I listened to Master Architect Ooi Bok-kim speak about the restoration of historic buildings in George Town, Penang. That city, brushed for decades by the sea wind, wears its mottled walls not as decay but as a duet between salt and time. Those tiny white crystals, barely visible, are like a soft sigh breathed out from deep within the walls of history.
Penang is an island city where sea, history, spices, and culture resonate together-
a canvas washed over again and again by the tides.
The sea there is never a single shade of blue; it shifts between mist-like gray, warm green, and deep indigo—tones layered by time across the water’s surface. Along the coastline, fish farms and farmlands lie in neat grids, like pages of a notebook the earth keeps, recording the daily negotiations between human life, water, and the tidal world.
The hills are not tall, yet they guard quiet stories; rooftops scatter loosely, bearing a southern ease. Even through the glass, the sea wind arrives with a moist contour one can almost touch.
UNESCO World Heritage: George Town
Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008 for its multi-cultural urban fabric-shophouses, mosques, temples, and churches standing side by side-George Town feels like an alleyway of time.
Cracks on the walls, fading tiles, old window grilles-each tells a piece of history never written in textbooks.
The sea wind raised this city, and it also erodes it.
Salt, humidity, and time do not merely write Penang;
they also slowly consume it.
This is why we study salt damage, materials, restoration, and preservation.
Penang is both the child of the sea wind and forever held in its arms.
It is the tenderness of the ocean and the depth of history, waking slowly together under tropical sunlight.
Restoration, when stripped of technical terms, is simply an act of gentleness much like looking at a Buddha statue:
you must understand its beauty, but also its fragility;
you want it to shine, but never at the cost of losing its original soul.
Then came Architect Ho Weng Hin from Singapore,
Chair of Docomomo Singapore,
Vice Chair of ICOMOS ISC20C (“the international committee dedicated to 20th-century heritage”),
and Adjunct Associate Professor at NUS College-
a man who moves effortlessly between hands-on conservation, international heritage frameworks, and academic theory.
Through a series of Singaporean case studies, he spoke in detail about research on salt deterioration in historic buildings. Many of the buildings he mentioned made me want to fly to Singapore just to see them-
not for the techniques alone, but for a way of facing time, meeting damage, and meeting ourselves.
Watching these buildings’ destinies felt uncannily like watching human fate.
Restoration is the act of mending a tear in time.
A heritage building, once old, ages with brutal honesty.
Peeling plaster, white deposits seeping from brick joints-
they resemble the backs of aging hands, where veins and lines can no longer be concealed.
What Architect Ho does is simply to make time look a little more presentable-
to ensure that the wounds of the years are not too stark, not too exposed.
- The Cathedral of the Good Shepherd –
A white of faith, older than time
The spire pierces the sky;
the white walls stand in a silence that seems to guard century-old prayers.
Time is lenient toward faith what it wears away is the wall, not the belief.
During restoration, workers patched lime mortar under the sunlight,
like nuns quietly smoothing their habits
wordless, precise, and full of respect.
- Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall
Where the shadow of revolution still lingers
The 1902 villa stands with walls so white they look like the last glow history wished to preserve.
The footsteps of the 1911 Revolution have long faded, yet they still stir faintly in the corridor winds, yellowed slightly by the tropical sun. Restoration does not return youth; it simply allows a house to keep holding up an umbrella for its memories.
- Raffles Hotel
A whiteness almost aristocratic
The white of Raffles is not ordinary white- it is the kind of white one hesitates to approach.
Like a woman in a cheongsam sitting in the afternoon light,
her poised stillness revealing the delicate bones beneath.
Architects quietly repair what the sea wind has tired,
covering the fatigue without erasing the dignity-
preserving that slight, aloof elegance untouched by the world.
- The Arts and Crafts Bungalow
The silence of 1926
Red bricks reveal their true color again after layers of paint are removed,
like a person finally taking off makeup worn for too many years-
pale, uneasy, but so real it moves the heart.
Craftsmen restore the mortar gently,
stitching the house’s edges like sewing an elderly person’s clothing
not seeking grandeur, just decency.
- Colonial Service Quarters (1910–1920)
A house with a past life
The house stands atop its modest hill
42 meters is not impressive,
yet enough for it to gaze upon the winds and the world.
High places carry unspoken hierarchies;
so do the homes built there.
These were never mere residences,
but screens behind which power cast its shadow.
The white walls are worn, the windows impeccably English.
Large openings stand like a posture
ventilation, yes, but also propriety.
This was the language of the 1910s and 1920s:
British aesthetics learning to loosen their collar in the tropics.
Inside, patches of efflorescence scatter across the tiles-
at first glance like careless housekeeping;
on closer look like an old man’s whitening temples,
growing upward from the earth itself.
This is the story of rising damp:
water creeping silently into the walls,
evaporating and leaving grains of salt-
time scattering its pale powder across the house.
The wooden trusses, weathered by humidity and years,
are as fragile as the edges of an old love letter. Termite bites do not announce themselves, yet they speak quietly of structural fatigue.
Non-destructive testing-infrared, sonic readings becomes a kind of auscultation,
an architect listening to an old building’s heartbeat.
Restoration is not reinvention.
It is conversation.
You ask: What happened to you?
You listen: How have you lived?
Studio Lapis works with restraint:
keeping beams that can be kept,
saving tiles that can be saved.
Replacements are done with materials close in age and nature like fitting an elderly person with a missing tooth,
so they may still recognize themselves in the mirror.
Lime plaster lets the walls breathe.
Repairs to flooring and tiles hide themselves quietly. Structural reinforcement remains invisible like a heart stent placed beneath familiar clothes.
Most enchanting is the long white corridor: light falling through the louvered windows like a morning lost from an old photograph.
Walk through it and you almost hear
heels from the past,
voices in forgotten languages,
or the soft murmur of wind brushing treetops.
Restoration is not erasure of time;
it is teaching people how to read it.
Salt blooms, dampness, abrasion, fragility-none are flaws,
but the true face of a house that has weathered monsoons for a century.
All we can do
is help it stand a little longer,
a little more gracefully,
and let it be seen breathing, aging, and still alive.
Some wounds come from storms;
some from love that was too forceful.
What Architect Ho does is simply help these buildings remain upright in the wind, with dignity.
Because heritage, like people,
only grows more desolate when its scars are concealed.
To acknowledge them, tend to them, accompany them that is what makes restoration whole.
Non-destructive testing can see only part of the truth;
Only invasive methods reveal the whole story. It sounds like a lesson in architecture, yet it is equally a lesson of the heart. Some cracks cannot be seen just because we wish to see them.
The wounds of a building are not always on the surface; sometimes they hide in the salt those pale crystals seeping outward like the tears of time,
returning grain by grain to the depths of history.
To restore a building as national heritage
is not merely to recover its form
but to return its soul. After class, I asked Architect Ho about maintaining marble floors. He answered gently,
“If you wash marble with water, it will discolor.”
The sentence was plain,
yet it felt like a quiet admonition for life.
In mindfulness we learn:
The more desperately we scrub something in pursuit of purity,
the easier it is to destroy its light.
The more anxiously we try to fix a wound,
the deeper it may fracture.
Only by seeing, allowing, and accompanying can true restoration happen.
Heritage is like the human heart.
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這天研讨会上，是有关古迹的现场修复、国际文资与学术理论。來自马来西亚建筑大师黄木锦与新加坡国际现代运动建筑保护学会 Docomomo Singapore 主席何永轩；也是 ICOMOS 中的 ISC20C专门负责 20 世纪遗产的国际专家委员会副主席及台湾学者专家一起细细讲述历史建筑的盐害研究。课堂上谈到的那些建筑，都很想亲自去看一看。不只是技术，更是一种面对时间、看待损伤、也看待自身的方法。宛若在看一座座建筑的命运，也像在看人。
修复，是替时间补一个破口。
古迹这种东西，一旦老了，便老得很诚实。
墙皮脱落、砖缝渗白，像人到暮年的手背，青筋和细纹都藏不住。所做的是替它们把时间整理得好看一点，让岁月的伤痕不至于太露骨。
修复这样的房子不是革新，而是对话。
要问它：你怎么了？
要听它：你曾如何活着？
工法向来节制。不急着换新，而是尽力保留：能留的木梁留着，能救的地砖救着。若是不得已需要替换，也会用与原先年代相近、质地相似的材料，像替老人补上缺掉的牙齿，远看仍是那张熟悉的脸。
墙面用透气性好的石灰灰泥，让水气能自由进出；地板与屋瓦的修补也讲究不露痕迹。补强结构却不改变外貌。
修复，不是把时间抹掉，而是让时间能够被人看懂。
盐华、潮湿、磨损、脆弱，都不是缺陷，
是这栋房子与雨季缠绵百年后留下的真面目。而我们能做的，不过是让它以一个体面的方式，继续站在这座小丘顶端，
用自己的方式，呼吸、老去，并被看见。
建筑的伤，有些来自风雨，有些来自人心太用力的爱。我们所做的，是让它们在风里站得再久一些，再漂亮一些。
因为古迹和人一样，越是想遮掩伤痕，越显得凄凉；只有承认它、照看它、陪着它，
才会真正变得完整。
不伤害古迹的检验方式，只能看到部分；若用会造成伤害的检验，才能看得更彻底。
听来像是在说建筑，其实也像在说人心。
有些裂纹，不是我们愿意看，就能看得见。
古迹的伤，不全在外表的裂痕；
有时在盐，那白色的滲出，像时间的泪，
一点一滴，从墙里渗回历史深处。
以文资的姿态去还原，不只恢复建筑的形貌，便是替一个地方找回它的灵魂。
藝術家劉于新 
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