Making for Here: Reimagining Place-Specific Building Practices

You are cordially invited to attend the lecture event by Eleena Jamil:

Date: 11 September 2025

Time: 18:00 – 20:00

Location: SDE4-05-Forum

BOA-SIA points: 2

Please register your interest here.

Making for Here: Reimagining Place-Specific Building Practices

Architecture is fundamentally a cultural and social enterprise. The relationship between a building and the place in which it is set is one of the key determinants of its cultural and social value. The faltering of this relationship due to international industrialisation leads to the reassessment of local architecture and its response to the essence of place.

Eleena’s lecture will explore the different ways in which her practice’s work relates to its context. One of these is how the active role of architects in the ‘making’ processes of architecture beyond the confines of the studio can encourage continuity of form and space shaped by local methods and material culture. This is based on the belief that cultural continuity and environmental awareness, embodied in this act of making, can offer valuable insights into reimagining modern, place-specific building practices.

Typologies and the ‘inherent orders’ seen in existing built forms are also fundamental to her practice’s contextual response in architecture. Taking careful note of the material, form, and detail of such regional structures, Eleena will explore the multiple new architectural possibilities in service of the 21st-century city’s inhabitants.

Eleena Jamil is a Malaysian architect born in Penang. She graduated from the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University in the UK. She joined the Cardiff architecture faculty as a teaching assistant while completing her MPhil and PhD postgraduate research. Her PhD thesis, titled “Rethinking Modernism: The Sugden House and the Mother’s House,” examined the idea of “ordinariness” and “vernacular imagery” as alternatives to the reductive limitations of modern architecture. Eleena established her eponymous architectural practice in Kuala Lumpur in 2005, focusing on developing buildings within the context of Malaysia and Southeast Asia.

She was shortlisted for Dezeen Architect of the Year 2018 and featured in 100 Women: Architects in Practice, published by RIBA in 2023. She has lectured widely and is an Adjunct Professor at the National University of Malaysia (Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia) and Taylor’s University Malaysia.