limkokwing cyberjaya campus

being taught to be aware of design; architecture students (including me) often yelled in disgust; “who designed this thing?”.. well, it is not necessarily to be in disgust anyway, but after being one year in the limkokwing campus, i started to wonder who really designed our campus? even our lecturers silently laughed at how the construction details are done in the classrooms. and a famous quote from my design lecturer,

“is this architecture or just a building? it is just a building! cause I don’t feel a thing in here.”

then be suprised because;

the limkokwing campus is designed by the famous local architect, ken yeang! the winged roof around the whole campus is exceptional!

 
and hey, the space was directly suspended from that large roof! that should provide us a spectacular view from there, but wait.. those perspective visualizations is a little bit different from the real thing, isn’t it?

hmm, well i suppose so. but the winged canopy is still visible, just no more dangling space from there.. OK, the roof is still impressive from here. and I especially liked the glass guardhouse. it seems to be designed by ludwig mies van der rohe in 2000 (if he’s still alive)

the masterplan shows up well, except that there were few but major changes to it. six campus blocks were reduced to four, the college hostel became a single block and looks like the whole clubhouse/pool thing was removed from scene.

I know this looks awesome, but most of the aspects shown in this section was never realized. especially the roof.

you know, as a environmetalist architect, ken yeang upholds environment-friendly in all his projects. but sometimes it does cost a lot, especially here in malaysia. so it ends up this way;

this is the major space in our campus; simple referred as ‘the plaza’.. I dunno, but the shoplots above should be rented to outsiders, but till today I believed that most of the students only went upstairs once in their lifetime.

it was supposed to be six or seven blocks of the real campus (the plaza being the canteen of the university). but hey, it isn’t all that bad; we still have four of them; with colors as names like the orange building (where most of the architecture classes take place)

this is how one of the campus blocks look like; this one is the green building. and what you can see from here is the building skin with colors faded out (don’t worry, they were replaced)

one thing that I liked is the staircases and skybridges is everywhere around the campus. for me, it just gives a good view from the top. pretty useless/wasting money you say, but who cares?

haha right, this picture is so ridiculously (insert any words you see fit) photoshopped to give a look of the new, replaced building skin. even the colors around the building were heavily saturated (notice the yellowish hue?). why don’t just take a new photo during the sunset, I wonder. it’s not like limkokwing doesn’t have any photography students with cameras.

well, anyway just let me end with a quote from the architect on the building;

“I have just been informed informally by a representative of the Government that the University is a benchmark building in Cyberjaya because it is the cheapest building built there. If this is the case, then this is what you would expect from the cheapest building in Cyberjaya.” – Ken Yeang

woah, ken yeang really says that? I’m not sure; just grabbed the line from here

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