 he even proposed a dome three kilometres wide over the middle of Manhattan, to control the climate of the whole district.
He had a word for this: ephemeralization, doing more and more with less and less. He once asked the architect Norman Foster a blunt question: how much does your building weigh? Most of us could not answer. I still think about it, and I would add a second question: how much does your building give back? A heavy, sealed building that takes its views, its shade and its water and returns nothing is, to me, a selfish building.
Fuller also called the planet Spaceship Earth. His point was that we are all crew on one small ship, and nobody ever handed us the operating manual. And here was his geometry, in bamboo, on a hill in Malaysia. I could not work out how it had got there.
The garden of domes
It took me sixteen years to find out.
The second time I went up the hill, I went with a friend. We drove up from Kuala Lumpur, because a friend of his had invited us to stay. His friend was the hotel’s owner: an architect, a botanist, and long ago a close friend of Fuller’s. Fuller came to Penang often and stayed at the Bellevue, and the two of them hosted meetings on world affairs there. Fuller’s rattan chair is still kept at the hotel, and nobody is allowed to sit in it.
I understand the pull. Fuller was an American who kept coming back to the tropics, and I am another one: I have spent most of my working life designing for heat, rain and forest, and the tropics are where I would rather be.
The owner showed us his own garden, which is not part of the hotel. It is a botanist’s garden, full of the plants he has gathered, and full of Fuller’s domes. Here the domes are not grand pavilions. They are light nets over plants, shelters that let the rain and the light through. Standing in it, I finally understood the little bamboo dome in the lobby. It was not a curiosity. It was a trace of a friendship, and of a conversation about the future of the planet that had gone on quietly, on a hill in Malaysia, for decades.
A city in my lifetime
There was something else to see from the top of the hill.
In 2006, George Town was a low city. Komtar stood on its own above it, with one other tall block out towards the coast, and the rest was a wide carpet of roofs running down to the sea.
Sixteen years later, a whole Hong Kong had sprung up below the hill. Towers lined the coast and crowded in around Komtar, and the old landmark that once had the sky to itself was now one tower among many. In 2006, Penang Island had two buildings taller than 150 metres. By the end of 2022 it had more than thirty.
20062022I had never seen a city spring up within my own lifetime like that. I lived in Singapore for years, so I know what it is to watch a city grow. But when you live in one, it grows up around you a building at a time, and you hardly notice. When you stay away for sixteen years and come back to the same hill, you see it all at once.
Spaceship Earth, from the top of a hill
What struck me just as much was what had not changed. The towers went up below, but the hill around me was still green. In 2021 UNESCO recognised Penang Hill and its forests as a biosphere reserve.
If the Earth is a spaceship, its forests are part of the life support: they make our air, hold our water and keep the ground cool. And a rainforest is the one part of the ship we do not know how to build. We can plant trees, but we cannot make an old forest. We can only keep one.
The British went up this hill to keep the cool air for themselves. Fuller went up it to think about how everyone could live well on one planet. I find both in myself. I would rather be in nature, and I also think the dense city is one of the best things we have ever built. From the top of Penang Hill you can see that the two can stand side by side: a city that grows up, so that a forest can stay.
Images: Archigardener, unless otherwise stated.