Post‐colonial projects of a national culture

The search for alternative architectural expressions in the capital city of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, has seen a shift from regionalistic and Malay revivalist architectural models to a trend labeled as Middle Eastern eclecticism, best exemplified by the new city of Putrajaya. This paper delineates and analyses these architectural shifts in these two 'capital’ cities from the Independence to contemporary eras in terms of shifting contestations over what is 'national’ in modern Malaysian history. Highlighting changing material and imaginative drives behind attempts to manifest power of the nation and their consequences on the architecture of these two cities, this paper shows how Malaysian architecture has moved from expansive imaginations in the Independence era to narrow albeit spectral imaginations of Islamic exclusivity characterized by the turn to Middle Eastern symbolisms toward the new millennium. This evolutionary architecture, we argue, must be understood in terms of the growing enmeshment of Malaysian nationalism within global political Islam which has led to the preeminence of Islamic over Malay identifications. The Malaysian case throws up post‐colonial predicaments of national architectural pursuits as nationalist politics become entangled with global identity politics complicating and, ironically, undermining original nationalistic desires to construct alternative modernist models rooted in local sensibilities.